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Texas is the highest user of coal for electricity generation, yes, though that's mostly because of having a large population. According to https://www.nei.org/Knowledge-... they get 26.6% from coal, whereas West Virginia does 94.4%. California does 0.2%, but I'm not personally in one of those 0.2% areas that do. Point is you have to compare apples to apples - CA accounts for half the EV sales, and our electric isn't dirty. Trying to take from EV sales from where EV sales actually occur, Mazda's claim would be very strongly false.

I just see it as, I wonder what is wrong with a US nuclear power station or they are looking a hugely reducing decommissioning costs, https://www.nei.org/Master-Doc.... Hmm, lot of decommissioning going on and well, expect a lot of people to get 'not radiation poisoning' because the downgraded law says it isn't radiation poisoning even if it is. Looks like a lot of decommissioning suddenly got a lot cheaper.

Areas of the US with a lot of nuclear have historically also had the lowest rates.

Not in my experience. Illinois has had some of the largest percent of electrical power as nuclear, but has had above average rates, for residential customers like me, at least. state-by-state rates state-by-state fuel types

Compared with similar demographics, your power has been relatively cheap. It has been dominated by coal pricing, then gas pricing. Nuclear pricing has rarely driven retail pricing upward. The Southeast is where they've been nuclear dominated the most, and their rates remain low.

Areas of the US with a lot of nuclear have historically also had the lowest rates.

Not in my experience. Illinois has had some of the largest percent of electrical power as nuclear, but has had above average rates, for residential customers like me, at least.
state-by-state rates
state-by-state fuel types

Yes, critical safety systems are air-gapped. In theory some of the operating data could be acquired, and I expect other systems outside of the reactor could be compromised and perhaps force an outage.

You are completely full of crap. Nuclear and fossil plants need maintenance all the time. Furthermore, nuclear plants also have refueling outages.

Even if you accept that report as the whole picture (and it says right at the beginning that it isn't), it says very clearly in Table ES2 that your "$150 million" figure is low by well over an order of magnitude.

The question stands: why does any industry as mature as coal and oil *still* need billions in direct annual subsidies, on top of the $400+ billion it's already received in recent decades?

I dunno on what grounds Switzerland voted for it, but it sounds like a very risky bet.

Look, I'm no climate change denialist, and I know that nuclear power has it's own share of problems that not even modern technologies can solve. I'm all for decomissioning old nuclear power plants because those are massive liabilities waiting to happen. Modern nuclear plants tech have solved most of the problems, but they yet have to prove themselves (if we only let them), and all modern propositions will still produce some form of nuclear waste... even if quantities are way smaller in comparison.

Plus, implementing new modern tech for the first time will be costly.

But abandoning nuclear in favor of renewables like wind and solar can end up being even worse. The first thing people have to understand is that with current tech, both wind and solar requires multiple times more investment and landmass to get near nuclear plants output. It's not "just a bit more"... we're talking about 200+ times more for wind, and 40+ times more for solar. I hope people understand this. We're talking about the dismantling of a single nuclear power plant requiring a city's worth of land covered in solar panels to get the same energy, or an entire state worth of wind towers.

Another thing that people need to pay attention to is that even if renewables don't produce radioactive waste, construction still generates toxic waste. It's not like we plant seeds to grow solar panels and huge wind towers, and it's not like those don't have an impact on the ecossystem, specially when we need a whole lot more of them. Chemicals produced by current solar panel manufacturing at proportional rates for energy generation can have a more impactful and long lasting effect on the environment than even an isolated nuclear meltdown. It's just that one is more imediate and impressive than the other.

Future technology can go both ways quite frankly, the important thing is not to halt development of neither. We could end up with nuclear power plants that have such a low possibility of accident and generates so little nuclear waste that it'd replace all forms of electricity generation. On the other hand, renewables also could reach a state of efficiency and eliminate needs for all sorts of toxic materials that it'd end being a viable alternative.

But we're not there just yet, and we have to work with current reality, not speculation.

