I am a proponent of power generation through non-fossil fuel methods, but I feel that nuclear power generation is not the best long term solution for most nations including but not limited to Malaysia.

The problems, some of which you've highlighted, basically circles around:
- Safe disposal of waste
- Power plant safety
- Availability of nuclear materials
- Security of nuclear materials

Let's look at these problems individually.

Safe Disposal of Waste
This is basically the first thing that comes into most people's minds when we talk about nuclear energy. The problem is that nuclear materials are radioactive and they remain dangerously radioactive for thousands to tens of thousands of years. However, the amount of energy it outputs to produce sufficient electrical power reduces after a number of years. So this makes disposal of the still highly radioactive material crucial to any plans for nuclear power generation.

Another form of waste that most people don't consider because of its relative obscurity is hot water. Nuclear plants work by converting water from rivers or the ocean to steam which then powers conventional steam turbines that generate the electricity that we all use. Water is also used in nuclear power plants to cool down the reactors and other components that generate too much heat. So all the hot water is actually waste from the power plant.

Now that we've established what the wastes are, lets see what the current means of disposal are.

For hot water, the disposal is quite simple. It's dumped back into rivers or the ocean, but this has caused major changes in biodiversity in places where the water is dumped. Hot water is also less dense in diluted oxygen, so when dumped into the river or sea, it displaces the more oxygen rich water from the area, causing a region of oxygen depletion. Yes, you can cool the water down and then dispose it, but that will reduce the overall efficiency of the power plant and cost more money. Will you be willing as a plant operator to spend lots of money cooling down water just to dump it into the sea again?

As for the radioactive waste, the current means is to combine it with a series of other materials and bury it deep deep underground where it will stay radioactive for many many years. The entire dumping site must be protected from any future developments for thousands of years and it must be made sure that the area chosen as a dumping site must not have underground groundwater reservoirs. If groundwater does come in, it'll be radioactive and it will poison plants and people who consume it.

So because of this, you need to spend millions just to maintain a dump site for waste that doesn't generate any income. Again, as a power plant operator, will you be willing to sustain this cost? Bear in mind, you need to upkeep the dump site for thousands of years, that's billions and billions in investments without any return.

Also as the number of nuclear power plants increase, you need to expand your dump sites or search for newer sites. Each time you expand or set up a new site, you need more non-profitable investments, you make more lands unusable for a few thousand years and you need a more complex system of monitoring.

Also remember that the dump sites have to be huge. It must provide a big buffer zone between the actual place when stuff is dumped and the place where development can start. Even then the places neighbouring the nuclear waste sites will have poor real estate values and can only be used for limited development.

A country like Malaysia has lots of unused lands, but this will not remain the same for thousands of years. Eventually the current 28 million population of Malaysia will become closer to 280 million some day and all these lands will be vital to our future. So wasting it on waste is not a good idea, unless you have huge uninhabitable lands like Australia, where the population is only 22 million as of now.

Power Plant Safety
Yes, there are established safety procedures that ensure nuclear power plants are kept safe at all times. There are numerous fail-safe mechanisms that prevent another Chernobyl from happening. But there's one thing most people keep overlooking when it comes to plant safety. Economics.

All this varies and redundant safety procedures costs a lot of money to keep up. They take up valuable time, cost money in the form of administrative overheads, equipment upkeep, hiring and payroll of skilled professionals like safety engineers and so on.

Yes, the power plant does generate lots of money, but economics is something that is never stable. Once nuclear power becomes widespread and the demand for uranium becomes global, prices are going to change and the economics will change. You cannot, as the plant operator, arbitrarily increase the price of your electricity because you have contractual obligations as well as competitors. So you try instead to cut costs, which is what happens frequently in airline companies and which is what happened at Union Carbide that caused the Bhopal disaster.

The risks of such things happening are too much for a small nation like Malaysia to deal with. Large areas surrounding the plant have to quarantined for decades. In the case of Chernobyl, the liquid radioactive material (that looks a bit like lava) poisoned the groundwater which then poisoned a nearby river.

If, yes *if* such a thing happens, even if it's a one in a million chance, it will cause too much of a devastation to a small country like Malaysia that it can seriously hamper our entire economy and put a serious dent in growth.

Some might argue that regulation will help to prevent any lax in safety maintenance, but one of the things this country is famed for internationally is its corruption. I don't doubt that a gift package of a few cars or a few houses to regulators will give most operators a good review.

Simply put, I don't trust regulations in this country.

