The above seems to be Big Brother himself making implied commentary about how tired we must all be getting not to already be sleeping with the Nuclear Genie….

(Sleep, sheeple, sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep!)

Who are the real terrorists? The Nuclear Powered dream machine is a blind wave of treasure and The Ten Million Dollar Mal knew he would never be Prime Minister by pushing that disingenious barrow too hard whilst simultaneously running the line that Australia is only responsible for less than 2% of GHG emissions.

If you go to sleep, but, Freddy( the metrosexual Liberal voter ) WILL get ya!

“This said, nuclear power certainly isn’t as cheap, fast, or efficient and its many boosters would have us believe in practice.”

Nuclear energy, when analyzed in realistic quantitative terms, is clearly able able to be deployed considerably faster and cheaper per real capacity-factor-corrected kilowatt of output than any other clean technology.

“So where do these magical 4th generation reactors exist?

What? They don’t?

Shame.”

Let’s see.
“Generation IV reactor” usually includes metal-cooled fast reactors, high-temperature gas-cooled reactors, and molten-salt reactors, just to name a few examples.

The ones generating useful electricity output on the grid in use today:

The French Phenix fast reactor.
The BN-600 sodium-cooled fast reactor in Russia.
The Monju fast breeder reactor in Japan (to be restarted soon)
The Russian (well, Soviet) Alfa-class naval lead-cooled fast reactors.
(Well, they’re not on the grid obviously, but generating useful energy.)

The ones that were formerly generating energy on the grid:

The Fort St. Vrain HTGR
The Peach Bottom 1 HTGR
The German AVR high-temperature, gas-cooled pebble-bed reactor.
The German THTR high-temperature, gas-cooled thorium-fuelled pebble-bed reactor.
The Fast Breeder Test Reactor in India.
EBR-II, which served as the first prototype for the Integral Fast Reactor.
The Fermi I fast breeder reactor.
The Dounreay Fast Reactor and the Prototype Fast Reactor at Dounreay.
The Superphenix fast reactor in France.
The French Rhapsodie fast reactor.
The BN-350 in Kazakhstan (Notable for its use as an integrated desal plant.)

Research reactors, prototypes or reactors under development, that didn’t or don’t generate electricity on the grid:

The ORNL Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment
The Aircraft Reactor Experiment(s)
The Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor in India.
The Clementine mercury-cooled fast reactor at Los Alamos
The Ultra-High Temperature Reactor Experiment (UHTREX) at Los Alamos
The SNR-300 in Germany. (completed power-generating reactor, never operated.)
The High-Temperature Test Reactor (HTTR) in Japan.
The Chinese HTR-10 small, modular pebble-bed reactor.

“A University of Melbourne research group estimates the cost of decommissioning conventional nuclear reactors as between AU$400 million to AU$2.4 Billion. Each.”

So, let’s assume 1000 MW, 95% capacity factor, 50 year lifetime.
Thus, you’re talking about between 0.1 and 0.6 cents per kilowatt-hour.
You only pay for decommissioning once, and you’ve got the entire operating lifetime of the plant to collect the money for it. It’s not a significant cost at all.

“the mine’s requirements will “increase from 37 megalitres to 216 megalitres per day, and power which must go from 125 MWe to 775 MWe – representing about 10% of South Australia’s current baseload demand.”

Anti-nuclear activists love to cherry-pick Olympic Dam as an example of energy inputs into mining, because it’s absolutely nothing like a typical uranium mine – it’s a large copper mine and integrated copper smelter, which produces a little bit of uranium on the side.

The total energy input, including all the energy used to mine all the ore, and smelt all the copper, plus the energy that would be required to supply all the water needs via desalination, is a tiny fraction of the energy output in the form of uranium production, even with inefficient use of uranium in existing LWRs.

My point was against the oft quoted claim that nuclear energy is carbon neutral. Maybe if all the diesel were biodiesel but at this stage

The life-cycle energy use and emissions argument originally established based on highly flawed, biased work by Storm van Leeuwen and Smith and endlessly repeated parrot-like by morons like Helen Caldicott has been absolutely done to death, debunked, and buried.

