Nevermind the reactors. Giving us Namrata is enough! "Thank you, America - for your love and support." -- Namrata Singh Gujral (Click the pic)
Posted on 08/25/2005 4:11:34 AM PDT by CarrotAndStick
NEW DELHI: India unveiled before the international community on Thursday, its revolutionary design of a 'Thorium breeder reactor' that can produce 600 MW of electricity for two years 'with no refuelling and practically no control manoeuvres.'
Designed by scientists of the Mumbai-based Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, the ATBR is claimed to be far more economical and safer than any power reactor in the world.
Most significantly for India, ATBR does not require natural or enriched uranium which the country is finding difficult to import. It uses thorium -- which India has in plenty -- and only requires plutonium as 'seed' to ignite the reactor core initially.
Eventually, the ATBR can run entirely with thorium and fissile uranium-233 bred inside the reactor (or obtained externally by converting fertile thorium into fissile Uranium-233 by neutron bombardment).
BARC scientists V Jagannathan and Usha Pal revealed the ATBR design in their paper presented at the week-long 'international conference on emerging nuclear energy systems' in Brussels. The design has been in the making for over seven years.
According to the scientists, the ATBR while annually consuming 880 kg of plutonium for energy production from 'seed' rods, converts 1,100 kg of thorium into fissionable uranium-233. This diffrential gain in fissile formation makes ATBR a kind of thorium breeder.
The uniqueness of the ATBR design is that there is almost a perfect 'balance' between fissile depletion and production that allows in-bred U-233 to take part in energy generation thereby extending the core life to two years.
This does not happen in the present day power reactors because fissile depletion takes place much faster than production of new fissile ones.
BARC scientists say that the ATBR with plutonium feed can be regarded as plutonium incinerator and it produces the intrinsically proliferation resistant U-233 for sustenance of the future reactor programme.
They say that long fuel cycle length of two years with no external absorber management or control manoeuvres "does not exist in any operating reactor."
The ATBR annually requires 2.2 tonnes of plutonium as 'seed'. Although India has facilities to recover plutonium by reprocessing spent fuel, it requires plutonium for its Fast Breeder Reactor programme as well. Nuclear analysts say that it may be possible for India to obtain plutonium from friendly countries wanting to dismantle their weapons or dispose of their stockpiled plutonium.
Thank you.
Wrong.No one has been building because natural gas has been cheap till recently and they could just order turn-key projects, where the vendor did all the construction and startup, adding capacity in small increments as needed. Apparently you are not associated with either the electrical industry or the nuclear industry.
Stupid is as stupid does. There are lots of examples where nuclear projects were well run and didn't get into financial problems and excessive delays.
Sorry, but I don't believe you even cracked a book. Buzz off, lying bastard.
You are being nit picky. I misspoke. It is the NRC I was thinking about. As for NG, it is cheaper to BUILD. However, fuel costs have driven the price of NG generated electricty way up in the last 4 years. I lost my job because of it. Don't try to tell me that the overregualtion of the nuclear industry by the feds didn't it because I KNOW it did.
And yes, I do know that the NRC must approve of ALL plans BEFORE the ground is even broken and then must re-engineer many pieces becuse of new regulations that didn't even exist when the plant was financed.
NO ONE will build one because they know that there is no way to budget for power hungry idiot bureauracrats who justify their pitiful existance by inventing imaginary problems and forcing contractors to tear out hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars worth of work and redo it.
Hell, the Browns Ferry nuke plant has been under construction for over 20 years.
I guess I would have expected a more technical explanation from a PhD. Oh well.
Nevermind the reactors. Giving us Namrata is enough! "Thank you, America - for your love and support." -- Namrata Singh Gujral (Click the pic)
It is the NRC I was thinking about. As for NG, it is cheaper to BUILD. However, fuel costs have driven the price of NG generated electricty way up in the last 4 years. I lost my job because of it. Don't try to tell me that the overregualtion of the nuclear industry by the feds didn't it because I KNOW it did. Fuel costs are up and so is interest in nuclear power. With oil at $20 a barrel no one would build nuclear. Things are changing.