Here are some links for those interested:
http://tsp-data-portal.org/Bre...
http://energyrealityproject.co...
https://nei.org/News-Media/New...
http://www.businessinsider.com...

Number of nuclear power stations in the world:

350+

https://www.nei.org/Knowledge-...

Number that have caused any significant amount of evacuation:

Chernobyl (human ignorance), Fukushima (tsunami + earthqauke), Three Mile (human error).

That's less than 1%.

If you're worried, site them off-shore or out of the way. They don't need to be near any large centres of population at all. And the US has one of the largest areas of land occupied by the fewest people in the world (comparable to the Faroe Islands).

Citation needed.

Here ya go .

There will be a shortage if we try to replace coal, nuclear, and natural gas with wind and solar. I have on my desk a report from Morgan Stanley claiming that it would take 10 billion tons of steel and concrete annually to replace coal power.

By when? Next month? Obvious bullshit number is obvious bullshit. Nobody has suggested that replacing coal, nuclear, and natural gas with wind and solar is going to happen overnight. Not even quickly. Coal, nuclear, and natural gas represent large capital investments with long amortization schedules. The power companies will only shut one off short of its design lifespan in extremis, and there has been no spike in fuel cost for any of them. Quite the opposite. Gas is dirt cheap now, but most utility companies have set fees agreed with state PUCs when gas was expensive, which have not been revisited, so they're making money hand over fist on gas power generation.

Imagine that I have a dozen nuclear power plants all humming along at about 80% capacity. Now imagine I have one of those once in a century events that knocks out one of those power plants.

Why imagine, when we have actual numbers? Average capacity factor of nuclear power plants in the US for 2015 was 91.9%, the highest it has ever been. If you follow the link, you'll see that at least the top 10 plants are actually operating at capacity factors in excess of 100% in order to achieve that average. Now consider that, with the shutdown of Vermont Yankee, there are only 99 total nuclear plants in the US. Having not just 10 plants, but 10% of the plants running at over 100% capacity, where they are by definition eating into their safety margin, doesn't seem all that safe, and it means that quite a few of those 99 plants are running at much less than 91.9% capacity factor.

Of those 99 plants, the majority of them are of such an age and design that they're incapable of being throttled, so when they're operating, they're operating at 100% or above. That means out of the 365 days in a year, the average nuclear power plant was offline for 30 of those days, and for every year but 2015, it has been worse than that. So there is no margin to "crank up" to accommodate a plant going offline.

In short, nuclear power plants are just as dependent on the existence of the full grid as wind and photovoltaics are.

This schedule should mean that with a dozen plants and an expected lifespan of 50 years I can expect a new plant to come online about every four years.

Design lifespans were universally 30 years and between 1977 and 2013, there were no new plants started. The Obama administration approved construction of 4 new plants. The US will be transitioning from nuclear to solar and wind by default, simply because those plants are not being replaced fast enough. But it won't happen so fast that Morgan Stanley's nonsense number is even remotely relevant.

I support nuclear power, but don't mistake it for being inexpensive. Some nuclear units in deregulated markets in the US for example are getting shutdown because they can't compete with combined cycle natural gas units. Some units are being saved by bailouts.

In 2014, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that nuclear power has the lowest lifecycle emissions of any electric generating technology, except for wind energy.
                      * Graph of 2014 IPCC lifecycle emissions findings.

The Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory released its analysis of life-cycle emissions in 2012 and concluded the following about nuclear:
                      "Collectively, life-cycle assessment literature shows that nuclear power is similar to other renewables and much lower than fossil fuel in total life- cycle GHG emissions."

The average duty factor for the nuclear industry is 92%. Linky: http://www.nei.org/Knowledge-C...

Please, provide sources for your dubious 50% claim.

Okay, what's the minimum delta-v required to pull that off?

The best answer I could find (without a ton of effort, honestly) is this. I have no idea how the calculation is done, so I can't comment on the accuracy, but the claim is that a bi-elliptic transfer could potentially do it in between 3000-8000 m/s (from LEO). Take that for what it's worth.

we got probes to Mercury

Yeah -- With payload masses ranging from 1/2 to 1 metric ton...

