Nuclear Power Push

[audtatious]

Most waste can be recycled. I think France recycles 80%+ of their spent fuel rods.

[WDRacing]

My favorite being the Space Cannon to fling the spent fuel rods into the sun.

If that isn't the coolest phrase I've ever heard...

[Bubba1]

Yeah, that's the problem. "What if" the rocket blew up and spread contamination in the air. "Why pollute another planet". blah blah blah.

I believe we have been storing nuke waste in the Yucca Mountain area but the Senate passed a bill to close it. Obama has also cut funds for Nuke waste sites as well. Obama is also pressing forth to tax coal plants to the point that they will end up closing. That leaves oil (also want to tax to death), natural gas (oh noes), wind, solar.

I don't Yucca closing any time soon. Our cash strapped government would have to establish/open a new massive storage facility because the flow of spent nuclear fuel is not stopping.

[AZhitman]

I am 100% in support of Obama for going through with this.There are absolutely no reasons why Nuclear should be avoided. The "wastes" that are created still contain use-able radiation...something along the lines of 70% left over once the rods are removed from the water.Even if we don't utilize technologies to use this waste...there are safe ways to dispose of it.My favorite being the Space Cannon to fling the spent fuel rods into the sun.http://www.popsci.com/technolo...space

My mom also worked at a nuclear facility in Ohio.

and

BTW, Obama's taking heat from his own party for his stance on nuclear. Something tells me he doesn't REALLY believe in it, but it's a convenient way to "reach across the aisle", since anything nuclear-related will take forever to implement.

Make sure you take a good hard look at ALL your local politicians' stances on firing up old reactors and breaking ground on building new ones.

[C-Kwik]

Coal and oil get bad reputations, but in all honesty, we need them in conjunction with nuclear PP's.

Coal and oil gets a bad reputation because of their waste products. There is the obvious CO2 emissions, but coal actually has a lot of sulfur emissions. This is the cause of acid rain. Search for maps of Acid rain in the US and you'll see how the east coast is riddled with much higher acidity than the west coast. And most locally, acidity is higher right where coal fire plants are and to the east of them.

Do we need them? For now, yes. But there are several technologies that are viable. Expensive, yes, but sustainable and can work very well with electricity usage. For example, solar energy tends to have a very close relationship with peak times of electricity. Basically, since energy usage and the availability of the sun tend to coincide, solar can deal pretty well with the peaks and valleys of energy usage throughout the day. Of course there are some limitations in that cloud cover, rain and higher lattitudes affect the availability of the sun.

Alternative energy sources should be implemented based on location. Some areas will have vast amounts of Geothermal activity which can be harnessed. CA's primary source of alternative energy is actually geothermal.

As for launching nuke waste into space, I don't think that's viable. It would require a large amount of energy to reach escape velocity from Earth's gravitational pull. The moon might be lesser, but still a lot of energy as most of the largest amount of thrust needs to occur closer to earth.

That said, I'm all for Nukes. While they produce some rather toxic waste, its viably containable. Unlike chemicals that are exhausted into the atmosphere.

[AZhitman]

As for launching nuke waste into space, I don't think that's viable. It would require a large amount of energy to reach escape velocity from Earth's gravitational pull. The moon might be lesser, but still a lot of energy as most of the largest amount of thrust needs to occur closer to earth.

You should read Popular Science.

Recent article about a privately-funded contest to deliver payloads into space at minimal cost... I can't recall details, but the projected costs per ton (I think that's the measure they used) were some ridiculously-low fraction of current costs... and the technology is actively being developed.

http://www.spacex.com/index.phphttp://w ... sh...0Main

[audtatious]

As soon as it's scaled down and affordable for housing there is a product that will provide clean energy for households

http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/...e-ipo/

[C-Kwik]

You should read Popular Science.

You should do some math.

According to wiki, a single reactor produces about 12 cubic meters of waste per year. As far as I can tell, uranium has a density of 18,900 kg/m^3. 12 cubic meters of it equates to 226,800 kg. The escape velocity for earth is 11.2 km/s initial speed at the surface of Earth (ignoring aerodynamic friction). The kinetic energy for that kind of mass at that speed is 14,224,896,000,000 Joules. That's the equivalent of about 107,764 gallons of gasoline. Or a 3 kiloton bomb.

