Thanks for the information.
One thing though, sure it's clean coal, but how clean is it compared to other methods, say, oil-based generation?

Thats interesting.Still,i thought material problem is also caused by the material couldnt sustain the heat of the fusion reaction.

Damn,ITER is delayed to 2026.Thats bloody long.

I'll personally be very happy to see a fusion reactor too.

Even the current lithium ion batteries is causing environmental issue,i really doubt that a nuclear battery will be ever used in the consumer market.

How you gonna to build the foundation to support the wind/solar farm in the middle of the ocean with low cost? The cost alone will kill you,as you arent building just an oil rig,you are building a huge farm of wind power generators.

I dont see why nuclear is not a long term solution.Nuclear is a much more sustainable solution to coal,gas or hydro,as it has no carbon emission.France have more than half of it's electricity generated from nuclear.I have yet heard of any large scale reactor failure like Chernobyl happening to France.

The nuclear waste will not be a problem if it's well treated,like burying it underground,rather than dumping them everywhere.Regarding on the risk,i think proper care like having well trained technicians running the plant will eliminate it.Chernobyl's accident happened partly due to untrained technicians running the reactor.

Besides that,i have heard of new designs of nuclear power generators,called very-high-temperature reactor(VHTR) that have a negative temperature coefficient which automatically shuts down the plant when something goes wrong.Chernobyl's reactor has positive temperature coefficient that cause it to go boom.

IMHO,nuclear energy is just getting better with time,until fusion is ready to be used.

Well it isn't very hard to separate the extremely hot plasma from the walls of the tokamak (note, this is one of the only of the possible designs for a fusion reactor), and actually I doubt whether anything can survive contact with the plasma, which is extremely extremely hot ( >10^8K, or approximately 100 million degrees Celcius), because we can create magnetic fields that will confine all the charged particles in the plasma. As you now can probably see why, neutrons are not charged, and won't be confined by this magnetic field and thus bombard the walls of the reactor. [Well, actually you can use an interpretation of the kinetic energy of the neutrons with temperature, but we disregard that for now]

Also, the idea that fusion will not create any radioactive byproducts isn't exactly true too, for example the walls of the tokamak will probably be highly radioactive after such a bombardment, and will quite likely be highly radioactive for a while too, but of course this is quite negligible compared to the amount of radioactive material produced as a byproduct of current nuclear fission reactors.

This post has been edited by bgeh: Oct 18 2009, 07:33 AM

Yeah, I heard from a documentary that the technology used to pump the CO2 back underground is quite expensive. I was thinking that if this technology gains ground, we might be able to add on this to current coal plants and future coal plants. Widespread implementation might help with the infrastructure cost.

I'm not so sure how much has been done, but I remember Obama pushing this technology during his campaign. So I'm hoping here that economics of scale might help.

(thanks for the detailed info, been trying to find stuff like this)

1. and 3. (see below )

The problem with Nuclear is that Uranium and other radioactive materials that are used in nuclear reactors are non-renewable resources. So it's almost like we get out of the problem caused by Oil only to eventually fall back into the same problem, but this time caused by Uranium.

Once we have many nations hunting for Uranium, you're going to end up with the same problem now with Oil, so it not very helpful, because then we have to go through all the problems again of finding something new to replace uranium.

That's why I feel that if we're going to need to do all this hard work to replace oil eventually, let's just do it once.

At best, I feel that Nuclear is going to be a short term solution until we can find something really long term. But if we're talking short term, then nuclear is too much money and lets not forget the waste. I mentioned previously that if we go with large scale nuclear power plants, the problem is not just about handling the waste, but also needing to allocate large swathes of land for dumping this waste and then continuously spending money for thousands of years to upkeep the dump site.

That's a lot of commitment...

Anyway, when I mean offshore wind turbine, I mean this. Apparently it's also called a Sway Turbine:


As you see, there's no need for a foundation, you just dump a concrete block as a weight to hold the thing down. But the problem is what ~lynn~ mentioned with the transmission lines. What UK does is that they build underwater hubs, its like a network of underwater plug-points where you can plug in any source of power into it and it goes in from there to the national grid. Will cost good money to do this, I guess since TNB is like the national power distributor, they will need to find money to do this.