Fair enough.

Without in-depth research, there seem to be at least 70,000,000 metric tons of nuclear waste in the US alone

Whoa, I think you're off by an order of magnitude. According to this, the entire industry has only produced 76,430 metric tons in the last 4 decades, and is currently generating between about 2,000 metric tons every year.

Three Mile Island was the only major commercial nuclear accident in U.S. history. Nuclear power in the U.S. has generated 24,196,167 GWh between 1971-2015. At an average price of 12 cents/kWh, that's $2.90354 trillion. So the approx $3.4 billion in cleanup and lossses from TMI is 0.117% of that. Or in other words, at a retail price of 12 cents/kWh, the historical cost of cleaning up nuclear accidents in the U.S. is 0.014 cents per kWh.

In contrast, subsidies for different energy sources are 23.1 cents/kWh for solar, 3.5 cents/kWh for wind, and 0.2 cents/kWh for nuclear. (Tables ES4 and ES4. Solar received $4.393 billion in subsidies while generating 19,000 GWh. Wind received $5.936 billion while generating 5,936 GWh, and nuclear received $1.66 billion while generating 789,000 GWh.) That's right. The subsidy for solar is 1650x more expensive than cleaning up nuclear accidents. The subsidy for wind is 250x more expensive.

Nuclear decommissioning costs are already paid for by the NRC's Financial Assurance fund. A portion of the revenue from electricity sales are placed into this fund.

The problem with insuring nuclear plants is just a quirk of statistics. The more times you roll the dice, the narrower the bell curve becomes and the more predictable the average outcome. e.g. A 1d100 has an equal chance to produce any result between 1 and 100 - the probability distribution function is a straight line. 2d50 produces a triangular PDF, with the values in the middle tending to be more likely. 10d10 produces an even more compact PDF - a narrow normal curve with results in the middle much more likely than the extremes. And 100d0.5 will always produce 50 - its PDF is just a single peak in the middle.

This is a problem for insuring nuclear plants - because they produce so much energy you don't need very many of them. Whereas there are thousands of coal plants, and (potentially) millions of solar installations, there are only operating 100 nuclear plants in the U.S. So insuring a nuclear plant represents a greater risk for the insurer. Even though the mean outcome will be that there is 1 accident every 30 years, the chance of a 2nd or 3rd accident is still significant and the amount the insurer has to pay out may easily surpass how much they've collected in premiums if they assume the statistically most likely outcome of a single accident.

The insurance company's response is to increase the premium to also cover that 2nd or 3rd event even though they're unlikely. In contrast, with thousands of coal plants they can be much more confident that there will be (say) only 10 accidents every 30 years, and 20 or 30 accidents is extraordinarily unlikely. So the premiums can be lower, even if the average risk (mean) is exactly the same. If there were some way to build thousands of small-scale nuclear plants instead of 100 large ones, private insurance wouldn't be a problem. You get around this problem by creating the largest insurance pool possible, which in this case would be nationalized insurance covering all 100 nuclear power plants.

Statistically, per unit of energy generated, nuclear power is the safest power source man has invented.

The long-term cost of the mishap could top $2 billion, an amount roughly in the range of the cleanup after the 1979 partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania.

Three Mile Island has been operating since 1974 generating on average 6645 GWh of electricity each year (yes it's still operating). At the U.S. average of 11.5 cents/kWh, that's $764.2 million/yr worth of electricity. Over it's 42 year history, that would be $32.1 billion worth of electricity generated by the plant.

So the $2 billion to clean up the partial meltdown of TMI reactor #2 amounted to an extra 11.5 * 2 / 32.1 = 0.72 cents per kWh.

Now consider that TMI was the only major commercial nuclear accident in U.S. history, and nuclear power in the U.S. has generated 24,196,167 GWh between 1971-2015. Then the $2 billion cost to clean up TMI works out to just 0.0083 cents per kWh.