Now bear in mind that no engine of any kind gets 100% efficiency. So between that, the energy needed needed to propel the payload, rocket and fuel, and accounting for aerodynamic drag, there is a significant amount more energy that will needed to be factored in. Regardless, being cheaper to launch into space doesn't necessarily make space a cheap place to dispose of nukes.

The info on the rockets are cool and all, but those are geared only towards an orbit. The largest one is designed to carry 28,000 kg to low earth orbit and 15,000 kg to geostationary orbit (whetever that is ). Escape velocity would require even more energy. And more fuel means more weight along with a bigger rocket. This is a huge reason why long distance space travel is problematic. None of the rockets are capable of sending up a years worth of waste from a single reactor in one trip. Let alone for the waste from all of the reactors.

Sorry if this is getting way technical, but seeing the numbers brings a huge level of reality. And I'm certainly no rocket scientist but I just don't see anyway dumping nuclear waste in space would be cheap.

[WDRacing]

As for launching nuke waste into space, I don't think that's viable. It would require a large amount of energy to reach escape velocity from Earth's gravitational pull.

Dude...say it with me..."Space Cannon" It would be worth building it just to say we have one.

[C-Kwik]

Dude...say it with me..."Space Cannon" It would be worth building it just to say we have one.

As awesome as it would be (seriously awesome), the link says they can launch at up to 13,000 mph (about 5.8 km/s) So you need at least twice the speed. Probably more due to the aerodynamic resistance encountered in the atmosphere. And who knows if we have any materials that can handle that kind of speed anyways. At high airspeeds, there is a lot of heat generated on the surface of the object. We might be able to engineer methods of dissapating heat from the surface but that would add to the cost, complexity and weight of the projectile. Rockets leaving Earth don't have to worry about this to the same extent as they accelerate away from Earth and the atmosphere starts to thin as it picks up speed and as the effect of gravity diminishes.

[AZhitman]

You should do some math.

The math is well and good. This ain't Robert Goddard-era technology, though.

Advances are being made faster than we can keep up.

And delivering a payload into orbit is sufficient. Depositing it on the moon isn't a big deal, using gravitational pull to slingshot the payload and small applications f thrust to guide the descent.... Remember, we were putting landers accurately on the lunar surface before you were born - we're good at it.

[srellim234]

That was an era when our educational system was churning out people who could add and subtract. Most of the Apollo program was built by people who knew how to use a slide rule. Now, our math geniuses can't add and subtract properly even with calculators because they have no clue whether or not they pushed the right button.

[AZhitman]

Yet we've got a craft that cruises back and forth into space regularly without even making the news.

I think we're pretty close to capable of delivering a railway car full of crap to the moon every month or so.

Here's what a million pounds of thrust looks like:

http://www.popsci.com/military...movin

Oh, and plasma rockets, yo:

http://www.popsci.com/military...eyond

[C-Kwik]

The math is well and good. This ain't Robert Goddard-era technology, though.

Advances are being made faster than we can keep up.

And delivering a payload into orbit is sufficient. Depositing it on the moon isn't a big deal, using gravitational pull to slingshot the payload and small applications f thrust to guide the descent.... Remember, we were putting landers accurately on the lunar surface before you were born - we're good at it.

I wouldn't want this stuff orbiting Earth. Constant adjustments are needed to ensure an object stays in orbit. Its one thing for a satellite to reenter the atmosphere. The heat will destroy it. Not so much with radioactive material.

Perhaps we can put it on the moon. And nowhere did I say we don't have the skill, knowledge or ability to do so. But the numbers I quoted (assuming math is correct)were for the minimum amount of energy to move the mass of waste produced by a single reactor off the planet forever. And that would be for a very ideal scenario. The reality is that the amount of energy will be significantly higher than the minimum. But lets just go off what is quoted for each launch. For argument's sake, I'll use the configuration to Low Earth Orbit. The payload capacity in a Falcon 9 is 10,450 kg. At $51.5 million a pop, it would take almost 22 trips at full weight capcity. That's over a billion dollars per reactor per year. And that's just for low earth orbit. The moon or beyond Earth's gravity would be much higher.

For contrast, best I can find is that storage of waste for 150 years is going to cost nearly $100 billion.

http://www.reuters.com/article...80806

And it appears there are 104 reactors in the US currently.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf41.html

The total cost per reactor over 150 years then would be just under 1 billion. For all practical purposes the comparson here is that storing it for 150 years costs the same as launching it for one year. This is of course simplified, but its just a depiction of scale. We are far from making waste disposal in space economically viable.

