Should we go Nuclear?

dowlingm

From the centre of Toronto as the crow flies (population 2.5m within the city, 5m in greater urban area) to Pickering Nuclear Power Station (6 operational 700MWe units, 2 shut down) is 30km east. That's the equivalent in Dublin terms of putting it in Balbriggan. Another 4 units at Darlington are 25km further east.

SeanW

godwin wrote: »

Would one nuclear power plant supply enough power for the whole of Ireland?

As a general rule, no. Ireland would not go for large nuclear reactors, such as the EPR (European Pressurised Water Reactors, 1600MW per reactor) or older French designs, generally 1300MW each. Rather, were Ireland to "go nuclear" it is more likely that we would best be able to use emerging small nuclear, micro-nuke and nuclear battery type designs, such as Pebble Bed Reactors.

Not only would these fit Irelands small relative size, but they could be efficiently deployed as needed to match the areas of demand with little transmission losses, which our friends at Greenpeace estimate accounts for the wastage of 1/3 of power generated. They also allege that another 1/3 is lost in cooling towers, both factors they attribute to a "1930s model of power supply." While I'm not certain of the veracity of either claim, again, the use of a Toshiba 4S or a PBMR would negate this.

Another option would be to use CANDU or Advanced CANDU reactors, each Canadian designs, these offer greater flexibility of fuel types that can be used. Advanced CANDUs are less flexible than 1st generation CANDUs but are larger and more efficient.

BrianD

There is a lot in favour of going nuclear. The big draw back is the waste and until we can find someway of dealing this, the answer has to be no.

SeanW

BrianD wrote: »

There is a lot in favour of going nuclear. The big draw back is the waste and until we can find someway of dealing this, the answer has to be no.

To be fair, this is a genuine issue that nuclear power and its users must deal with.

However, the situation with regard to the use or disposal of waste is far more nuanced than your simplistic "It's a dealbreaker" view. If you're interested in researching the nuclear fuel cycle, including the end-of-life portion, you could start reading here: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf03.html

Additionally, the amount of High Level Wastes created to supply nuclear electricity to one person for a normal lifetime can be represented in this block:

and encased in boroscilicate glass or something similar. Compare this insane volumes of toxic emissions, acid rain forming compounds and greenhouse gases dumped into the air to supply ... even one person ... with coal fired power over a similar timeframe.

There really is no contest.

ei.sdraob

for anyone interested, Thorium seems like the way to go
Uranium/Plutonium was chose as fuel in the last century since it was easier to make nuclear weapons, we of course dont need nuclear weapons (tho it would be easier to tell IMF and co to feck off and not pay anything back armed with a nuke or two, joking joking)

Thorium on the other hand is much more plentiful, doesnt produce weapons grade material, produces barely any waste (100gramms for 1 year of running a 1GW plant!)

theres an article here worth reading

Dr Rubbia says a tonne of the silvery metal – named after the Norse god of thunder, who also gave us Thor’s day or Thursday - produces as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal. A mere fistful would light London for a week.
Thorium burns the plutonium residue left by uranium reactors, acting as an eco-cleaner. "It’s the Big One," said Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA rocket engineer and now chief nuclear technologist at Teledyne Brown Engineering.

and several videos, one of these is from a dude from NASA giving a talk at Google, very very interesting, loads of info for anyone interested

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHs2Ugxo7-8

and another Google talk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgKfS74hVvQ

Hotblack Desiato

SeanW wrote: »

Not only would these fit Irelands small relative size, but they could be efficiently deployed as needed to match the areas of demand with little transmission losses, which our friends at Greenpeace estimate accounts for the wastage of 1/3 of power generated.

Oddly enough I never hear the green types mention that when it's renewable power we're supposed to be selling into a 'European renewables grid' - the cost and inefficency of transmitting electric power thousands of miles don't seem to enter into those calculations.

They also allege that another 1/3 is lost in cooling towers, both factors they attribute to a "1930s model of power supply."

So Greenpeace have found a way of violating the laws of thermodynamics? I'm all ears :rolleyes: any heat engine (from a car engine, right up to a huge gas or coal or nuclear plant - or, indeed, a solar-thermal plant) has to cool its working fluid, and will have a maximum theoretical efficiency limited by the difference in temperature of the working fluid in the hot and cold parts of its cycle.