Now consider that mdsolar's favored solar receives a subsidy of 96.8 cents per kWh. Or in other words, per unit of energy generated, the subsidy for solar is 11,711x more expensive than cleaning up TMI was.

Nuclear reactors don't have a "capacity factor" of 90%. >

Do you even stop to think a second before you say stuff?

http://www.nei.org/Knowledge-C...

Capacity factor is total generation for the year over total generation if the plant operated at 100% 24/7 for the year. Downtime due to maintenance and refueling is included.

Please do a least a little checking before you post, you are just professing your ignorance.

oh really? I worked at nuke plant; the correct answer in USA is "over 90%", the 60-70% number hasn't been true since the 90s

http://www.nei.org/Knowledge-C...

US capacity factor exceeds 90%.

http://www.nei.org/Knowledge-C...

Over the past four decades, the entire industry has produced 74,258 metric tons of used nuclear fuel. If used fuel assemblies were stacked end-to-end and side-by-side, this would cover a football field about eight yards deep.

http://www.nei.org/Knowledge-C...

So a country that invented nuclear power, currently runs 100 reactors constituting the largest nuclear generation in the world and has been for the last 50 years, only has produced enough "waste" to cover a football field eight yards deep?

That's less space than this plant will take up, for the world's greatest stockpile of nuclear waste...

You have to read the GDC to understand why the regulations are in place. They exist for a reason and sometimes you have to go and research things yourself to gain the knowledge. For example, you might download EPA data and query it to find out something about the Nuclear Industries CFC emissions. The data is available, it just isn't packaged and you have to be prepared to do the work yourself.

You do realize that this is basically what asking for a citation means, right? You can't just say 'go find it yourself'. If you write a scientific paper, you'd cite the paper and page you got the information from. You make an assertions, you might be asked to back it up. I'm actually fine with backing my assertions up, at least when I have time.

Still, on emissions - there's a difference between what you wrote, along the lines of 'allowed to release radioactive gasses every two weeks', which implies that they were just opening reactor vents every two weeks, allowing the gasses to go directly to the atmosphere, and what the patent you linked to(thank you, very enlightening), which reveals that while systems vary, they're actually trapping said gasses in non-emergency situations for at least 30 days. Which is very much NOT just releasing to the atmosphere in normal operations, which is what you implied, and why I was getting antsy about sources.

As for providing links better than yahoo news, I do that when I can. Proving a negative is hard.

As for AP-1000 vs EPR, I already did the calculations, which I posted. Basically, the EPR is rated at more accidents per plant year, but only slightly. Because the EPR is a more powerful reactor though, by anticipated energy production it'd actually have slightly fewer accidents. Note the use of 'slight'. The EPR is not significantly safer than the AP1000, and vice versa.

Both are at around 1% as likely to have an accident involving radiation release as the current legacy reactors, which are generally e-5 on accidents, rather than e-7.

Man, too a bit to find

AP1000 vs EPR: Per wiki the AP1000 has a core damage frequency of 5.09e-7 per plant years, EPR is rated at 6.1e-7 per plant year. So by that metric they're both neck and neck (e-7), with the AP1000 having a slight lead over the EPR. The EPR is about 50% more powerful though, so on a per kWh basis it's a touch safer, as you'd need 3 APs to replace 2 EPR. You're still very close though.

As far as asking me to provide citations, let's see:
Reactors not venting: Conceded. However, I'll maintain that under normal operation, said venting doesn't appear to be on a '2 week schedule', and is very much a processed release, where the gasses are contained and absorbed until the radioactivity has time to die down. If you had expressed it in this fashion, I wouldn't have been so confrontational about it. Also, you were the one saying they vent, which is why I placed the onus on you. Proving a positive is also easier than proving a negative.

Planes not being a threat to even AP1000 domes - Analysis of Nuclear Power Plants Shows Aircraft Crash Would Not Breach Structures Housing Reactor Fuel.

