Have you heard of Pebble Bed Modular Reactors?
Richard Russell's Dow Theory Letters (by subscription only) has a comment, today, about Pebble Bed Modular Reactors (PBMR).
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The Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) is a small, safe, clean, cost-efficient, inexpensive and adaptable nuclear power plant.No more big cooling towers. The PBMR is about the size of a soccer field and the height of the building will be 18 stories, half of which is below ground level.The PBMR is a nuclear power plant that uses coated uranium particles encased in graphite to form a fuel sphere (60 mm in diameter or about the size of a billard ball). In addition, the PBMR design makes use of helium as the coolant and energy transfer medium to a closed cycle gas turbine and generator.
This design differs in a number of ways from Pressurized Water Reactors. These design differences result in the PBMR being an inherently safe and economical power plant.
I have saved the best for last. Uranium is about $20 per pound. At that price, relative present fuel costs are:
Coal - $1.25 per million BTU
Natural Gas - $3.5 per million BTU
Oil - $6.00 per million BTU
Uranium - $0.055 per million BTU
"Let's assume that Uranium increases to 50 times the current price as demand picks up again. The new PBMR nuclear plants would provide energy at the equivalent to buying gasoline at 1/2 cent per gallon."The environmentalists should love this. There is no danger of "The China Syndrome", the is no pollution as in fossil fuel plants, and there will be enough room on site for the spent fuel to be stored in dry storage tanks within the PBMR building. Finally, a PBMR lasts for 40 years and takes 24 months to build.
Update:
Posted by movermike on
Monday May 9, 2005 at 3:16pm
Maybe the environmenalist movement wouldn't have anything to cry about so they need the other forms of energy to stay in business. That makes more sense, yup, they need a job more than they need efficient fuel.
Do you really believe that we have the ability to isolate highly radioactive waste for a quarter million years?
I think that idea is so absurd as to be beyond reason. Creating plutonium and burying it in holes around the planet is just a sophisticated suicide plan... no matter how safe the reactors are while they are operating.
You'll note that because plutonium storage isn't considered part of the "problem" it is often never discussed....
The waste storage problem is what makes nuclear fission such a terrible idea.
If it's suicide like you say, and you may be right, we have already pulled the trigger. We had better figure out how to bury the tons we have already and in the process we can probably figure out how to bury some more.
Time to load up on Cameco..
The fact is we aren't creating anything that doesn't already exist in nature. We are pulling radioactive material out of the ground, extracting some energy and then putting it back in the ground from wence it came. I wouldn't call that I problem but rather one of the best, cleanest sources of energy available.
The fact is unless we revert back to a low-tech, low-energy consuming economy, which just isn't going to happen, the only alternative is to continue to generate billions of tons of air and ground pollutants from extracting, transporting and burning fossil fuels. I can't find the exact quote but I read from a recent book called "Beyond Oil" that the comprable per person waste if we converted to 100% nuclear would be about the size of a door knob.