Incidentally, that's why a PWR is more efficient than a BWR, or why a sodium-cooled reactor is more efficient again - in simple terms the hotter it runs the more efficient it is.

I don't think we need to go down the road of lots of little reactors - too many NIMBY-type objections if nothing else, and 4-6 350-400MW units would allow us to replace Moneypoint and the like for base load. We already have stations of that size in the grid so we could replace them with nuclear as a straight swap, without having to do any expensive grid upgrades.

ei.sdraob

there is an interesting eirgrid document/report here which explores several different generating scenarios in Ireland


one of the scenarios is having 2GW of nuclear in the mix, take a look at the above, the conclusions are interesting...

Hotblack Desiato

Seems to me they did their best to downplay the nuclear option in spite of their own figures. To assume the minimum size of a commercially viable unit is 1000MW is bull.

Sponge Bob

I think, in fairness, they were referring to what is marketed. Smaller capacity reactors are not commercially available, eg 500mw type units. Shutting a 1000mw unit down for necessary maintenance and refuelling takes a lot of total generation offline for quite some time...certainly weeks. We could shut one down in the summer maybe but not in winter. We could not shut 2 x 1000mw units down ever.

ei.sdraob

Sponge Bob wrote: »

I think, in fairness, they were referring to what is marketed. Smaller capacity reactors are not commercially available, eg 500mw type units. Shutting a 1000mw unit down for necessary maintenance and refuelling takes a lot of total generation offline for quite some time...certainly weeks. We could shut one down in the summer maybe but not in winter. We could not shut 2 x 1000mw units down ever.

In the report the "nuclear option" is only 2GW as part of a larger 17GW that will needed by 2030-35
They take the lifetime costs from the experience of Finland in building their PWRs and waste processing facilities (yes disposal is accounted in the cost in Finland), the capital and lifetime figures seem very large...
but for unit size are using the 3rd gen AP1000s while ignoring that they are much cheaper to build than 2nd gen reactors as seen over in China

Any reactor would have to be taken offline every so often for training and maintenance but the norm availability in US across all their reactors (going back decades) is 90%



using Eirgrids own figures I did some maths comparing nuclear and onshore wind by plugin in the availability figures

ei.sdraob wrote: »

Ok lets do a simple exercise using Eirgrid's figures
Firstly lifetime costs of each tech



Secondly if you take the halfhourly generation figures from eirgrid for 2010, you would get 299MW average generation from an average installed capacity of 1500MW :rolleyes:, thats ~20% availability over the year at any time

so to generate an extra 1 Terrawatt hour continuously one would need:

* 80euro * 1,000,000 * (10/9) = 88 million if chose nuclear, 90% availability is the norm with previous gen reactors

* 75 euro * 1,000,000 * (5/1) = 375 million if chosen onshore wind, yes almost 5x thanks to a measly 20% availability of onshore wind


Eirgrid predict an extra 10 TWh of demand between now and 2030, so yeah which option will be cheaper



please note:

* That the above uses the average over a year for all the windmills scattered all over the country already,
if you go with wind some months and weeks you could generate **** all energy,
the average for december was 10%, that means either importing the energy in that time (not cheap and so much for energy independence) or using gas (back to fossil fuels) or freezing :P
You could store this energy in a Spirit of Ireland type storage at a capital cost of €1,200/kW (source Eirgrid) adding further costs

* If you go with nuclear you know exactly how much you can generate and you know all the costs, and yes the above figure from Eirgrid is based on Finlands experience and includes waste disposal

* Going nuclear would not required billions to be spend on new power lines saving even more money

Hotblack Desiato

Sponge Bob wrote: »

I think, in fairness, they were referring to what is marketed. Smaller capacity reactors are not commercially available, eg 500mw type units.

But that report also mentions IRIS.

Wikipedia wrote:

International Reactor Innovative and Secure (IRIS) is a Generation IV reactor reactor design made by an international team of companies, laboratories, and universities and coordinated by Westinghouse. IRIS is hoped to open up new markets for nuclear power and make a bridge from Generation III reactor to Generation IV reactor technology. The design is not yet specific to reactor power output. Notably, a 335 MW output has been proposed, but it could be tweaked to be as low as a 100 MW unit.