Which brings us back to the point I originally made that the AP-1000 incorporates none of the design changes the industry *itself* recommends be applied to reactor facility design for NEW plants.

Dude, the wiki, westinghouse's site, etc... All mention extensive safety systems, including how they've changed some things up to improve safety - things like relying on gravity rather than pumps, because gravit

My source is the fact that all the waste in the US is stored in dozen different places where each one is far bigger than a foorball field:
e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
or read this: http://www.nei.org/Issues-Poli... particular this: http://www.nei.org/CorporateSi...

The only thing giving your a small edge about your claim is that the above waste (first link) includes waste from weapon production and decommissioning.

FYI: http://www.wired.com/2015/07/p...

"All told, the nuclear reactors in the U.S. produce more than 2,000 metric tons of radioactive waste a year, according to the DoE"

From: http://www.scientificamerican....

I really wonder how pro nuclear advocates can be so uneducated that they not even know the basic facts.

In which desert do the USA store the biggest amount of nuclear waste in the word?

http://articles.latimes.com/ke...

My source is the fact that all the waste in the US is stored in dozen different places where each one is far bigger than a foorball field:
e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
or read this: http://www.nei.org/Issues-Poli... particular this: http://www.nei.org/CorporateSi...

The only thing giving your a small edge about your claim is that the above waste (first link) includes waste from weapon production and decommissioning.

FYI: http://www.wired.com/2015/07/p...

"All told, the nuclear reactors in the U.S. produce more than 2,000 metric tons of radioactive waste a year, according to the DoE"

From: http://www.scientificamerican....

I really wonder how pro nuclear advocates can be so uneducated that they not even know the basic facts.

In which desert do the USA store the biggest amount of nuclear waste in the word?

http://articles.latimes.com/ke...

It'll be bigger than a house, but you are also wrong. The amount of waste from US nuclear power plants for the last 40 years fit in one football field. What is your source?

http://www.nei.org/Knowledge-C...

"Over the past four decades, the entire industry has produced 74,258 metric tons of used nuclear fuel. If used fuel assemblies were stacked end-to-end and side-by-side, this would cover a football field about eight yards deep."

As I understand it, the US capacity factor has been improving over the years:

around 88% from 2006-2012, but only 70% averaged from 1970-2009 - http://www.nei.org/Knowledge-C... and http://www.nei.org/Knowledge-C... from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

As I understand it, the US capacity factor has been improving over the years:

around 88% from 2006-2012, but only 70% averaged from 1970-2009 - http://www.nei.org/Knowledge-C... and http://www.nei.org/Knowledge-C... from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Ching ching ching? We haven't even heard a clank clank clank coming from Chernobyl for decades now. And won't for decades more (or at least until they're forced to go in there and rebuild the fucking dome that hides that "oops".)

Prosperity measured in half-life is anything but.

Using Chernobyl (or Fukushima) as a reason not to build more reactors is the same logic as saying we shouldn't build boats because of the Titanic.

443 reactors provide 10% of the worlds power needs right now. Safely. citation. It would not be by any means an insurmountable endeavor to build 2500 additional reactors and get us completely off of coal/oil/gas.

Even better would be 1000 additional reactors, and supplement the remaining with hydro/solar/wind/etc.

I may be wrong, it's very difficult to find reliable information on this as no reactors have been built since the 70's, but as of now there are very little incentives for nuclear power. Those that do exist are just loan guarantees and some tax breaks (source). If you do have more information let me know.

Ok, how do you start upgrading? Oh yeah, you decommission the old one! So your whole argument makes very little sense...

If only it were that simple. See this NRC backgrounder on decommissioning nuclear power plants and 26 CFR 1.468A-5. It is a fund owned by customers, held in trust for complete plant dissolution. It cannot be borrowed from or against or used to upgrade the plant, even if this would result in a longer useful life. Typically these funds are held conservatively, though there have been attempts to tax them to higher heaven or play risky games.