Also from the diagram, you can see that the power you can get from those offshore turbines depends on wind speed and hours of wind per year. So that's something that we need data on... i wonder if such information has been collected so far.

Yeah, Fusion also produces nuclear waste, it's supposed to be like less amount of waste and the radioactivity decays faster (~50 years) than the ordinary types (uranium etc - thousands of years).

This post has been edited by DeniseLau: Oct 18 2009, 09:27 PM

Then the only way to keep the neutrons in place is by physical means i.e. wall. So currently they're still in the midst of overcoming this issue too?

1) Uranium ore: Yes, I agree with your sentiment here, of which I've considered too in my earlier post. While uranium ore may be abundant now, relying on it will merely shift the reliance on oil unto uranium, which the cycle of dependency still continue. :/

2) Underwater plug points: Akin to multiple sockets extension box? XD Very interesting indeed. Your posts are most enlightening to read

3) Data collection: Well, I suppose if TNB has the initiative to implement this, the research and study to measure the wind density/abundance in South China Sea shouldn't be an issue.

Denise: The point being, nuclear is indeed a medium term energy source until we can move on to better energy sources, and looks to be the 'greenest' (in terms of carbon emissions) and one of the more viable ones. No one's advocating a full shift to nuclear, but to a more mixed economy, with nuclear being one of the choices explored. Sure nuclear is expensive, but it is looking pretty comparable, if not cheaper than a lot of the 'green tech' that many are pining their hopes on in a post oil/gas/coal future.

Yes you could make weapons from refined uranium, but it's not going to be some terrorist target where the buggers run in grab the fuel rods and run - because the rods themselves will be in bloody boiling salt or some really hot water, and plus it's all radioactive. Heck they could probably scare the heck out of the population if they tried to attack a nuclear plant but they wouldn't be able to extract anything useful or weaponisable in any form. Also, try bombing dams and causing a flood for a terrorist target, washing away the people downstream with little warning at all, if you can't think of one possibility.

Today's nuclear reactors are way safer than in the past, with many of them starting to incorporate passive safety systems where even if operator error causes some screwup, the system is designed such that if the reactor starts going beyond some design limit, the moderator will react in such a way (regulated by temperature) as to reduce or hold the reaction rate from going up further. I agree that the problem of waste is the biggest issue facing nuclear fission today, but research is ongoing on transmutation methods to try to transmute the waste to less radioactive or lower half life materials.

I could go on for a point by point rebuttal, but I'd just like to say finally that while I agree Malaysia is corrupt and everything, we do tend to be competent when it comes to critical things, else you would've heard of Petronas' oil gas rigs going boom in the middle of the sea every 2-3 years or so, which simply doesn't occur

B-b-bbbut our internet?! That's critical D:

Well I guess you're probably right, but I still don't trust the higher-ups to do a good job.

Things like highway i.e. MRR2 ring road is deemed to be critical as well. Yet we observe of mishandling there.

While cracks in the pillar would spell certain disaster, cracks in a nuclear power plant could give us the entire thesaurus for the word disaster.

Actually that was the only major project that has come to my mind so far. [I recall other incidents too, the NKVE overpass collapsing during construction, the resort house in Perak or something suddenly collapsing]. So which other major highway is cracking and about to collapse again?

Also, it is likely that most of the work done will be by whoever we partner with to build the nuclear power plant, if it ever commences.

I'm not walking in with some Malaysia Boleh syndrome saying that for the pride of the country, but I'm saying that this is probably one of the better options to be considered if you honestly do want to cut down on carbon emissions, nuclear is going to have to be an option because fusion will not be ready anytime soon, much as everyone likes to use it as a byword, and solar and wind will always have inherent difficulties w.r.t. costs and also the variability problem

Well unless you're willing to pay for the extra cost of solar and wind in your everyday electricity bill, and manage to convince the population that they should also pocket the difference in cost so we can shift to a non-carbon generating power source and yet still avoid nuclear. I wouldn't mind such a thing but well try convincing everybody that the hike in their bills is worth it.

