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Chernobyl 23 years on

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Conundrum

Sun Apr 26 2009, 07:33AM

Registered Member #96 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:37PM
Location: CI, Earth
Posts: 4061

Hi all.
Today marks the 23rd anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster.

May the fallen rest in peace knowing that corners will never be cut on nuclear safety, ever again.

Hopefully within my lifetime nuclear fission power will be sent the way of the dinosaur, replaced with renewable energy and fusion.

-A

Proud Mary

Sun Apr 26 2009, 07:55AM

Registered Member #543 Joined: Tue Feb 20 2007, 04:26PM
Location: UK
Posts: 4992

There are still lakes in Swedish Lappland which are too contaminated to eat fish from, so let's hope the era of those 50c Russian Geiger counters on a key ring are over.

An idea I've had for a long time would be a chain of international amateur radiation monitoring stations. Each would use identical, inexpensive equipment mounted so far as possible in the same way (or according to a rule) The output from each station could be displayed in real time on a single web site, both as comparative live graphs one above another, and perhaps superimposed on a global map if there were enough stations to make it worthwile.

I have only very basic computer skills, and would need a lot of help to sort out the live feed display, and associated web software, but anyone who is interested, and has the resources and abilities to join might like to send me a PM.

Bored Chemist

Sun Apr 26 2009, 08:42AM

Registered Member #193 Joined: Fri Feb 17 2006, 07:04AM
Location: sheffield
Posts: 1022

"Hopefully within my lifetime nuclear power will be sent the way of the dinosaur, replaced with renewable energy and fusion."
Fusion power is nuclear power.

Proud Mary

Sun Apr 26 2009, 10:17AM

Registered Member #543 Joined: Tue Feb 20 2007, 04:26PM
Location: UK
Posts: 4992

Bored Chemist wrote ...

"Hopefully within my lifetime nuclear power will be sent the way of the dinosaur, replaced with renewable energy and fusion."
Fusion power is nuclear power.

I think the lad intended a relatively 'clean' nuclear process that didn't fill the secret tunnels of the world with irreducible, almost everlasting, fission products.

Bored Chemist

Sun Apr 26 2009, 11:53AM

Registered Member #193 Joined: Fri Feb 17 2006, 07:04AM
Location: sheffield
Posts: 1022

Don't let anyone fool you into thinking that fusion won't produce highly radioactive waste.

Chris Russell

Sun Apr 26 2009, 04:01PM

... not Russel!
Registered Member #1 Joined: Thu Jan 26 2006, 12:18AM
Location: Tempe, Arizona
Posts: 1052

I'm not a huge fan of fission, but I'd rather see technologies like coal and natural gas power plants sent packing first, even if that means building more nuclear power plants in the meantime. The Chernobyl accident was a terrible tragedy, but it says a lot more about the RBMK reactor than it does about nuclear power as a whole. The design has many inherent flaws, and hopefully the last of the RBMKs will be shut down soon.

Modern designs, such as pebble bed reactors, are theoretically safe, even if some sort of attack were to breach the reinforced containment structure. There's no action one could take in the control room that would result in a meltdown, even if one was intentionally trying to do so.

Fusion is a nice dream, but it's been about 20 years off for the last 50 years. There are still so many unanswered questions that I find it hard to believe any of us will see widespread commercial fusion power in our lifetimes. It's also by no means waste-free. The waste should break down in decades, rather than centuries, but there will still be underground vaults packed full of aging waste.

Renewable energy is a good option, but unless people as a whole are willing to make some really tough choices, it will never be the backbone of our energy supply. Everyone wants renewable energy, but it seems nobody wants wind turbines anywhere nearby. Nobody wants to sacrifice coastline for tidal power stations. Nobody wants to dam up local rivers and streams and risk hurting the fish. Seems like most people want some sort of magical renewable energy that works like coal and nuclear -- generation happens at some power plant, far away, out of sight and mind. Renewable energy doesn't work like that, or we'd be doing it already.

aonomus

Sun Apr 26 2009, 04:38PM

Registered Member #1497 Joined: Thu May 22 2008, 05:24AM
Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Posts: 801

Fusion is a nice thing if it does get off the ground, while it does produce radioactive waste, its much more stable and in the form of reactor components that are past their lifetime due to wear. Any reactor failure will result in a big mushroom cloud of only slightly radioactive plasma, maybe some radioactive debris, but greatly reduced heavy isotopes such as Cs or I that are long lived and like to get absorbed by humans.