Don't get me wrong, decommissioning funds are a good idea in general for industry, especially for anything involving radioactivity or stored chemicals. But you have to ask yourself for anything, such as my water or sewer plant example, is it likely that we will really want this thing to close and completely disappear in (x) years? If the answer is NO, the return-on-investment burden costs everyone money over it's lifetime because it stifles renovation and innovation. The higher cost and lower profit margin repels good stewards and attracts bad ones (like Dominion). Just as for life insurance, it's not healthy for any one or thing that is truly useful to be considered worth more dead than alive.

If anyone would attempt to impose such a trust to coal generating plants over a pre-determined lifespan with subsequent greenfield decommissioning, you'd hear some real noise. Then when those numbers change, aside from CO2 everyone might conclude that nuclear IS cheaper than coal, today!

"The useful is as beautiful as the beautiful." ~apologies to The Little Prince

The nuclear industry developed a flex plan in response to Fukushima, but some of it has extra equipment available to handle a single issue arising among one of many reactors. http://safetyfirst.nei.org/ind... In a wide scale grid failure, does that really help is several emergency generators fail a few weeks into aftermath?

Sort of the same way pensions work right? Unless you're company decides to raid the pension for short term financial issues and goes bankrupt...

Unlike pension funds, decommissioning funds aren't really raidable.

Claiming that the original estimates didn't include inflation is a a minimum disingenuous at best and dishonest at worst.

Didn't claim that. Didn't word it right, but construction costs* have risen above inflation for quite a few years.

As for new developments- I believe it's a mix of many things. Safety standards increased, in some cases above what I'd consider 'sane'. Parts became contaminated that wasn't forseen in the original plan. No long term storage site ever opened up(Yucca Mountain), which increases costs because there's often no where to move the waste, so it has to be kept on site. Construction costs soared past expectations. Etc...

*And deconstruction is a form of construction, utilizing much of the same equipment and labor skills.

Well, it would vary quite a bit - how much space each plant 'takes up', how much is owned around it varies by OOMS. Palo Verde has 4k acres.

Surry Power Station, on the other hand, only has 840 acres. Commissioned in 1972 it's more likely to be decomissioned sooner than Palo Verde.

Still, per the NEI all nuclear waste nuclear fuel for the last 50 years would fit in a football field to a depth of 7 yards. Given that a football field is 1.3 acres, I'm confident that you could fit a few eons worth of waste fuel into the Surry site. Accepting low and medium level waste would shorten the ability to store it substantially.

We could stop wasting the fuel you call waste, and using it completely instead. What we do now is like bringing in oil, burning off the diesel and ignoring the gasoline, kerosene, and all the other fuels it contains.

http://www.nei.org/Issues-Poli...

On the other hand, thorium reactors are even more efficient, and the leftover is nearly inert.

You should note that, despite what many believe, we don't really "subsidize" fossil fuels to any major degree. The majority of the "subsidies" people whine about are just plain old tax deductions - the same ones that other businesses get. The oil companies didn't even get those deductions for a long time, and people complained when they finally got to deduct for exploration and drilling expenses in the same way normal businesses deduct for operations.

Bullshit:

http://www.nei.org/corporatesite/media/filefolder/60_Years_of_Energy_Incentives_-_Analysis_of_Federal_Expenditures_for_Energy_Development_-_1950-2010.pdf

http://www.elistore.org/Data/products/d19_07.pdf

There are a lot of aging, crappy nuclear plants because politicians chicken out the minute people like you embrace FUD

How do you figure? The way I see it is that there are a lot of crappy nuclear plants out there because our ancestors were short-sighted enough to build them. And now the task of cleaning up the mess, which was never factored into the cost of the electricity they generated, is left to us. I'm happy France is exporting something besides their delicious wine and cheese and noxious sentimentality, but I expect their waste will end up somewhere that is not France.

And, well, there is the usual FUD which "people like me" embrace. It's a self-evident fact that nuclear power has associated risks and that history has shown that these risks occasionally result in catastrophe. I'm no actuary so I can't put odds to it, but there are certain similarities between SoCal and Fukushima: old coastal powerplant with creaky design, on a fault line, etc. I'd rather pay a little extra for my energy so I don't have to die of radiation sickness or see my property rendered worthless by a disaster that could have been easily averted.