Joey the lips

I have no problem with going nuclear...However if you think the plastic bag tax was extrame..What the fook are we going to do with nuclear waste....

and in the hands of our shady dealings....God help us

Hotblack Desiato

Joey the lips wrote: »

I have no problem with going nuclear...However if you think the plastic bag tax was extrame..What the fook are we going to do with nuclear waste....

read the flipping thread

and in the hands of our shady dealings....God help us

ochon ochon... oh please. The "shure aren't we Irish and can't manage anthing except a p*ss up" argument doesn't wash. If nothing else, for the very good reason we'd contract out the design, build and operation to the likes of EDF or Westinghouse.

ei.sdraob

Joey the lips wrote: »

I have no problem with going nuclear...However if you think the plastic bag tax was extrame..What the fook are we going to do with nuclear waste....

As mentioned several times, most of the nuclear "waste" could actually be reused, the decision to not recycle this waste and instead store it is purely political not scientific or engineering.


watch this interesting google video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv-mFSoZOkE

1. most of the radioactivity is gone quickly from waste, several orders of magnitude less radioactive after few years, with mostly plutonium remaining which is a waste since this can be used as fuel again leaving it in the ground will only mean future generation will have a ready made supply of refined fuel :P

2. some of the waste created if separated is highly valuable such as xenon, neodymium, ruthenium, rhodium and plutonium


We could use breeding or even better switch to thorium which produces much less waste (100 gramms over a year in 1GW reactor) and can burn existing waste.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZR0UKxNPh8

Joey the lips wrote: »

and in the hands of our shady dealings....God help us

As opposed to letting our politicians waste billions in subsidies to the wind industry and waste further billions in building pylons and cables for farms in the middle of nowhere?

ei.sdraob

I did more digging around

ei.sdraob wrote: »

I found another report from UKs Parsons Brinckerhoff only few months old, very interesting document and has detailed cost breakdowns


Full details of the 2010 Powering the Nation update can be downloaded here (PDF, 258Kb).
The following illustrations are also available:
Range of costs - all technologies (PDF, 67Kb).
Cost breakdowns - all technologies (PDF, 66Kb).




More variables not accounted for in case of Ireland:

* wind will require massive investment in the grid building pylons to the back arse of nowhere for new farms. 2.1 billion eirgrid will have to spend in next 3 years alone, nuclear on the other hand can be located at existing high voltage lines/ plants like moneypoint

* we only have so many good onshore wind locations, the lowest hanging fruit already have windfarms on them, which take up alot of land


@Ghost Estate the fuel is less than 10% of the cost of running a nuclear plant as shown in above report and the fuel is readily available from such rogue states such as Canada and Australia
oh and 90% availability is a bit higher than 20% over the last year (10% last month) :rolleyes: no? that's dismal availability! there was me thinking 30% or more but no the generation data for the year is all there.

Tech3

Just copying my post from over in the Irish economy forum:

The lifetime of moneypoint will reach an end in 10 years time. At the moment it is the base load for our energy in this country. It produces just over 900MW of the 5000MW we need daily. We need to decide now what will be our energy base load past 2020. It can take up to a decade to design and build a nucleur reactor plant and a waste management facility. It will have one main advantage over another coal burning plant - our C02 levels will be met if nucleur power become our base load for energy in the future. However it would be very expensive to develop and build the first one, we would need to bring in people with experience from France probably. Also we would have serious NIMBYism problems if we decide to go and build one of these. We were going to build one at Carnsmore point in Wexford during the 70's only for it to be scrapped due to consistent protests against it. Look at the Wyla plant in Wales which is only 100km from Dublin!

As regards to safety many will always bring up the disaster which happened at Chernoybl. We cant ignore what radioactive materials can potentially do but Chernoybl was a disaster which would never happen in the Western world. It was a badly thought out design which had no containment building around it, also the safety procedures were non existent to the most part. In the lead up to the fatal diaster the operators manage to turn off the safety system which would have inserted all the control rods and ramped down the reactor to a safe level. The other RMBK reactors have subsequently been shut down at the Chernoybl site.

