China touts nuclear fuel 'breakthrough'

reply to post by Maslo


ok so you are telling me the spent uranium is fine well why are you trying to dump the crap over here then it is so great maybe you should use it as a tv stand or something. As i said before yes clean while producing power but no when the waste has to be disposed can't believe what i'm hearing from some people.

As others have stated Thorium is the way to go but that won't happen and the US wont do it cause they will have to say good bye to nuclear weapons even though you have a lifetime supply of the stupid things

reply to post by vkturbo
Why would they have to say goodbye to the weapons? The two are not mutually exclusive. Use thorium for power generation, and uranium for the weapons. Just don't try to BS anybody and say the uranium reactors are for peaceful purposes.

reply to post by sonofliberty1776


If we all want a peacful world why would you allow anyone to have the uranium reactors if they are getting power from thorium there is no need for it is there?

Reading what has happened to other countries that have this technology and have meltdowns the area is still registering on the counters why have something unsafe when there is a better choice.

But being as you are american bombs and guns are cool and we want them all and noone else can protect their country from ours if all countries got rid of them there would be no need to get the same tech to protect yourself from that tech.

But hey just me a little aussie down here we know there is a better option than uranium reactors that if your country showed there was and lead by example the rest would follow.

But seeing as though your economy is on life support what you lot do will have no effect on anyone else soon enough you the public need to get a voice cause you are losing it and everything everyone used to love about your country you have almost lost.

reply to post by vkturbo

If the US got rid of our nukes, the only thing that would happen would be an attack or at minimum nuclear blackmail from the Chinese and or Russians. Sorry mate, but life is not all lollipops and rainbows. However, just because the major powers will not be divesting themselves of weapons anytime soon is no reason not to implement this fine technology.

I realize that the article was a popular, not a scientific one, but it would be more credible if at least an outline of the physics involved in this 'breakthrough' were given. We are left wondering it this is something really new, or merely amounts to some sort of breeder reactor that the Chinese have gotten to work.

I got no idea whats going on here this was just meant to be a thread on the announcement lol

Originally posted by randomname
nuclear energy is one of the cleanest forms of energy for the enviroment. but again, peoples fear and brainwashing at the hands of politicians who feel nuclear energy is a threat to the oil industry have pretty much rul

September 29, 1957 Mayak/Kyshtym, Russia In the Kyshtym Disaster, a cooling system failure causes an explosion of dried waste, knocking off the lid of the storage vessel and releasing a large amount of radiation 200 6
01957-10-08 October 8, 1957 Windscale, UK Windscale fire ignites plutonium piles, contaminating surrounding dairy farms 0 US$78 5
01961-01-03 January 3, 1961 Idaho Falls, Idaho, US Explosion at National Reactor Testing Station 3 US$22
01977-02-22 February 22, 1977 Jaslovské Bohunice, Czechoslovakia Severe corrosion of reactor and release of radioactivity into the plant area, necessitating total decommission 0 US$1,700 4
01979-03-28 March 28, 1979 Middletown, Pennsylvania, US Loss of coolant and partial core meltdown, see Three Mile Island accident and Three Mile Island accident health effects 0 US$2,400 5
01984-09-15 September 15, 1984 Athens, Alabama, US Safety violations, operator error, and design problems force six year outage at Browns Ferry Unit 2 0 US$110
01985-03-09 March 9, 1985 Athens, Alabama, US Instrumentation systems malfunction during startup, which led to suspension of operations at all three Browns Ferry Units 0 US$1,830
01986-04-11 April 11, 1986 Plymouth, Massachusetts, US Recurring equipment problems force emergency shutdown of Boston Edison’s Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant 0 US$1,001
01986-04-26 April 26, 1986 Pripyat, Ukraine Steam explosion and meltdown (see Chernobyl disaster) necessitating the evacuation of 300,000 people from Kiev and dispersing radioactive material across Europe (see Chernobyl disaster effects) 53 US$6,700 7
01986-05-04 May 4, 1986 Hamm-Uentrop, Germany Experimental reactor releases excessive radiation to four square kilometers surrounding the facility 0 US$267
01987-03-31 March 31, 1987 Delta, Pennsylvania, US Peach Bottom units 2 and 3 shutdown due to cooling malfunctions and unexplained equipment problems 0 US$400
01987-12-19 December 19, 1987 Lycoming, New York, US Malfunctions force Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation to shut down Nine Mile Point Unit 1 0 US$150
01989-03-17 March 17, 1989 Lusby, Maryland, US Inspections at Calvert Cliff Units 1 and 2 reveal cracks at pressurized heater sleeves, forcing extended shutdowns 0 US$120
01989-11-24 November 24, 1989 Greifswald, East Germany Electrical error causes fire in the main trough that destroys control lines and five main coolant pumps 0 UD$443
01996-02-20 February 20, 1996 Waterford, Connecticut, US Leaking valve forces shutdown Millstone Nuclear Power Plant Units 1 and 2, multiple equipment failures found 0 US$254
01996-09-02 September 2, 1996 Crystal River, Florida, US Balance-of-plant equipment malfunction forces shutdown and extensive repairs at Crystal River Unit 3 0 US$384
01999-09-30 September 30, 1999 Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan Workers at the Tokaimura uranium processing facility try to save time by mixing uranium in buckets, killing two and exposing one more to radiation levels above permissible limits 2 US$54 4
02002-02-16 February 16, 2002 Oak Harbor, Ohio, US Severe corrosion of control rod forces 24-month outage of Davis-Besse reactor 0 US$143 3
02004-08-09 August 9, 2004 Fukui Prefecture, Japan Steam explosion at Mihama Nuclear Power Plant kills 5 workers and injures dozens more