But the math on this one isn't even close...The sun just ain't hot enough for long enough.

What math are you referring to (your article is TL;DR)? Do you mean the math that shows a rapid decline in the cost of PV systems and a dramatic increase in installations of 60% globally? Or the The math Steve Chu used to predict that renewable energy will be cost-competitive within 10 years? As for the second statement, the current insolation of the earth at the ground is about 7 times total power consumption -- to say nothing of wind or tidal power.

You no doubt think I'm a knee-jerk partisan relying on wishful thinking and flimsy data. I certainly think you're a knee jerk partisan (and pessimist) relying on wishful thinking and flimsy data. I personally would support spending on research on thorium reactors. I'd much prefer fusion (not likely very soon and already pretty well funded) and would pref

lazy lazy lazy! http://www.nei.org/corporatesite/media/filefolder/60_Years_of_Energy_Incentives_-_Analysis_of_Federal_Expenditures_for_Energy_Development_-_1950-2010.pdf

STFI, lazy! http://www.nei.org/corporatesite/media/filefolder/60_Years_of_Energy_Incentives_-_Analysis_of_Federal_Expenditures_for_Energy_Development_-_1950-2010.pdf

AH, nvm Ill read up on it myself http://www.nei.org/corporatesite/media/filefolder/60_Years_of_Energy_Incentives_-_Analysis_of_Federal_Expenditures_for_Energy_Development_-_1950-2010.pdf

Nuclear does indeed manage near 90% on average. Sources: http://www.nei.org/Knowledge-Center/Nuclear-Statistics/US-Nuclear-Power-Plants/US-Nuclear-Capacity-Factor, http://en.openei.org/apps/TCDB/ (click on capacity factor, which also confirms your wind capacity number by giving it a median of 38%).

He also specifically said unplanned maintenance, not planning maintenance.

What waste?

Here are a few hits from the 1st page of a Google search...
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Introduction/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle-Overview/#.UVsb1FeOCF8
http://www.nei.org/keyissues/nuclearwastedisposal/recyclingusednuclearfuel/
http://inhabitat.com/china-finds-way-to-reuse-nuclear-fuel-60-times-longer/
http://larouchepac.com/node/14720

So are you going to admit that nuclear is safe. http://www.nei.org/newsandevents/newsreleases/nuclear-energy-facilities-prove-resilience-during-hurricane-sandy/

Do you believe the stories from the nuclear power plants? http://www.nei.org/newsandevents/newsreleases/nuclear-energy-facilities-prove-resilience-during-hurricane-sandy/

New York: Indian Point 2—continued operating at 100 percent power Indian Point 3—manual safe shut down from 100 percent power on Oct. 30 due to an electric grid disruption Ginna—shut down for refueling outage Fitzpatrick—continued operating at 100 percent power Nine Mile Point 1—manual safe shut down from 100 percent power on Oct. 29 due to an electric grid disruption Nine Mile Point 2—continued operating at 100 percent power.

http://www.nei.org/newsandevents/aircraftcrashbreach

Light aircraft likely would not damage your house if they hit it. Airplanes are pretty fragile.

A 1GW-rated nuclear plant will produce 1GW 24/7/365, rain or shine.

No, it will not. Maybe an imaginary one, but not a real plant.

A real city, complete with homes and businesses and some industry. If they can't do that, then that power source will never be good for more than a few percent of national power usage.

In Denmark, we passed the 15% mark some years ago. But I guess we live in a fantasy world.

I think your position is silly - the future of renewable power sources isn't in being disconnected from the grid, au contraire. From what I can find, people who've actually done some real calculations on this say that it's possible to rely 100% on renewable sources without excessive costs. And why wouldn't it be, we have the tech.

Call you names? That's not good debating technique. I might attack ideas, but not you. Line breaks would be nice though.

