Nice to see progress in Nuclear Energy research
http://www.gnep.energy.gov/gnepUSNuclearPower.html
Posted on 03/13/2008 4:06:32 PM PDT by HangnJudge
The Bush administration has ear-marked $20 million in its 2009 budget toward the US Department of Energy's efforts to design nuclear power plants in the 250-to-500 megawatt range as part of its Global Nuclear Energy Program (GNEP).
The money marks the first substantial commitment to building the new plants since President Bush announced the program in February 2006. The latest nuclear plants designed for US domestic use have capacities about 1300 megawatts.
GNEP, which now includes 21 member countries, hopes to begin construction of its first reactor in a country currently without nuclear power in 2015, saying the plants will provide a clean, safe source of electricity.
Nuclear green "These will be deployed in a responsible way that is safe and secure and offers the lowest possible risk for proliferation," says Daniel Ingersoll of GNEP and the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Global energy demand is expected to be 50% higher in 2030 than it is today with 70% of this growth coming from developing countries. "They are going to grab whatever power sources they can," Ingersoll says. "We think nuclear power offers a better option than fossil fuels and there is no way renewables alone will be enough."
Countries that build the reactors would have to agree to use nuclear power for civilian purposes only and to forego uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities that can be used to develop nuclear weapons, GNEP says.
Nuclear batteries Nations with established nuclear capacity would supply fuel and collect spent material for reprocessing to ensure no fuel went missing. "Fourth generation" reactors could be built with a sealed load of fuel that lasts the lifetime of the reactor – like a disposable gadget with a non-replacable battery
(Excerpt) Read more at technology.newscientist.com ...
http://www.gnep.energy.gov/gnepUSNuclearPower.html
Does not sound like US built nuc power but we are paying to build power plants for everyone else.
“The Bush administration has ear-marked $20 million in its 2009 budget toward the US Department of Energy’s efforts to design nuclear power plants in the 250-to-500 megawatt range as part of its Global Nuclear Energy Program (GNEP).”
WOW! 20 whole million!
Well, maybe that’s all we have left after giving Fatah $500,000,000.00 and planning on $375,000,000.00 to the KLA terrorists in Kosovo this year.
Anything to stop the flow of money into the Oil producing Middle East states.
Wellllllll, ya gotta have yer priorities...
better be Pebble Bed reactors...
I remember reading a while back that Mitsubishi had something like this already and we were going to buy some. IIRC, some French company said they could safely reprocess the fuel.
There's already talk of gas topping $5 a gallon.
This sounds like another global coalition to set some ground rules for the construction of commercial nuclear power plants outside the US.
We already have our rules. They're in the Code of Federal Regulations and they're monitored and enforced by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Just imagine if he’d expended as much political capital on a decent energy policy and social security reform as he did on pushing amnesty and pushing for nationhood for the Palis. We’d be in much, much better shape, as a party and as a nation.
I agree
The delays on implementation of a rational Nuclear Energy Program are unconscionable. I primarily blame the Environmentalist idiots, and Political fear-mongering for the delay
But every year we wait makes our dependency on Fossil Fuels greater.
They’re not. These reactors are going to be based on the liquid sodium moderated breeder design that the DoE built in the early ‘90s. While the liquid sodium moderator used in this design is tricky to handle, the reactor has several advantages: it has a high negative coefficient of reactivity, meaning that if the core gets too hot, criticality is lost and the reactor shuts down. Also, the sodium-moderated design allows the reactor to use fuel elements that are simply cast instead of precision-machined, thus drastically lowering fuel costs. Another advantage is the fuel itself, a plutonium/uranium mix: as the reactor ages, neutron flux from the plutonium gradually converts the uranium into more fuel, allowing the reactor to recover ±99% of the energy in each fuel element — this means the core can be sealed, as one fuelling will last the lifetime of the reactor. This configuration furthermore transmutes the usual long-half-life “poison” byproducts of fission into short half-life isotopes, allowing the spent fuel elements to be safely stored on site. Finally, the alloy fuel elements cannot be reprocessed into weapons-grade nuclear material without the use of huge, heavy, easy-to-find-and-bomb centrifuges, thus greatly reducing the likelihood of proliferation.
I’ll be honest: liquid sodium scares the crap out of me. That stuff oxidizes like crazy, and if it touches water, well... don’t ask. However, the basic design of these reactors is sound and the prototype tested well, so I’m confident the new units will work.
I feel impelled to speak today in a language that in a sense is new—one which I, who have spent so much of my life in the military profession, would have preferred never to use.
That new language is the language of atomic warfare.
The United States then launched an "Atoms for Peace" program that supplied equipment and information to schools, hospitals, and research institutions within the U.S. and throughout the world."
The Industry sources for support read like a
Who’s Who of Nuclear Power
Westinghouse, BNFL, OKBM (Russia)
ORNL, Polytechnic of Milan, MIT, Tokyo Institute of Technology
Just to name a few
cool...
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