The life-cycle emissions intensity of nuclear energy is as low, if not lower, than any other clean technologies such as wind and hydro, and certainly clearly lower than that of solar photovoltaics.

“HuggyBunny: Not too long ago there was a large particle accelerator located in the lower floor of a prestigious institute in Melbourne.
After it had run for a year, one of the Professors calculated that a large gamma ray flux was entering the brick wall behind it.
Perhaps he suggested we should find out what is on the other side of the brick wall? It was a major bus stop.
They closed the installation down the next day and we were all told to say nowt.
Humans are basically not smart enough to mess with this stuff.”

Well, we used to have the betatron (and a cyclotron, I think) at Melb. Uni, and we still have the several-story-tall pelletron accelerator which is used to drive a nuclear microprobe system. (as an aside, most of Switkowski’s research used to involve studying proton-driven reactions using this machine). I believe there is also a still small proton accelerator used for undergrad teaching, the only particle accelerator dedicated to this purpose in the Southern Hemisphere, so I was told.

There is a small accelerator at RMIT I believe, and most other serious universities will have at least one too. There’s also a cyclotron for nuclear medicine at the Austin Hospital, I think. Plus the Australian Synchrotron, of course. And this is just within Victoria. There are many accelerators, all over the country.

Of course, these are all under the care of expert people who know what they’re talking about where health physics and radiation safety is concerned, and all these institutions are under ARPANSA’s regulation concerning their use of ionising radiation, from any source.

I’ve long opposed the use of nukes as a power source for reasons involving:

1. Safe disposal of waste (with 1/2 lives of thousands of years, and high toxicity of the elements/compounds) produced, not an insignificant problem.

2. Safe disposal of “decommissioned” plants – which, in my understanding is also not an insignificant problem

involving the “current” generation(s) of reactors (and I don’t think the use of DU in armaments qualifies as “safe” disposal, BTW).

“Half-lives of thousands of years” for the waste? No. This is simply rubbish.

The bulk of the radioactivity in reactor-produced fission products is nowhere close to being that long lived. Caesium-137 has a half-life of 30 years, strontium-90 has a half-life of 29 years, and iodine-131 has a half-life of 8 days, to name a few well-known examples of typical radioactive fission products.

Some actinides have longer half-lives, eg. 432 years for americium-241, but that’s still less than thousands of years. Plutonium-239 has a half-life of ~24,000 years, but that’s not waste, it’s a valuable fuel. In an efficient reactor, Pu-239 is the internal intermediate step in turning abundant uranium-238 into abundant clean energy. It certainly isn’t “waste”.

There have been many examples of the successful decommissioning of nuclear power reactors, and research reactors. As my above comment elucidates, it’s not even expensive.

It’s certainly a waste to turn DU into munitions – it’s such a valuable energy resource. Of course, this use has got absolutely nothing to do with nuclear energy. If uranium didn’t have the nuclear characteristics that it does and you couldn’t use it for energy, it would still be mined for use in things like munitions which use it for its mechanical properties and density.

When talking about so-called “waste”, you must stop and ask why you’re calling it waste, when it is valuable, useful material.

Allowing for losses at the head when you release it to recover the energy you can get about 80% of that back, (although if the top reservoir gets topped up by more rainfall than it loses in evaporation perhaps you’ll do a little better in practice), you may do the match and work out what 2 weeks of energy storage would look like. I’ve never done it, but unless they have some truly massive mountains suited to containing large volumes of water and huge catchments at the bottom, or they are near the ocean/sea/large lakes 2 weeks does sound very ambitious.

Look here for someone who has done some of the maths in a UK context.

The real value of pumped storage is instant despatchability, which allows you (subject to the storage you have) to bridge the gap during a slew (a disjuncture between demand and supply) between power from major sources. It may take 30 minutes to bring gas fired plants online, a ccouple of hours for nuclear and perhaps 8 hours or more for some coal fired.

Used properly, pumped storage allows you to reduce active redundant capacity and get closer to just in time supply with a near zero emission technology. It may even be used to do desal/water purification as an alternative to power — and since this too requires power, offset existing demand.

Fran

What? They don’t?

Shame.

Yes it’s called pumped storage.

You might want to look here for a detailed discussion on managing intermittency in a system.

