Nuclear Power.... MSR's

Annatar

How would Nuclear power be recieved in the Republic if the reactors were of a MSR design?

AngryHippie

huh ??
http://www.trailspace.com/news/2006/08/11/msr-reactor.html


oh, you mean one of these


http://nuclear.inl.gov/gen4/msr.shtml


Only as opposed as I am to Nuclear power on a principle.

Flourine is a pretty nasty element....what kind of salt?

Gonzales

Annatar wrote: »

How would Nuclear power be recieved in the Republic if the reactors were of a MSR design?

It would be received with the NIMBY default response.

Personally I think nuclear is the way to go. When done properly its clean & safe with very little waste.

SeanW

Exactly. Nuclear plants operate without spewing any pollutants into the air other than sometimes a column of clean steam. The waste is manageable, and plant safety outside the Former Soviet Union has been almost flawless, due to Safety 1st work practices and the use of safe, sound reactor designs, neither of which, among other things, were prevelant in the morally, financially and competently bankrupt exercise that was the Soviet Union.

Unfortunately, no matter what reactor design was chosen, Irish people would stick their heads up their rear ends in terror as soon as the dreaded N-word was mentioned. We'd rather tear up pristine boglands to produce filthy peat for electricity and imported Russian gas with all the security, environmental and political ramifications that has.

Capt'n Midnight

Gonzales wrote:

Personally I think nuclear is the way to go. When done properly its clean & safe with very little waste.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor

With fuel reprocessing, the Thorium fuel cycle, so impractical in other types of reactors, produces 0.1% of the long-term high-level radioactive waste of a light-water reactor without reprocessing (all modern reactors in the U.S.).

I'd have said 300 times but they say 1000 times the amount of waste from current reactors.

Liquid reactors are not a new idea. Burning up the waste as it is formed is a great idea, in a molten reactor you would be left with mostly low weight atoms with short half-lives in the order of months where you can probably guarantee to keep it safe.
They are a better idea than the current stuff, but I'm still not pushed on them.

And as for the nuclear industry, well these are the guys who have been producing 100's of times as much high level waste as best practice would indicate.

daithicarr

But what are the chances of the goverment taking the lead in promoting and adopting an efficent policy towards nuclear power.

I strongly dislike the idea of Nuclear power, and of course if something goes wrong it could be catastrophic and destroy the enviroment.

But are we not better of with something that could Destroy the Enviroment , rather than the current system which is destroying it?

RedPlanet

It's convenient that the pro-nuke crowd gets to advocate theoretical designs while the greenies must show their technologies in production isn't it?

daithicarr

id want to see a working and tested model before any move was made to build them. but the problem with lot of the green alternatives are they are unproven ideas.

Capt'n Midnight

daithicarr wrote: »

id want to see a working and tested model before any move was made to build them. but the problem with lot of the green alternatives are they are unproven ideas.

most of the arguments are over economics not technical issues.

IIRC ESB claim that the windmills down in carensore point recouped the energy used in their construction in the first few months of operation. Salters duck was shafted because of a decimal point in a report. Nuclear reactors have been running since 1943 , there first tidal turbines are due to be installed soon in the North. The nuclear industry has been subsidised by billions of dollars, not the stuff that's worth less than a euro but real 1940's dollars during the cold war. The pentagon and kremlin have enough oil that they would not need to import any so they haven't invested in it. If only someone could figure out how to make renewable energy a concern for the military you'd get real deveopment instead of small schemes that have to pay their way as at present.

SeanW

RedPlanet wrote: »

It's convenient that the pro-nuke crowd gets to advocate theoretical designs while the greenies must show their technologies in production isn't it?

In this thread there has been a grand total of one post advocating a non-proven design, that being the titular MSR.

most of the arguments are over economics not technical issues.

That's because both nuclear and renewables programmes must be measured, costwise, against the use of coal and natural gas. The successful technology must a provide a reliable, cost-effective electricity supply with little, or preferably no, air pollution and CO2 per kw/h. Coal can never do this because it's fundamentally filthy, the toxins, acid rain compounds and residual CO2 emissions will always be a problem no matter how much "scrubbing" is done. Renewables can't do this on their own because they depend on the weather.

The French managed to make a good go of it (getting fossil fuels out of the electricity supply chain), I see no reason, with the appropriate technologies (nuclear, nuclear imports from France, and renewbales), that we can't do the same.

ted1

i'm a greenie who agrees with nukes

Húrin

As an environmentalist I think that most anti-nuclear opinion is no more sophisticated than bigotry. It is the cheapest and most effective clean energy. Far from being "unnatural" it is the preferred power source of nature itself. Look at how well France has done with it. They have Western Europe's lowest carbon footprint per capita, energy independence, Europe's cheapest electricity and a countryside and coastline not blighted by wind turbines and coal-fired plants like Drax.

Spyral

I concur with NPP only output steam + stuff that you hide away anyway.

definalty better than coal