China's Ling Ao Unit 2 Nuclear Reactor Begins Commercial Operations.

[NNadir]

Unit 1 of the second phase of the Ling Ao nuclear power plant in Guangdong province, China, has entered commercial operation, China Guangdong Nuclear Power Company (CGNPC) announced.

How the Ling Ao Phase II units could look (Image: L-3 MAPPS)
The reactor - a 1080 MWe Chinese-design CPR-1000 reactor - entered into commercial operation on 20 September, the company said. A ceremony was held in Beijing to mark the milestone.

The reactor - the first CPR-1000 to be built - becomes the 12th nuclear reactor to supply power to China and takes total generating capacity close to 10 GWe.

The first of 157 fuel assemblies was loaded into the reactor on 21 April after state approval for the operation to begin. The unit achieved first criticality on 9 June and was connected to the grid on 15 July. By 15 September, Ling Ao Phase II unit 1 had successfully completed 168 hours of trial operation, with an average capacity factor of over 92%. The unit was required to successfully run for such time before CGNPC could apply for approval to enter full operation.

http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NN-New_Ling_Ao_II_unit_enters_into_service-2709104.html">New Ling Ao II unit enters into service

The reactor is rated at 1080 MWe, and if it continues to operate as it did during the testing phase at 92% capacity utilization, it will thus produce 23.84 GWh per day.

In 2009, the entire state of California produced in an entire year - after 50 years of cheering for solar energy - just http://www.energyalmanac.ca.gov/electricity/electricity_generation.html">846 GWh of solar electricity, less than it produced in the year 2000 and the year 2002.

Thus to completely outstrip all of the solar energy output of the entire State of California, the new Chinese nuclear reactor need operate at 92% capacity utilization just 29 days to completely outstrip California's solar energy supply.

Of course, the nuclear reactor differs from the solar capacity of California inasmuch the reactor is reliable and need not be backed up by dangerous natural gas mining, burning and waste dumping.

Have a nice evening.

[kristopher]

1. "A new Yucca Mountain every 2 years"

A new Yucca Mountain every 2 years

From a presentation by John Holdren.

The renewable option: Is it real?

SUNLIGHT: 100,000 TW reaches Earth’s surface (100,000 TWy/year = 3.15 million EJ/yr), 30% on land.

Thus 1% of the land area receives 300 TWy/yr, so converting this to usable forms at 10% efficiency would yield 30 TWy/yr, about twice civilization’s rate of energy use in 2004.



WIND: Solar energy flowing into the wind is ~2,000 TW.

Wind power estimated to be harvestable from windy sites covering 2% of Earth’s land surface is about twice world electricity generation in 2004.



BIOMASS: Solar energy is stored by photosynthesis on land at a rate of about 60 TW.

Energy crops at twice the average terrestrial photosynthetic yield would give 12 TW from 10% of land area (equal to what’s now used for agriculture).

Converted to liquid biofuels at 50% efficiency, this would be 6 TWy/yr, more than world oil use in 2004.



Renewable energy potential is immense. Questions are what it will cost & how much society wants to pay for environmental & security advantages.




The nuclear option: size of the challenges

• If world electricity demand grows 2%/year until 2050 and nuclear share of electricity supply is to rise from 1/6 to 1/3...

–nuclear capacity would have to grow from 350 GWe in 2000 to 1700 GWe in 2050;

– this means 1,700 reactors of 1,000 MWe each.



• If these were light-water reactors on the once-through fuel cycle...

---–enrichment of their fuel will require ~250 million Separative Work Units (SWU);

---–diversion of 0.1% of this enrichment to production of HEU from natural uranium would make ~20 gun-type or ~80 implosion-type bombs.



• If half the reactors were recycling their plutonium...

---–the associated flow of separated, directly weapon - usable plutonium would be 170,000 kg per year;

---–diversion of 0.1% of this quantity would make ~30 implosion-type bombs.



• Spent-fuel production in the once-through case would be...

---–34,000 tonnes/yr, a Yucca Mountain every two years.


Conclusion: Expanding nuclear enough to take a modest bite out of the climate problem is conceivable, but doing so will depend on greatly increased seriousness in addressing the waste-management & proliferation challenges.