1. Somewhere in the far distant future there will be Nice Little Green (NLG) nuclear reactors that will be totally safe.
2. These reactors will use only the fuel provided by decommissioned nuclear weapons and will use flying pig urine for coolant
3. That huge and energy and water intensive mines will be required for the present and future “conventional” nuclear reactors
4. That the same mines will be required for the NLG reactors in the event that the flying pigs are unable to deliver
5. That there is already a vast supply of nuclear weapons and we should welcome this because it is all a matter of the will (to power perhaps?).

New stuff.
A University of Melbourne research group estimates the cost of decommissioning conventional nuclear reactors as between AU$400 million to AU$2.4 Billion. Each.
France has allocated AU$100 billion for decommissioning it present reactors (Ian Lowe QE 27 2007 P62)

Recommendation:

Suggest that Reaction Time Climate Change and the Nuclear Option by Ian Lowe (QE 27 2007) be read by all and sundry.

Note on decommissioning. The decommissioning costs were never considered in the past because the real driver of the nuclear “Power” programs in the US (10,000 bombs), Soviet Union (10,000 bombs), Great Britain (185 bombs), France (454 bombs), China (410 bombs), Israel (200 bombs), North Korea, India Pakistan and South Africa
was the nuclear bomb.

Huggy

How’s that for reflecting the importance of the deposit?

That’d be Petratherm/TruEnergy/BeachPetroleum’s Paralana project, 40 kilometres east of Arkaroola. Mar’n Fer’s’n has given them $7 mill under the geothermal funding program, they are drilling as we speak and they have an application in for some of his $435 mill Renewable Energy Demonstration Projects funding round, applications for which closed over 3 mths ago, presumably awaiting announcement to suit some political agenda, like as a green ALP plank in a double dissolution election .

“By 2011 we expect to be supplying geothermal energy on a commercial basis”…
that commercial basis will be providing electricity first to the Beverley uranium mine, then the Olympic Dam behemoth.

Ironic what, large swags of Australia’s renewable energy funding going to provide juice for SA Labor’s Reelection Plan digging one of the world’s biggest holes, in the process depleting and despoiling one of continents most precious resource, the Great Artesian Basin:
From the draft environmental report
the mine’s requirements will “increase from 37 megalitres to 216 megalitres per day, and power which must go from 125 MWe to 775 MWe – representing about 10% of South Australia’s current baseload demand.”
Nice one Mar’n, Penny, Pete, and Kev, diverting renewables funding to provide a green smokescreen for BHP-Billiton’s big uranium project, and get Mike Rann re-elected. You cynical bastards.

I did a google map link between Olympic dam and Innamincka and from memory it was about 1,000k, but it wasn’t a direct route. Geodynamics isn’t scheduled to enter the commercial market until 2015 and then is unlikely to offer the quantities required by BHP Billiton. So I’m thinking that they’ll have to commit to traditional sources.

OTOH I did read today that SA was increasing its wind power significantly, but the point of the article was that renewable power coming onstream in Australia is not even keeping up with increased demand.

There is another geothermal development in the Flinders Ranges that might actually have its nose in front from a snippet I heard, but I don’t have any real information.

Brain, I think I have the numbers on my other computer of the volume of soil that will be displaced, and the amount of land that the displaced soil is likely to cover, I’ll try and track it down when I have more time.

I also seem to recall that Olympic Dam was being touted as a logical market for geothermal power since it is so close to the geothermal source.

Even with gen 3 the total life emissions for nuclear are very competitive.
For what it is worth, the following data was put out by the uranium information centre:

TYPE G CO2/kWh % OF COAL MEDIAN
HIGH LOW MEDIAN
Coal 1306 966 1136 85 to 115
Gas 688 439 537 39 to 61
Hydro 236 4 238 0.3 to 21
Sola PV 280 100 190 9 to 25
Wind 48 10 29 0.9 to 4.2
Nuclear 21 9 15 0.8 to 1.9

for practical purposes the emissions from uranium mining and processing would be negligible for gen 4.

Huggybunny –
Bullshit, pure and undiluted bullshit.

I tuned out him or her months ago. If blogs had killfiles Huggybunny would be in mine.