In my own opinion I think nucleur power should be explored and cost benefit analysis should be undertaken soon rather than later. Wind and wave energy wont be enough to power the entire country but will provide power to several regions. One of the bigger wind farms produces 50-60MW nowhere near what we need for our base load.

maninasia

mysterious wrote: »

I have another question to all the people who want nuclear.


If you want it build next to your house. We are a small country. So I don't want it anywhere near me and I have that right!

Thanks! I'm really looking forward to some answers to THAT one

If you live on the East Coast you could be closer to one that was based in Galway, Limerick or Cork! Look at a map...

Measure Twice

Don't fret, mysterious. Nobody is trying to take away your right to want or to not want whatever your heart desires. You still have the right to have babies if you want!

However, I want to build a nuclear power plant beside my house but I do not have that right because it is against the law in Ireland to do so.

I want cheap, plentiful, reliable and low carbon electricity. This is being denied to me by those who have outlawed nuclear power and have instead embarked on a nonsensical waste of my money in pursuing a "green dream", aided and abetted by wind farm developers and often supported by fanatics and fantasists.

Some of these are driven by dogma over data and that is their right even if they are wrong.

We all have a right to express our views, but we do not have exclusive right to decide what is or is not allowed - that is a collective decision and it is our collective responsibility to adhere to these decisions unless and until they are changed.

SeanW

I know this is an old post and Mysterious is now banned :rolleyes: but I'd welcome a nuclear plant as my next-door neighbor, particularly if it were a choice between having a nuclear power station next-door or Moneypoint Mark II (coal).

Hotblack Desiato

And anyone who thinks we can just construct a Moneypoint MkII without any NIMBY objections is deluded. There have been major protests at sites like Corby Drax in the UK (OK, by extreme greenie types that in the context of UK politics are easy to ignore, but don't underestimate the hard-Luddite tendency in rural Ireland - we have objectors to every power line and phone mast and even the HVDC connectors that renewables will need in order to 'work'.)

I had to laugh during the week when it was reported in the Irish Times that a poor lady might have to put herself underneath a bulldozer to stop those evil bastards in EirGrid from trampling across her rights and her land and giving all her kids cancer. Turned out a couple of days later that her hubby had taken the money to allow the pylons, oops...


Edit: Corby was a steelworks, I meant Drax which is a huge coal-fired power plant.

ei.sdraob

somewhat related since we have one of these down on Shannon and no one bats an eyelid

The popular conception of nuclear power is straight out of The Simpsons: Springfield abounds with signs of radioactivity, from the strange glow surrounding Mr. Burn's nuclear power plant workers to Homer's low sperm count. Then there's the local superhero, Radioactive Man, who fires beams of "nuclear heat" from his eyes. Nuclear power, many people think, is inseparable from a volatile, invariably lime-green, mutant-making radioactivity.

Coal, meanwhile, is believed responsible for a host of more quotidian problems, such as mining accidents, acid rain and greenhouse gas emissions. But it isn't supposed to spawn three-eyed fish like Blinky.

Over the past few decades, however, a series of studies has called these stereotypes into question. Among the surprising conclusions: the waste produced by coal plants is actually more radioactive than that generated by their nuclear counterparts. In fact, the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy. * [See Editor's Note at end of page 2]

At issue is coal's content of uranium and thorium, both radioactive elements. They occur in such trace amounts in natural, or "whole," coal that they aren't a problem. But when coal is burned into fly ash, uranium and thorium are concentrated at up to 10 times their original levels.

Fly ash uranium sometimes leaches into the soil and water surrounding a coal plant, affecting cropland and, in turn, food. People living within a "stack shadow"—the area within a half- to one-mile (0.8- to 1.6-kilometer) radius of a coal plant's smokestacks—might then ingest small amounts of radiation. Fly ash is also disposed of in landfills and abandoned mines and quarries, posing a potential risk to people living around those areas.

In a 1978 paper for Science, J. P. McBride at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and his colleagues looked at the uranium and thorium content of fly ash from coal-fired power plants in Tennessee and Alabama. To answer the question of just how harmful leaching could be, the scientists estimated radiation exposure around the coal plants and compared it with exposure levels around boiling-water reactor and pressurized-water nuclear power plants.

Dinarius

We already have nuclear power being piped in from Northern Ireland and, when the interconnector to Wales is completed, we will have it piped in from there.

We really need an open and sensible debate on this.

D.