And yes, I do know that the NRC must approve of ALL plans BEFORE the ground is even broken and then must re-engineer many pieces becuse of new regulations that didn't even exist when the plant was financed.
New regulations were put into place to prevent future events like Three Mile Island. I have been on nuclear projects that went well with no major design changes due to "NRC change in regulations".
NO ONE will build one because they know that there is no way to budget for power hungry idiot bureauracrats who justify their pitiful existance by inventing imaginary problems and forcing contractors to tear out hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars worth of work and redo it. The past cases where they had to redo all that work was because they were too dumb to do it correctly the first time.
Hell, the Browns Ferry nuke plant has been under construction for over 20 years.Oh, great example. Here is a case where the government put in new regulations to prevent stupid people from burning down their nuclear power plants. Those d@mn power hungry feds. Can't they just leave the utilities alone? I mean, if the utility wants to go around with lit candles and burn their plant down, they have every right to do that!
You present a one-sided, distorted picture. You are not aware of how the NRC has worked to stream-line regulations and future licensing processes nor how utilities and vendors have worked on new, safer and easier to build and license, designs. No wonder you lost your job.
It is the NRC I was thinking about. As for NG, it is cheaper to BUILD. However, fuel costs have driven the price of NG generated electricty way up in the last 4 years. I lost my job because of it. Don't try to tell me that the overregualtion of the nuclear industry by the feds didn't it because I KNOW it did. Fuel costs are up and so is interest in nuclear power. With oil at $20 a barrel no one would build nuclear. Things are changing.
And yes, I do know that the NRC must approve of ALL plans BEFORE the ground is even broken and then must re-engineer many pieces becuse of new regulations that didn't even exist when the plant was financed. New regulations were put into place to prevent future events like Three Mile Island. I have been on nuclear projects that went well with no major design changes due to "NRC change in regulations".
NO ONE will build one because they know that there is no way to budget for power hungry idiot bureauracrats who justify their pitiful existance by inventing imaginary problems and forcing contractors to tear out hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars worth of work and redo it. The past cases where they had to redo all that work were because they were too dumb to do it correctly the first time.
Hell, the Browns Ferry nuke plant has been under construction for over 20 years. Oh, great example. Here is a case where the government put in new regulations to prevent stupid people from burning down their nuclear power plants. Those d@mn power hungry feds. Can't they just leave the utilities alone? I mean, if the utility wants to go around with lit candles and burn their plant down, they have every right to do that!
You present a one-sided, distorted picture. You are not aware of how the NRC has worked to stream-line regulations and future licensing processes nor how utilities and vendors have worked on new, safer and easier to build and license, designs. No wonder you lost your job.
Thank you for adding graphical support to my point.
My quote in #65 came from Feynman's Lectures on Physics, Volume II in the section on electricity. He gives another example using electromagnetism demonstrating how powerful the electric force is compared to our common sense notion of how strong it is.
Sorry I couldn't reply sooner, the hurricane cut off my electricity.
Pray tell us, Mr. Know-it-all, if it is sooooo easy and sooooo cheap to build a nuke reactor, then why has no one seriously proposed it in over 20 years?
Environmentalists! Same reason we don't build refineries to ease the gas shortage. Then we have the Pew and Packard foundations giving the enviro groups large sums of money to file lawsuits to regulate domestic competition to their foreign investments. Always follow the money.
That one's easy:
A combination of a most vocal Bugs and Bunny crowd, coupled with a large body of nut jobs determined to pull us back into the 18th century.
India insisted (and achieved), both majority ownership and the final word on how the plant was to be run.
Name one, designed, run through the approval process, and built after the creation of the Environmental Quality Act and the Endangered Species Act and their endless string of children...
Compare the timeline, cost and amount of time from inception to on-line completion with, say, the 5th and 6th nuclear plants built in the USA.
interesting, even after getting past your in-your-face bullsh*t remark. I'd like to see if you can back it up -- no, not the "lefty propaganda" part, the part about ownership and control. It's not an unusual arrangement. Liability simply becomes a matter of percentages.
I didn't say it was sooooo easy and soooo cheap and I already gave you the reason.
You are sooooo not with it.
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