Availability of Nuclear Materials
There are only a few countries in the world with deposits of materials suitable for nuclear power plants, and these countries will be the OPEC of the future if nuclear power generation becomes the norm.

Also this relative scarcity of radioactive materials will allow these other nations to have a monopoly on the very thing that powers our entire country.

Call me nationalistic, but I'd really hate to see another country have such a stranglehold over us. At the moment, we're still fine because we have our own oil supplies that prevents us from being kicked around by other nations, but if we depend on others for stuff like uranium, I can bet you that there'll be more interferences and arm twisting happening.

Security of Nuclear Materials
This is one of the major concerns of widespread nuclear power. The very same materials that is used to power a nation can be used as weapons of mass destruction.

This also makes nations with nuclear power plants and the nuclear power plants themselves as a target for those with the intention to obtain these materials.

So again, more money has to be spent protecting the plants. In contrast, nobody is going to try and attack a hydro-electric plant. There's really nothing of value in there.

Summing up, I believe that with the additional overheads, risks and unfavourable economics, nuclear power is not for Malaysia.

I believe that the future of power generation in Malaysia has to be a combination of:
+ Hydro-Electric power plants - For base load capacity
+ Coal-fired or Diesel power plants - For emergency capacity
+ Offshore Wind Turbines
+ Underwater River Turbines
+ Underwater Sea Turbines
+ Concentrated Solar Power (Solar Thermal)
+ Photo Voltaics
+ Nuclear Fusion (still in research)

The thing about alternative sources of power is that none of them on its own can be sufficient to meet huge demands. They must be all implemented and linked via the national grid.

I also feel that it's important that building codes be amended such that newer buildings come with Photo Voltaic cells installed in roofs and built with energy conservation in mind like the new Ministry of Energy Water and Communications building.

Also once Nuclear Fusion is a reality, we must get our hands on that. So there's a need now to build talent in that field.

Edit:
Unless I'm mistaken, E=mc^2 is not usable when we talk about nuclear power generation. We're not destroying the mass of uranium to create that energy. We're using the materials radiated heat to boil water and make steam which powers the turbine.

This post has been edited by DeniseLau: Oct 12 2009, 08:30 PM

Hmm, didn't realise that E=mc^2 worked in fission, turns out it does.
http://www.worsleyschool.net/science/files/emc2/emc2.html

Anyway, Fusion has been discovered already, but the problem as bgeh mentioned is that it's not yet giving us a sustainable net output of energy. Also the reaction is destroying the reactor.


Wow, we're using coal for base load? Damn... Here's to hoping Bakun will help.

Anyway, individually none of the alternatives I listed can sustain constant output, but when hooked together it should be possible to get a nice steady supply. But I'm not so sure on the economics of this.


More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civil...clear_accidents
Some of them are unrelated to power plants, but Chernobyl isn't the only one.


Yup, it's quite frustrating, but there's no way around it. Even when it finally does get completed and commercial Fusion power plants become feasible, it's still going to take years before Malaysia gets out hands on it.

What we need a sort of a stop gap solution between fossil fuels and fusion power. Fission is very attractive, but to me it's a risk not worth taking unless you have huge deserts in your country where you can build the reactor and dump the waste.

I like what the UK plans to do, they have this plan where they want to build large offshore wind farms and an assortment of offshore power generation solutions off the coast of Cornwall.

This post has been edited by DeniseLau: Oct 15 2009, 06:18 PM

Yeah, the issue with solar is space, but the best thing about wind is that you can put it offshore where it doesn't ruin the landscape and where you get better winds. I was thinking about South China Sea, but I haven't come across any study/report on yearlong wind strengths.

As for nuclear, it's not a long term solution so I personally don't think it's worth the investments and risk.

There's this other thing that's interesting though. It's called Clean Coal Technology. The idea is that you burn coal to make steam which powers turbines like normal, but instead of releasing the CO2 into the air, we capture it and stick it into underground reservoirs.

But it's also not a long term solution, but I guess it fits as a short-term solution until we can come up with something better.

1. Read bgeh's post above. It's got something to do with the high energy neutrons banging into the walls of the reactor and "eating" away the material. We need to find a way to stop this from happening or find a material that can resist the impact for long enough that we can make money even if we have to replace the walls every few years.

3. Yeah there are ways to insulate the effects of the power from disrupting the power lines, this is actually easy compared to the other problems.

5. I was thinking: how if we placed a few hundred or thousand wind turbines in the south china sea. But there needs to be a study on wind-speed averages over the span of the whole year before we can decide.

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

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

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