Macha

I've heard promising things about thorium - in this thread and elsewhere. What sort of size thorium plants are available and does anyone know where the thorium is (and if Ireland has any)?

dubhthach

Macha wrote: »

I've heard promising things about thorium - in this thread and elsewhere. What sort of size thorium plants are available and does anyone know where the thorium is (and if Ireland has any)?

Thorium reactors are currently not available but are in development. The US ran a thorium research reactor for several years until the early 70's. It was discontinued as one of main uses of a Uranium cycle (other then power generation) was the production of weapons grade plutonium which you can't do if all your reactors are Thorium powered.

ei.sdraob

Main research is going in India who have plentiful thorium, should be operational within few months. They also have several other commercial reactors using thorium at least partially running for 15 years.

Most of the known reserves are in friendly countries such US, Australia, India, Canada etc its about 4 times as abundant as uranium. Norway (they have all the luck when it comes to energy sources) also recently found some ore and were debating construction...

It occurs in Monazite ore, I read somewhere there might be deposits in south east, might be a good question to ask in geology forum if we have one here in boards. According to the Telegraph UK has deposits in Cornwall

Thorium is so common that miners treat it as a nuisance, a radioactive by-product if they try to dig up rare earth metals. The US and Australia are full of the stuff. So are the granite rocks of Cornwall. You do not need much: all is potentially usable as fuel, compared to just 0.7pc for uranium.

ei.sdraob

Few more developments this month on Thorium

* China now started a molten salt reactor programe

* they are also busy snapping up mines in africa, many of which contain monzanite sands (mentioned earlier) next to them since this used to be considered mining waste but is rich in thorium and rare earths


while we here continue to waste our time on windmills imported from China and/or reliant on Chinese rare earth (they control 95% market)
the Chinese are strategically snapping up mines and hope to leapfrog the west with all sorts of nuclear technologies in development.

yawnstretch

I'm so glad boards isn't representative of normal society.

You do realize that nuclear waste doesn't go away right? We're basically stealing from our descendants. It will get in the atmosphere and will be impossible to get rid of in a few thousand years when the mess gets out one way or another.

Id make an analogy but nothing compares to nuclear. --snipped-- Highly inappropriate read Rule 3 of charter -- Mod

Pete_Cavan

yawnstretch wrote: »

I'm so glad boards isn't representative of normal society.

You do realize that nuclear waste doesn't go away right? We're basically stealing from our descendants. It will get in the atmosphere and will be impossible to get rid of in a few thousand years when the mess gets out one way or another.

Id make an analogy but nothing compares to nuclear. If you want this "easy" option you shouldn't be allowed to live IMO. You're a disgrace to the human race.

So you are looking for an analogy comparing the damage nuclear energy does to the atmosphere, well ei.sdraob has shown us that burning coal creates 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy. Coal is far more damaging so that is not a good one. Oh well, lets keep on producing our baseload energy supply from imported coal while you think of a good analogy.

dubhthach

Well there's also the fact that Thorium plants would create about 1/40th the amount of waste as a Uranium plant. Here's some nice pics:





Regarding future generations well the 1tonne of radiactive waste that Moneypoint puts into the atmosphere every year will have an affect as will the multi-generational affect of putting all that CO² into the atmosphere.

ei.sdraob

yawnstretch wrote: »

I'm so glad boards isn't representative of normal society.

You do realize that nuclear waste doesn't go away right? We're basically stealing from our descendants. It will get in the atmosphere and will be impossible to get rid of in a few thousand years when the mess gets out one way or another.

Id make an analogy but nothing compares to nuclear. If you want this "easy" option you shouldn't be allowed to live IMO. You're a disgrace to the human race.

I wish more boards users did basic physics in school :rolleyes:

"Classic" nuclear waste (for political reasons only3 % of energy contained in uranium is extracted) does quite litterary go away and rapidly within few years the radioactivity decays by a few orders of magnitude as described in Google Tech talk below

what you are left with after a few years is mainly refined plutonium which in itself fuel but not being used much for political reasons, future generations will thank us for providing them with concentrated plutonium mines.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv-mFSoZOkE

and thats just classic uranium, the future lies with thorium (which wasnt chosen as fuel in nuclear plants for political reasons of wanting to make nukes)