There is already a wall; the tokamak's walls. Also neutrons are quite likely to penetrate very far through most objects. The worry is more of the tokamak's walls not being able to withstand the high flux for a significant time; something that no hypothetical wall can help with.

[Note: I do not know much about a tokamak's construction to be able to say definitively whether a physical wall inside the tokamak itself will be an effective shield; I'd imagine it wouldn't be because it would face the exact same issues of getting bombarded by a high flux of neutrons, and then we'd have to worry about this hypothetical inner wall collapsing instead]

This post has been edited by bgeh: Oct 23 2009, 12:45 AM

I think I remember mentioning that shifting from oil to uranium is still the same problem just with a different material.

Here's more on this:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2042...ium-crunch.html

Yes but what we're trying to do is buy ourselves some time. Uranium is certainly finite, but it has the added advantage of not being a large carbon emitter, unlike fossil fuels. It's just to buy us more time to do more research in wind/solar/tide/fusion/(some other source) sources of energy, increase their efficiency (for solar), or perhaps do more research into fusion, etc, etc.

They should take over in the medium term/long term, I agree wholeheartedly. But if we are to bridge the gap, and do not want to pump shitloads of CO2 into the atmosphere, nuclear is probably the best like-for-like replacement for our coal/gas/oil power plants, with solar supplementing it (speaking in the context of Malaysia). There is a downside to nuclear though; costs for nuclear are projected to rise by approx 2x, but according to estimates on BBC, that'll still make it cheaper than solar's current prices, plus the added technical advantages outlined above.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8338824.stm

Both ways, the cost of energy is going to have to rise, whether it's nuclear or directly jumping to 'green' alternative energies.

This post has been edited by bgeh: Nov 27 2009, 09:15 PM

The problem I see in using Nuclear as a stop-gap is that it's a huge investment that isn't going to last that long. We're going to have to burn so much cash just for something we know has no future.

It's like buying an iPhone 3Gs as a stop-gap between your current failing phone and the upcoming Nokia n900.

We have loads of coal and clean coal technology is far cheaper than building nuclear power plants. Since all we're interested in is to buy time, why not just use lesser money to upgrade our current coal plants (a majority of the plants in this country) and our diesel plants with carbon capture technology instead of spending many times more replacing these plants with nuclear only to throw out nuclear after some time and then live with the maintenance costs for the dump site?

Also using coal+carbon capture as an interim measure will let us have some resources left in the future to build the real "green" infrastructures, instead of us taking huge loans first for the nuclear infrastructure and then again for the "green" infrastructure.

This post has been edited by DeniseLau: Nov 28 2009, 12:56 PM

Carbon capture isn't as easy as you think; Firstly you need stable geological formations so that the carbon is never suddenly released from some earthquake or something, and also, carbon capture, while being a buzzword, does not have a single large scale implementation yet for power plants. Next, if we find one, we'll have to construct an infrastructure to pipe the CO2 emissions from the power plants to this storage facility, which is somewhat similar, if you think about it, to taking nuclear waste and storing it at the same place, except that we can transport the waste using lorries, instead of having to build pipelines to this storage site; or build multiple storage sites.

Considering how far our power plants are spread around, you can imagine the costs. Sure the tech exists, but being the first few implementers will cost a bloody bomb, and it's also 'short term', to borrow a phrase you're using, since if we do manage to transfer completely to non-carbon sources in 100 years or so, we won't have anyone to sell this carbon capture technology to do. Nuclear on the other hand, already has had plenty of current implementations, and it's just cheaper in general compared to carbon capture, so your point on borrowing money to fund nuclear energy is not really a strong one, because we might have to borrow more instead to retrofit every one of our plants to do so, and even that depends on the geology of the surrounding area.

Note: Clean coal has multiple definitions; in the carbon context it refers to carbon capture, and no one really knows what the cost is yet, because there are no industrial scale power plants operating using carbon capture yet.

And really, 50-100 years is plenty of time for a 'short term technology', considering that coal is itself, in the carbon context, 'short term'.

This post has been edited by bgeh: Nov 28 2009, 10:19 PM