Chinese boffins build nuclear-powered deep-sea station Not content with ambitious plans to dominate space exploration over the coming decades, China is also looking to master the ocean with the development of a deep-sea station which could be its first step towards large-scale underwater mining. Plans for the nuclear powered mobile deep-sea station were unveiled earlier this year …
We have managed to pollute the land, the air and the space with our presence, so now we move into the last remaining sanctuary, the sea.
There really is no end to human destruction and it is always for some impossible dream of "making things better for everyone".
It's about time we stopped "moving forward" and took a step back, looked at the mess we have made, cleaned it up and then started living truly sustainable lives and not the corporate, "I want it know", lifestyles that we are permanently presented.
What did you seriously think would happen:
a) That we'd temper our greed, big business and government would stop looking for cheap solutions, and we'd start considering paying 20% more for stuff that comes from ethical and renewable sources.
b) We'd spend the tens of billions and effort on massive amounts of new-tech research to solve our energy problems with serious investment in fusion and other next-generation technologies.
c) We'd just take the short cut of raping places we've never raped before, and carry on regardless. And we'd conveniently ignore all those agreements not to mine the crap out of environmentally protected areas, because it's the cheapest, easiest option.
So you want to go back to the dark ages then? A sustainable life means being supplied with the food and materials needed to stay alive. If you only grow your own food then it only needs one small disaster (just like the recent floods) and you end up starving. Being able to source food from all over the world means that no one is at the mercy of nature again. Growing your own food is fine if you don't want to do anything else. Its a very labour intensive task which means that you can't go an work in the factory making tractors that make it easier for others to grow food.
"It's about time we stopped "moving forward" and took a step back, looked at the mess we have made, cleaned it up and then started living truly sustainable lives"
Out of curiosity, what level of technology/development are you thinking of to give a "sustainable" level? Hunter-gatherer, medieval, modern?
To above: stop bleating about polluting Gaia and other such hippy shit. We need "stuff" and more specifically (as the article says) China needs energy. Without a reliable gas supply they will continue to build their marvellous coal fired stations which you all think are bad as well.
And the bottom of the ocean is pretty much dead to anything other than bacteria (at least - the proper deep ocean, not the edges of continental shelves). The occasional Polykete Worm maybe.
On a geeky note, this is really cool. If they can pull this off (which they probably can) then it is likely the first step in proper underwater habitation & exploitation. Hopefully it would allow us to start draining the South Atlantic of oil around the Falklands and really piss off the Argies.
We only "need stuff" because the population is increasing at a rate which the earth can't sustain. And I believe that we have already passed the sustainability limit which means that the problems will truly start coming to light.
Obvioulsy you are quite happy to exacerbate the situation.
How many nuclear submarines are already dissolving at the bottom of the ocean? Some with a full complement of ICBM warheads? Quite a few that are known to have been lost, and probably rather more that still haven't been disclosed.
Actually there's no nuclear explosion risk, and probably very little radiation risk. There's next to no circulation between the deep ocean and the surface, and a helluva lot of water to dilute the radioactives in. I doubt that this Chinese project adds significantly to that risk, even should the worst happen. Hasn't the worst already happened at least twice, at Chernobyl and in Japan? With less actual harm than the normal operation of coal-fired power stations, even ignoring their CO2 output?
The oceans are salty because they contain most of the sodium that's been released from rock over three billion years of plate tectonics. They're naturally mildly radioactive, for the same reason with respect to Uranium.
"We need "stuff""
No, we really don't. Not as much as we think we need. I haven't had a new car for ten years, a phone for three, or a PC for five, and guess what: My life is just as good as yours. An awful lot of the 'stuff' we buy is only bought because we're brainwashed into believing that we need it.
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well, technically it's also what is killing us... there's plenty of all natural things that has been trying to off us since we got up on two legs.. predators, diseases, climate, natural disasters.. we're only here because we adapted and learned to fight it... the other side of the coin. The enviroment is like a set of really really abusive parents, we couldn't live without it but it's not like its really trying very hard to keep us alive either.
You might not need stuff, but there are quite a few people living on this planet who don't enjoy your decadent western lifestyle and really could do with things. You know, those people you see on your digital 3D LCD TV who don't have twitter accounts, are still awaiting their first general purpose computing device and could do with a bit of help in the medicine/food production/general survival department.
We could :
a) Tell them to stop having so many children.
b) Decline to offer assistance and help in improving their circumstances, thereby limiting population growth naturally.
c) Keep bunging aid, so that they are forever dependant on the largesse of richer countries and tied to doing our bidding
d) Give them the opportunity to grow and prosper through free trade, and take a chance that they wish to acquire the trappings of a successful modern economy.
Seems like China has tried a and is now applying d, so "stuff" has to be made from "something" which has to be obtained from "somewhere", and if it's not from corrupt African dictators then the sea bed seems like a valid option.
"You might not need stuff, but there are quite a few people living on this planet who don't enjoy your decadent western lifestyle and really could do with things. You know, those people you see on your digital 3D LCD TV who don't have twitter accounts, are still awaiting their first general purpose computing device and could do with a bit of help in the medicine/food production/general survival department."
I don't own a TV, either... but that aside, *We* - the people reading this article and responsible for most of the damage - don't 'need stuff' as much as we think we do. The demands of the third world for 'essentials' are trivial in terms of consumption, compared to ours. Fresh water, medicine and basic food for the year have far less impact than a new car and a house full of gadgets.
I vote for 'a', so long as we extend it to ourselves as well. If every family on Earth had only one child, for two generations, we'd pretty much solve most of the problems of over-consumption, and those alive would then merely have to clean up the mess we left behind.
