China has very ambitious plans for nuclear power. They have twenty one operating nuclear power reactors and there are twenty eight more under construction. Nuclear power supplies two percent of the electricity in China and they want to raise that to six percent by 2020. Then they want to raise that to sixteen percent by 2030. Most of the reactor construction involves what are called Generation Two reactors, the current widely used type of power reactor.
India is one of the few countries in the world that is dedicated to a massive expansion of nuclear power generation. Currently India has twenty operating nuclear reactors which supplies about three percent of their electricity. There are seven more reactors under construction. India has announced that its want to supply twenty five percent of its electricity from nuclear power by 2050. The recently elected Prime Minister of India is a very strong supporter of nuclear power.
I have blogged several times about the disaster at Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986. There was a power surge at reactor number four of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The operators tried an emergency shutdown which triggered a much bigger power surge which, in turn, ruptured a reactor vessel and caused a series of steam explosions. The graphite moderator rods were exposed to air and ignited.
I have often blogged about the problems with spent nuclear fuel in the United States. Estimates are that all the spent nuclear fuel pools in the U.S. will be full in five years unless the spent fuel can be stored elsewhere. There are about fifty thousand tons of spent nuclear fuel in those spent nuclear fuel pools. With no permanent geological repository for spent nuclear fuel, the only alternative at the moment is to build containers and store the spent fuel on site at the reactor.
My Geiger counter is in the shop for maintenance.
My Geiger counter is in the shop for maintenance.