As for the plasma powered rocket, I doubt we are anywhere close to making a version that can actually launch from earth's surface. Superheating enough hydrogen to create that kind of thrust would require a very fast rate of energy and a whole lot of it. Once out in space, sure, but getting the rocket out of the atmosphere still requires all the costs I have already pointed out.

[s0m3th1ngAZ]

For the ion thruster rocket...they use traditional rocket boosters to get it into space. It then deploys and then fires up.

Another thing to think about is magnetism. Rail guns are getting more and more powerful and efficient every year. Create a set-up where capacitors store energy from a hydroelectric damn for a rail-gun launcher.

This would all be so much easier if we had a space elevator. Anyone interested in that technology read the Red, Blue, and Green Mars trilogy. It goes into detail about the political, scientific, and social effects of bypassing a planet's gravity well. And who knows..maybe within the next half century materials science will have perfected carbon nanotube technology, allowing us to build a strong enough tether. Though who knows how much tensile strength the tether would need?

Ramble ramble...

[C-Kwik]

For the ion thruster rocket...they use traditional rocket boosters to get it into space. It then deploys and then fires up.

Which brings us right back to square one. It still costs a lot of money to get it up to low orbit.

Another thing to think about is magnetism. Rail guns are getting more and more powerful and efficient every year. Create a set-up where capacitors store energy from a hydroelectric damn for a rail-gun launcher.

The energy equation for this would be the same as with the cannon mentioned earlier. The mechanism for accelerating the object and to some extent, power, would be different, but how much energy needed after differences in efficiencies are accounted for is exactly the same.

This would all be so much easier if we had a space elevator. Anyone interested in that technology read the Red, Blue, and Green Mars trilogy. It goes into detail about the political, scientific, and social effects of bypassing a planet's gravity well. And who knows..maybe within the next half century materials science will have perfected carbon nanotube technology, allowing us to build a strong enough tether. Though who knows how much tensile strength the tether would need?

Ramble ramble...

Sounds like an engineering nightmare:

http://en.wakopedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator

And an appropriate tether would only be one problem in a long list of problems to be solved in order to make this work. It would be a fun engineering exercise though.

[s0m3th1ngAZ]

Which brings us right back to square one. It still costs a lot of money to get it up to low orbit.

engineering exercise though.

With yah there...I'm not saying it should be used as a waste disposal system...I'm just nit-picking.

[KoopaTroopa]

drop the spent rods in a subduction zone

[MagikDragon]

Coal and oil gets a bad reputation because of their waste products. There is the obvious CO2 emissions, but coal actually has a lot of sulfur emissions. This is the cause of acid rain. Search for maps of Acid rain in the US and you'll see how the east coast is riddled with much higher acidity than the west coast. And most locally, acidity is higher right where coal fire plants are and to the east of them.

Don't worry I'm working on it!My company actually reduces SO2 and SO3 emission in atmosphere at coal and oil plants. We are also working on a viable option for using CO2 to create bio fuel with algae, and the big money maker right now is Mercury mitigation, We are starting a trial in June with hopes to have a commercial system up and running by 2011. If things go according to plan CLEAN COAL will not just be an advertising slogan, but a reality.

[4cefed]

One of the challenges Yucca faced was states not wanting the "glow train" passing through their backyard. The transport casks on these trains were designed to survive hits from another locomotive, detonations and being burned in jet fuel for 8 hours. If the stump huggers weren't sold on this idea, what makes you guys think they would be on board with launching then into outer space?

It's really lunacy.

Like someone mentioned the spent fuel can be recycled. England, France, Germany, and Sweden all recycle. Our government stopped us from doing so for fear of nuclear proliferation. A small amount of plutonium 210 is created while "burning" commercial fuel. During the recycling process this plutonium can be extracted. We were afraid of this material falling into the wrong hands. Pu-210 is what all the cool kids use to make the really nice bang bangs.

There are 22 licenses being reviewed by the NRC for new reactor sites. I've been hearing that some of them are breaking ground in Florida or Georgia, but I haven't found any sources of that yet. All this while my own states senate has the vision to deny Vermont Yankee's license extension. Bye bye tax base.

And whoever was concerned about steam line snapping or whatever: These plants make so much money they can afford to do things the right was and do it safely. Industrial safety is paramount in these places.

This radiation protection tech has to get to work. We open steam generator manways at Davis-Besse in OH tonight, my a** will be in a bubble suit for the next three weeks straight.