We do need stuff. And it's not gadgets like PCs and cars and phones every other year. You might not need a new phone for years, but there are plenty of other people who need a phone every five years or longer. That's what drives the requirement to make stuff. And stuff is more than just a few gimmicky gadgets. We need stuff like fridges and cookers, trucks to move materials around, cars to move people to work, electricity to allow us to stay up late rather than go to bed when the sun sets, tractors to help grow more food, test tubes to find new drugs. Those are all stuff and important stuff too.
We do need stuff. It's just that we need a lot less of it than we're told.
Mr. Medieval Ploughman didn't buy a new bucket every year when the old one was still working, just because the new one has 12 rivets instead of 10. We have been suckered by people who make money out of us buying crap that we need to buy more crap in order to be happy/cool/get sex/whatever.
400 pound is not a sensible amount for people on less than 20k to be spending on a phone *every year*.
""We need "stuff""
No, we really don't. Not as much as we think we need. I haven't had a new car for ten years, a phone for three, or a PC for five, and guess what: My life is just as good as yours. An awful lot of the 'stuff' we buy is only bought because we're brainwashed into believing that we need it."
A PC, (presumably) a cellular phone, and a personal motor vehicle? That's a lot of stuff for someone who's coming off all preachy about brainwashed-consumerism. If it's ever appropriate to draw a line in the sand, it's statistically improbable, if rather convenient, that exactly where you personally happen to be standing right now is the proper place to do so. (That's besides the fact that your 10-year-old car is likely much more wasteful than my '09.
"A PC, (presumably) a cellular phone, and a personal motor vehicle? That's a lot of stuff for someone who's coming off all preachy about brainwashed-consumerism... (That's besides the fact that your 10-year-old car is likely much more wasteful than my '09."
It's a six year old PC that was going in the skip at work, an 8 year old phone (which was my old work phone), and a 35 Year old Landrover, which might suck more fuel than your '09, but I'll bet you any money that it's used a total of resources in its cranky old way than the value of fuel and materials put into building however many cars you've owned in 35 years.
My own lifestyle is still far more comfortable than it needs to be or is 'fair' though: I have potable running water and free healthcare, which makes me very lucky. You can carry on criticising my own lifestyle if you like (because personal attacks totally devalue my argument...), but it doesn't change the fact that we are grotesquely rampant consumers who do not need *half* the shit we buy.
"Or have I missed something?"
Yes; you have.
Unless you haven't heard, China have built a rather large dam. Quite a few of them really. I believe they plan to get something like 80% of power for hydo sources, and thus don't *need* any of those pricey nuclear reactor things for power.
Oil is something that they can sell to other people, though. If the West is stupid enough to still be over-dependent on it and they produce it, they'll be laughing all the way to the bank.
it has puzzled me,
technicaly, we can build large pressure containers to hold nuclear reactors,
is not under water pressure vessel 'just' a big version of the same ?
the small vessles we currently have for sub sea are limited , by the fact they have to fit on a ship, or are to be stealthy.
If you can build BIG, with lots of concrete, how hard can it be to build a container that can sit at any depth ?
its not like you have to fly it into space, it can float .
Look at the size of the big oil rigs, instead of building tall, make stong,
...
think BIG.
Pressure increases by 1 atmosphere for every 10m of depth. Say 5,000m for the Abyssal Plain... That's 500 Atmospheres of pressure. That is rather a lot. It's no mean feat of engineering.
And why do you want it big? Minerals at those depths are in nodes rather than deep-mined, I believe. You need a rig that you can move around.
.. aren't they quite different sets of pressure vessels?
A nuclear reactor has high internal pressure and low external, a submersible is the reverse. Quite different engineering challenges. Eg, a bottle holding a fizzy drink can withstand quite high internal pressure, but its is very easily crushed by external pressure.
Conversely, I would fully expect a submarine with high internal pressure when put in space to pop like a balloon.
Right, but what if you put a high-internal-pressure environment, like a reactor, in a high-external-pressure environment, like the deep sea? Wouln't it be easier to maintain since there should be less pressure differential (which is the real challenge of pressure containment--vast DIFFERENCES rather than the pressures in and of themselves)?
Oh no,.... the Chinese will meet the Aliens first.
They'll probably sell them a load of their stockpile of rare-earth minerals in return for super-tech.
@a_mu
There is a big difference between a 160bar Pressurised Water Reactor and the 350+bar needed at 2 miles deep. What's worse is that the PWR is surrounded by 4metre thick concrete and NEVER has to move whilst under pressure. Finally, the PWR is pressurised inside so the steel of the vessel is in TENSION. Steel is very good in tension, but less good in compression, which it will experience on the ocean floor.
Concrete is VERY good in compression but is brittle, VERY heavy and a bitch to work with under pressure.
So, perhaps it's possible to build a 2 mile deep base, but to make it even marginally mobile will be extremely difficult.
Concerning the moral implications of it all, that's why I don't have kids.
Too many people on Earth already.
The only fix for "global warming" is LESS PEOPLE.
Try telling that to the next hippy that preaches at you for not recycling your soft drinks can.
Bloody hypocrites!
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Note to the Reg sub-editor who sets headlines : you may have noticed from the article that the «Chinese boffins» haven't built anything (yet), but rather have revealed plans to do so. Adding the simple infinitival particle «to» to that headline would give «Chinese boffins to build nuclear-powered deep-sea station», which corresponds far more closely to the situation described - after all, even Phil deserves a chance to get it right, for once....
Henri
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