Is nuclear fission safe?

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That is beside the point. The scientific communities, as such do not have much more than what the government gives them as grants. In short they do not have independent capital with which to build test plants. Scientific research is one thing, building a plant is another. That requires a hefty capital investment.

ruveyn

Cheap energy is a principal requirement of industry.
I would have thought there would be plenty of punters there to back one research reactor.

That would be nice. Is it happening?

My guess is that the Lords of Hydrocarbon are not yet motivated to invest in something that would undermine their current business. When hydrocarbons become truly scarce or when their use inflicts ultra heavy environmental damage (see what is happening in China these days with overuse of coal), then they may become sensible and invest in a new generation of fission reactors. Also the government goaded by the eco-phreaks should get out of the way.

When the government becomes the chief arbitrator of who wins and who loses, you can be almost certain they will come down on the side of scarcity. Why? When things are scarce the government doles. He who doles, controls.

ruveyn

I just meant that there is obviously a dollar in it.
A world first for the first country who succeeds at it. Worldwide rights enforceable in the developed world.
A supposedly clean alternative - no trouble attracting top talent for that.
It looks like a win win win.

I don't know why people are so stuck on fusion. If we took all of the people in prison and lock them in giant hamster wheels instead of cells we could power the world.

Controlled Fusion is our Great White Whale. Have ye seen The Great Controlled Fusion Reaction that produces more energy than it consumes???????????

ruveyn

"Aye, aye! and I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give him up."

Curse that Moby-Fusion

*edit* Yar!

It's unwise any way you put it.
After threemiles Island, USA
After Tchernobyle, URSS
After Fukushima, Japan

Seeing today someone ready to build and/or operate that kind of time bomb is insane! I wonder howmany Tchernobyl humanity will need to understand?

When I see cpountry like Idia and China operating that kind of stuff I fear the worts. If they (china) build nuclear powerplan like they build everything else we are in deep sh*t. And for india I prefer to not thinking about it...

They don't even know what to do with all the waste they produce, toxic and radioactive for millions of years. This is completely irresponsable. This is madness and insane. In the 1940 and 1950 the blind fate in progress made them belive that they will found a solution but 70 year later will still at the same point. The only differeces is that we have now great stack of waste waiting to kill us all.

The modern PIUS designs are much safer and their control systems are cleaner and easier to maintain.

The problem was never fission. It was managerial stupidity.

If we are serious about cutting down on CO2 emissions then nuclear generation is the only form of power generation that can produce electricity in amounts that an industrial society requires. Solar and Wind are at best niche sources. And they are intermittent.

We will not be able to make serious use of Solar and Wind generation until we get decent large capacity storage batteries.

ruveyn

Fukushima was not "extremely well-designed." The backup diesel generator for the electrical system (needed when the power plant was automatically scrammed during the earthquake) was, contrary to recommendations of engineers involved in the design process, located at ground level. When the walls proved inadequate to hold back the tsunami, the generator was disabled by less than a meter of water pooling on the grounds.

Had the generator been elevated, as recommended, there would have been more than enough power to keep things running until the reactor itself could be recertified and restarted. Once again, as with Chernobyl and TMI, the problem is human error, not the basic design of nuclear power plants as a whole. (Chernobyl was caused by a commissar insisting on pushing the plant past its then-current limits, coupled with poor construction techniques. TMI happened because a power-plant operator ignored alarms and disabled some automated systems because resetting them in the event of a false alarm meant more work for him - and even then, the only damage sustained was inside the plant itself; radiation release at the perimeter fence was lower than that experienced by anyone living in a brick house or with granite countertops.)

Nuclear power plants are plentifully safe, provided that design is conducted by engineers rather than beancounters and/or politicians, and operators are properly trained not to turn things off that need to stay on.

You can't avoid human error. Human error caused the failure of appolo 13, the Titanic, exond vadez, Deepwater Horizon, software are full of human error. Human error are everywhere, of things that was not been seen as possible (like big tsunami, a small asteroide, or an islamic nut...) and discarted in the desing. The More nuclear catastrophe will occure it's unavoidable it's only a question of time. Some day a colling pool will be destroyed by an unexpected event and according to Brookhaven National Laboratory this will be catastrophic.

«In 1997, the Brookhaven National Laboratory estimated that a "massive calamity at one spent-fuel pool could ultimately lead to 138,000 deaths and contaminate 2,000 sq. mi. (5,200 sq km) of land".» (wikipedia)

Stacking highly radioactive waste is already an human error by it's self... There still no solution to this problem we created in our blind fate in progress.

About trace gaz CO2, human can live in kalahari heat but they can't survive in a nuclear wasteland.

There ARE solutions. Feed the so-called waste to a breeder reactor. If you just want to get rid of it, dump it into the Marianas Trench which is 35,000 feet deep. Out of sight, out of mind.

ruveyn

Or the solution proposed by Dr. Jerry Pournelle, among others - cast it into glass bricks, store those bricks in a Quonset hut in a nice cry patch of desert (say, out by the Trinity test site), surround the hut with a tall fence, and every hundred feet or so hang a sign on the fence that says, "IF YOU CROSS THIS FENCE, YOU WILL DIE." If anyone actually enters the hut without proper protection, the bricks defend themselves - lethal level of radiation don't care about political affiliation.

Dumping the bricks under 6.5 miles of ocean water in the middle of the Pacific is safer. But using the radioactive waste in a breeder reactor is more economical.

ruveyn

Once you dump, radiation doesn't necessarily stay with the bricks, themselves.

The water or dust/air around the bricks becomes radioactive then travels with current.

Face it - the stuff is so incredibly toxic, there isn't a single storage method that guarantees it'll NEVER get into our critical ecosystem.

Pity the waste has such a long half-life... a short half-life would make it non-toxic in a workable timeframe, but when talking about tens-to-hundreds of years it becomes nearly impossible.

Build a space elevator and dump it on the moon.

Ionizing radiation is electro magnetic radiation. A sufficient amount of water will absorb all the energy from the radiating source. Radiation is not a substance. It is energy carried in a field. Water is a first rate absorber of electromagnetic energy. That is why below a certain depth the oceans and seas are pitch black -- no light can make it down from the surface or above..

All the radioactive waste in the world is currently stored in pools of water.

A six mile deep pool of water is perfect. And radiation absolutely does NOT FLOAT with the water. The water does NOT become radioactive. If one drops borated glass slugs 6.5 miles miles down below the surface of the Pacific it is gone. It is not going anywhere.

By the way, the molten portion of the earth is loaded with radioactive heavy metals. That is what keeps our molten core molten.

ruveyn