Why invent a new personal definition of peak oil? Just look it up instead of making shit up, but at least you had the decency to list your own personal definiton.

I thought my definition was pretty much standard? It's the point where oil production levels out and starts decreasing because extraction costs have risen to the point that increasing production further isn't economical. Whether that's because the economic gain is less than the cost, or because an alternate has risen that has a better benefit ratio.

There has been a lot of progress and reactors such as pebble bed (built) and accelerated thorium (under construction) are showing a lot of promise, and reactors such as the AP1000 (under construction) could come close.

Pebble bed reactors aren't showing as much progress as I'd like. I really like the promise of thorium. I'm not a fanboy of 1970's tech, matter of fact, I'd be supporting shutting down the reactors from that time period as soon as we finished replacing the coal power plants(sooner in a few cases).

The edge nuclear power has over coal and oil is much higher steam temperatures - that advantage comes with a cost in materials which becomes less important as the scale increases.

Source on this? Hate to break it to you, but to my knowledge coal plants(~374C) actually get their steam HOTTER than nuclear plants(~350C). Heck, there's a coal fired plant that reaches 600-620C. This could be fixed by newer nuclear plant designs, but the old designs just don't get that hot. I'm also irked that our environmental regulations often mean older, less efficient and more polluting plants keep operating under grandfather clauses than getting new plants built. That goes for ALL plant designs, coal, nuclear, even gas.

There's not much more 'exotic technology' in a nuclear reactor, one could even argue that there's less, than what's in a modern 'clean coal' plant.

At this time financial (not political) constraints along with the technological ones are preventing the construction of much in the way of nuclear reactors - in fact it's a political action to override that and get one built.

An absolutely HUGE portion of the cost is the permitting process, and that's political. Fix that and you'd see more reactors built. Personally, my goal power proportions is 40% nuclear, 20% wind, 20% solar, 20% other(hydro, biomass, etc...)
Right now, about 20% of power in the USA is nuclear and is provided by 104 reactors. So figure on building ~208(increase to 40%, decommission the older less safe reactors). But new reactors tend to be bigger than the old ones: Another calc: 806.2 TWh/year. A 1 GW reactor like the AP1000 should produce ~8TWh a year. So replacement would only be 100 reactors, or 200 to both expand and replace. Of course, the AP1000 is actually a 1.2GW reactor, so it'd only be 167 reactors. Figure on a 5 year build, break ground on 1 this year, 2 next, then 3 and so on, and you'd be finishing up in 25 years assuming a few delays. Peak would be 18 years from now, starting up 14-18, depending on slippage and expansion.
167 more or less identical reactors would give you lots of comparative advantage on safety and maintenance engineering costs. Still, I think that making a quarter of them AP1000, and 75% other standardized designs would be good. Don't forget to set them up to use the waste heat for something useful, if possible. Up in Alaska use some of the micro-nuclear plants to also provide steam for heating buildings. Some of those are in the single digit to low double Megawatt. Heck, get a thorium design out, and at least build a test plant.

[To be clear, I'm not khallow]

RPHP isn't exactly a reputable source. These are the same people who couldn't even get the half-life of Sr-90 correct in a published paper. And here's a counter-cite for your cite. Nuclear energy does have its own unique problems, but this group's approach isn't a constructive way to address them.

- T

Fun fact: the ban on reprocessing was lifted by Reagan. The government just isn't subsiziding it.

"The technology was banned by President Carter due to proliferation concerns. President Reagan lifted the ban, and President Clinton later reinstituted it."

Yeah, I think people understand that they need water.

That's not entirely true, especially anymore. Palo Verde, for example, uses treated sewage water for cooling, and if they'd built the additional two units they were planning - those would have been cooled via dry towers. It just tends to cost a bit more.

Solar thermal consumes more water than nuclear?. Oh, and this source says that coal power consumes nearly as much.

http://nei.org/newsandevents/information-on-the-japanese-earthquake-and-reactors-in-that-region/ they have good daily updates. at the bottom of the current days update there is a link to the archives