Yea just like governments are clean untill corruption taints them right ?
en.wikipedia.org...

edit on 3-1-2011 by seedofchucky because: (no reason given)

reply to post by q_ball


Great so this means after they nuke us, they can re use the uranium on other countries...

reply to post by q_ball


I hope that they are right about this news. Save them from turning it into bullets ect and firing it all over the world.

reply to post by seedofchucky


Thanks for posting the list. As people can see, the risk of serious nuclear accidents is really very low, there have not been any since 1986, and it was due to human fault and experiments, not during standard power generation. There have been massive progress in safety and automation since then, those reactor designs are not used anymore, and new types of reactors are simply physically impossible to overheat and release radioactive material in the manner of Chernobyl.

As the list proves, nuclear energy is really very safe, and the cleanest form of energy in terms of environmental impact per energy produced.

There are three main fuel cycles that are possible using nuclear reactors. The first we use today in essentially all of our power reactors - the Uranium cycle, where Uranium is enriched and burned in a reactor. There's also the Uranium/Plutonium fuel cycle where Uranium-238 absorbs a neutron becoming Plutonium-239 which is then burned, and there's the Thorium/Uranium fuel cycle where Thorium-232 adsorbs a neutron becoming Uranium-233 which is then burned. Both the U-238/Pu-239 cycle and the Th-232/U-233 cycles have enormous advantages over the Uranium-235 fuel cycle which include increasing the fuel utilization by a factor of up to 200, complete safety, and sharply reduced toxicity. The advantages of the Th-232/U-233 cycle over the U-238/Pu-239 are slight - namely a reduced fissile inventory (the amount of fuel needed in the core for a reaction) of around 1000kg versus 10,000kg, the disadvantage is that the Thorium fuel cycle is where the Uranium/Plutonium fuel cycle was in approximately 1975.

With existing reactors plus a reprocessing facility fuel can already be recycled, but the problem is that it isn't very efficient, is costly, and the process extracts pure Plutonium from the spent fuel which, if isotropically pure (which it typically isn't) could be used to make nuclear weapons. Given the 60 fold increase (3000 years vs 50 years) it sounds as if the Chinese are working on Fast Breeder Reactors that use the Uranium/Plutonium fuel cycle, and can also use nuclear waste as fuel. The US was also working on similar technology, but cancelled it in 1994 due to politics. I did a thread on it here. It is somewhat similar to Thorium as it has most of the advantages - like massively increased Uranium utilization, increased proliferation resistance, extra safety, while destroying nuclear waste, but can be achieved much quicker although it may not have all the advantages (like a lower fissile inventory).

Also, while current reactors technically could produce material for weapons if operated on a very short operation cycle, it has never happened with a civilian power reactor, hence the notion that the only reason we are sticking with Uranium is for weapons, is BS. We're sticking with Uranium because reactors capable of running Thorium have not been developed.

reply to post by seedofchucky


How weak.

Half of those were incidents that occurred many decades ago with experimental or military reactors. Or were incidents involving weapons production. Others involved Soviet bloc designs that are completely irrelevant. Nuclear energy need not be perfect to be vastly superior to all of its alternatives. It need only be superior to all of its alternatives, which it is. Not one member of the public has died due to operation of a civilian nuclear power reactor in the United States, ever. Thousands of people die from coal pollution in the US, annually. Last year the US had a natural gas explosions that killed members of the public. The best relevant information about nuclear that you can come up with is "cracks at pressurized heater sleeves" and "US Severe corrosion of control rod forces 24-month outage" and so on? I'm betting you don't know what a "pressurized heater sleeve" is. And FYI the Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station occurred when borated (acidic) water leaked and ate through a substantial portion of the Reactor head, it wasn't corrosion of a control rod. Also a steam explosion tells us nothing because pretty much any power station boils water.



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