Mitigation of Human-Caused Climate Change
John P. Holdren

Conclusion: Expanding nuclear enough to take a modest bite out of the climate problem is conceivable, *but* doing so will depend on greatly increased seriousness in addressing the waste-management & proliferation challenges.

John P. Holdren is advisor to President Barack Obama for Science and Technology,
Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and
Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology...

Holdren was previously the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University,
director of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program at the School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and
Director of the Woods Hole Research Center.<2>

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

[NNadir]

2. Actually there are no Yucca mountains, nor need there be any.

The biggest waste problem in China right now is electronic waste, like the shit left over from making solar cells.

A nuclear reactor can contain its used fuel indefinitely, but the Chinese are planning a mixed fleet that will burn its plutonium, will be able to use dupic, and recover precious metals from used fuel. Their fleet includes PWR, HTGR, HWR, and EPR.

They're not a bunch of primitives hovering over the paper of Mark V. Jacobson. They're scientists and engineers.

Since they are building 500 reactors, I doubt that very many actinides will escape after being mined. They can burn plutonium, SEU, thorium, DU, Am, Np, and probably even Cm.

Have a nice day.

[madokie]

3. Are you delusional on purpose or do you work at it?

Even with reprocessing there is still a need for long time storage of the waste and that is fact.
The reason the Chinese have a waste problem is because of the American companies skirting our environmental laws by letting the Chinese build these products to begin with because they have little or no environmental laws and the ones they do aren't always enforced. We should be building these solar panel and all the other products that we use here in America where we have laws protecting our environment. But the big man who owns the companies here don't like to be put out by little things like protecting our planet.
There is no such thing as a free lunch, so to say, and there is no perpetual motion as your reply implies.

Your tripe is so full of holes that if someone was to even attempt to point them out they'd have a hard time figuring out where to begin.

Did your mother ever teach you that it isn't the sign of a big person when all you do is tear down someone else to make it appear you are that big person? I guess not huh.

Where is an example of all this work you want us to believe you do, where do you add value to anything? Or do you just bully your way through life, thats it isn't it?

[DrGregory]

4. What do you call long term?

Even with reprocessing there is still a need for long time storage of the waste and that is fact.
==============================================

With reprocessing, the longest lived radioisotope that needs
to be stored is Cesium-137 with a half-life of 30 years.

If by long term, you mean the 10s of thousands of years
that the anti-nukes are always wailing about; then the
answer is NO!!! Cesium-137 decays to STABLE Barium-137
at a decay rate given by the 30 year half-life. The
Cesium-137 will be STABLE Barium-137 LONG LONG LONG
before that 10s of thousands of years.

If by long time, you mean 10 years; then yes - you will
need to store it for more than 10 years. But 10 years
is not a problem in storage. Our society produces waste
that is as deadly or deadlier than Cesium-137; and that
waste is STABLE - it doesn't go away with time as Cs-137
does.

Dr. Greg

[madokie]

5. Now go piss down someone else's legs and tell them its raining

I don't want to hear any more of your lies and half truths dr greg.

Last I checked we're not doing reprocessing and not many are, russia and japan, and I doubt seriously we ever will.

The radioactivity of all nuclear waste diminishes with time. All radioisotopes contained in the waste have a half-life—the time it takes for any radionuclide to lose half of its radioactivity—and eventually all radioactive waste decays into non-radioactive elements. Certain radioactive elements (such as plutonium-239) in “spent” fuel will remain hazardous to humans and other creatures for hundreds of thousands of years. Other radioisotopes remain hazardous for millions of years. Thus, these wastes must be shielded for centuries and isolated from the living environment for millennia. <2> Some elements, such as iodine-131, have a short half-life (around 8 days in this case) and thus they will cease to be a problem much more quickly than other, longer-lived, decay products, but their activity is much greater initially. The two tables show some of the major radioisotopes, their half-lives, and their radiation yield as a proportion of the yield of fission of uranium-235.

The faster a radioisotope decays, the more radioactive it will be. The energy and the type of the ionizing radiation emitted by a pure radioactive substance are important factors in deciding how dangerous it is. The chemical properties of the radioactive element will determine how mobile the substance is and how likely it is to spread into the environment and contaminate humans. This is further complicated by the fact that many radioisotopes do not decay immediately to a stable state but rather to a radioactive decay product leading to decay chains.