On another note, STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl was a fun game...

Zum Beispiel

Sun Apr 26 2009, 05:22PM

Registered Member #514 Joined: Sun Feb 11 2007, 12:27AM
Location: Somewhere in Pirkanmaa, Finland
Posts: 295

I agree with Chris. Fission might not be the way for the future, but it sure beats every other option we have available now.

The RBMK reactor was a horrible mind-fart and a great example of how the Soviets thought about things:
Pros: Cheap, simple, fast to build, powerful and it could be used for making nuclear material for nuclear weapons.
Cons: Huge positive void coefficient, making it inherently unstable.

And still it didn't just blow up on it's own. The operators had to disable almost all of the security systems to make it blow up! The operators had to run the reactor at a very low power level to conduct the test, and that's where the void coefficient kicked in. They had to remove the control rods completely to keep the reactor from shutting down, and that made the reactor extremely unstable, jumping from 500MW thermal to 30GW thermal in just few seconds. They should have known this was going to happen (and most likely they did know it was unsafe), but once the test had been ordered, it had to be done. It was just how the Soviet system worked.

Even the unsafe RBMK design, with all of it's design flaws, was relatively safe. It was just operator error and bad luck that caused the horrible accident.

Now if you look at modern reactors, the chance of something like that happening is almost zero. When you think how many RBMKs were constructed and only one has suffered catastrophic failure, what do you think is the likelihood of a modern reactor blowing up? Of cource there are problems, most importantly the waste issue. But I like to think it's better to have some isolated caves with highly radioactive waste, than to keep filling our atmosphere with carbon dioxide and all that other nasty stuff combustion based forms of energy produce.

This is my main gripe with the likes of Greenpeace: They protest at nuclear power plants rather than protesting at coal fired plants. The environmental impact of a nuclear reactor is pretty much zero, while a coal plant is a huge polluter. If they actually cared about the Earth, they'd protest against coal, but it's all really about the politics surrounding all things nuclear, and the fear.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to belittle the Chernobyl accident. It was a horrible accident, with a long lasting environmental impact. But if we learn from it, instead of trying to forget it, we can make new and better reactors, generating all the power we need with zero pollution.

The thing is, we can't go back. The west can't go back. There is no way to cut down on our energy usage enough to make renevable forms of energy be a viable option. Now that the standard of living is increasing in large countries like China and India, they can't keep using things like coal to meet their insane energy consumption, lest we drown in pollution. Nuclear power might be the right way for them to cut back on their consumption of fossil fuels.

Cesiumsponge

Sun Apr 26 2009, 06:31PM

Registered Member #397 Joined: Wed Apr 19 2006, 12:56AM
Location: Western Washington
Posts: 125

Modern fission plants when run properly are more efficient, safer, and less radioactive than actual fossil fuel plants as far as what makes it back out into the environment. It pollutes less and has a smaller "carbon footprint", that environmentalists like to jive about, and spent fuel waste can be reprocessed into a fuel format for another type of fission reactor which make the overall process more green.

Fusion itself even in it's scaled down experimental stage like the ITER reactor are insanely expensive, assuming tokamak reactors become the best choice for the first generation plants. Rough projections put it at about $10-15+ billion at the time of completion due to increased material costs and it's only a research-level reactor. This is assuming the tokamak topology is acceptable as it's an insanely power hungry beast when pumping it's magnetic field containment. A full scale plant would probably be as expensive as the International Space Station and probably take close to a decade to build unless you sink the entire country's GDP into building the thing. Not many countries can afford this type of "clean power" except well-off first world nations.

Conundrum

Sun Apr 26 2009, 07:07PM

Registered Member #96 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:37PM
Location: CI, Earth
Posts: 4061

Then there's the whole thorny issue of reprocessing generating plutonium...

-A

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