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

[Confusious]

6. if it's radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years

then it's not a danger. You'll die of old age sooner.( or cosmic radiation)

if its enough to be a danger, then it will only be radioactive for a short time 50~150 years.

basic radioactivity learned in a 1st year college chemistry course, which I guess you skipped.

you can hold an amount of plutonium in your hand, below the critical amount of course, with no danger. half-life 24,100 years.

they have a photo on wikipedia. If it had been so radioactive, you couldn't have taken a photo.

the main problem is it's a heavy metal. like all heavy metals, if you take them into your body, they become a big problem. the manufacture of electronics uses a lot of these heavy metals, and they are just about the same danger level if they get into the water supply as plutonium.

The difference is, one will give you cancer, the other weird effects, like gulf war syndrome.

[NNadir]

7. So let me get this straight...

I'm being lectured by a person who wouldn't be able to tell one end of a boson from a fermion about what is and is not possible?

Here is a list of the people whose views on nuclear power were considerably different than the average anti-science anti-nuke: Glenn Seaborg (Nobel Laureate and discoverer of the actinide concept and ten elements in the periodic table). Hans Bethe (Nobel Laureate and discoverer of the process by which stars work), Enrico Fermi (Nobel Laureate, and discoverer of the, um, nuclear reactor), Eugene Wigner, winner of the Nobel Prize, and author of the first nuclear engineering text book.

If what you call "tripe" was "full of holes" the assholes in the anti-nuke squad would be able to point to JUST ONE person who was injured, in the 50 year history of nuclear energy, who has died because there is no Yucca Mountain.

They can't. In fact the risk is their fantasy.

There is NOT ONE anti-nuke who knows the solution sets of the Bateman equations and what they imply about the maximum accumulation of radioactive materials in any process. That's because there is NOT ONE anti-nuke who has ever taken an advanced math course, never mind one in vector valued differential equations.

The fact is that I am familiar with every single nucleon among the fission products in detail. Every single one. All of them. I know exactly what should be done with every single one of them. Whether I share this information with intellectual Lilliputians makes no difference whatsoever.

The Secretary of Energy - who, um, won the Nobel Prize - doesn't think Yucca Mountain is necessary. He's a firm supporter of nuclear energy. Could it be, is it possible that he might know well, just a smidgeon of science. He may be more polite than I am about the topic, but I assure you he doesn't really give a fuck about the lack of education among anti-nukes either.

I am not interested in what people believe. Belief motivated people are usally dogmatic dolts with closed minds and it is my misfortune to be exposed to many of these.

I am interested in what people know.

If there was ONE anti-nuke, just one, who knew of a person who was killed by the lack of a Yucca Mountain, they would, being fetishists, fetishize over that person for decades at the expense of the tens of thousands of people who will die from the dangerous fossil fuel waste they couldn't care less about this week.

As a citizen, I don't fucking want your toxic electronic waste - which is what the failed solar industry generates in lieu of generating energy - distributed all over the planet. The pile of crap doesn't produce even 1% of the energy on earth, and already it's causing a stir in the toxicology world.

I have children, and I'm sick of rote ignorance putting toxins in their flesh.

Got it?

No? I couldn't care less. Neither, in fact, does the rest of the world.

None of the rising powers in the world, China, India, Japan, Korea give a fuck what uneducated anti-nukes smeared with tanning lotion think. They are building their nuclear infrastructure, because, unlike the airhead squad in this culture, science and engineering are valued in their cultures, specifically, nuclear science and nuclear engineering. China just announced a nuclear energy investment larger than their annual defense budget, one hundred and twenty billion dollars worth.

You think they're worried about whether the tanning lotion sun worshipping cults object?

Um, do you think they checked with the tanning cults in the US before deciding start construction on the twenty-four reactors they have under construction right now, one of which powered up commercially just last week?

No they didn't.

The anti-nukes are trying to weigh this country down to the last minute, because basically, they consist wholly of indifferent bourgeois consumers who are intense only with being lazy. The anti-nukes are killing the economy and the people of this country, but not that of the world at large. I regret that we are losing ground on China, on India, on Japan, even the Czech Republic and Romania but it's not my fault. I fought for my country, and no, I'm not talking about fighting by throwing hand grenades.

Have a nice evening.