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Nuclear plants need months to cycle up or cycle down.

Well, more like hours than months.

http://www.neimagazine.com/features/featureload-following-capabilities-of-npps/

http://www.areva.com/EN/operat...
http://www.neimagazine.com/new...

India and Europe also have extensive nuclear programs. Despite interference from the Dems, the USA still does a lot of nuclear research as well. Pebble reactors are an advancement, but have their problems. I'm hopeful that there will be failsafe breeder reactors in the future, and maybe Bill Gate's traveling-wave reactor research will provide a robust and decentralized solution to the energy situation.

Pebble reactors are a great idea. You can read about some of the history and problems here

I think your comment is pretty insightful, but you are mistaken on one point.

Fukushima taught us that [...] a meltdown at a modern nuclear power plant (zero dead

Fukushima taught what happens when an ancient nuke plant melts down, not a modern one. Fukushima was due for decommissioning... it was a second-gen design that had been in operation for over four decades! That's the original planned total lifetime of the design. (Although with upgrades it is possible to keep operating a gen-II past the four-decades mark.)

I want to see a large buildout of gen-III+ or fourth-gen design nuke plants, and yes you can build one near me if you like. Even a crappy old nuke plant doesn't kill everyone when a giant tsunami hits it, so I'm even less worried about a modern "inherently safe" design, and plus I don't live in a tsunami zone.

Anyone who honestly believes in human-caused climate change must be in favor of nuke plants as they release no CO2. We should be building modern nuke plants and closing down coal plants. And yes, build modern nuke plants and closing down the four-decades-old nuke plants. And invest in research on thorium, traveling wave, etc.

And go ahead and build solar power too while you are at it. Just shut down the damn coal plants.

Anyone seen any mentions of safe nuclear power technologies?

You mean like those 'inherently safe' pebble bed reactors?

I'm sure they're around somewhere. Hey, a flying unipig! Don't see many of those these days.

"Those running [nuclear reactors]" are generally tied to the plant and don't travel around much. Operator experience is not really tied to the number of reactors in a given area.

But organizational experience is geographically clustered. When something goes bad wrong at one unit in a big fleet (like Entergy's or Exelon's), the whole organization is stimulated to respond (with new processes, best practices, safety culture, etc.). Western fleets are smaller and their operators have less cumulative organizational experience (though they are apparently trying to compensate by starting a new industry group).

Call bias if you want, since this company is in the nuclear business, but the details regarding the overall process are much better. This issue is a regulatory one as changing the safety system from the original design basis is a big deal. In response to the above post regarding China taking over...leave your FUD at the door.

http://www.neimagazine.com/story.asp?sc=2058654

The biggest problem with digital I&C is the “software common cause failure issue"

Imagine modern nuclear plant with multiple-channel redundancy in instrument and control systems, if one instrument fails, there are others. Same applies to whole cooling systems, if one cooling system fails, there are other completely independent systems that continue to work. Typically redundant systems use instruments from different manufacturers or instruments that are implemented with different technology.

This is not possible for digital systems because they are too costly to implement multiple times. What this means is that redundant digital control systems use same software. If one system fails because of software error, others may follow. This has already happened in German nuclear plant that had new digital system installed. Only the old analog system that was still operational saved the reactor.

This is why Finnish radiation and nuclear safety authority required changes in Areva's plans for the most modern nuclear reactor being build, Olkiluoto 3. They added analog safety requirements. Reactor must be able to shout down even when digital I&C has total failure. Relying for all digital systems compromises redundancy.

More info:

http://www.neimagazine.com/story.asp?storyCode=2053091

http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Instrumentation-Control-Systems-Nuclear/dp/0309057329

That chart is dishonest and causes me to lose a lot of respect for XKCD's author. He only gives the measurements at towns located far from the plant. Why does he ignore the plant's readings which even today are 2,126 micro-Sieverts PER HOUR. That's the equivalent of getting a chest X-ray every 34 seconds and would expose a person to the maximum annual dose for nuclear workers in 23 hours.

Correction - no leak, and the fire is not in the reactor building:
http://www.neimagazine.com/story.asp?sectioncode=132&storyCode=2059127

See also http://www.jaif.or.jp/english/ for updates.

The AGW community ... refuse to look at green technologies like nuclear because they’re ignorant. ... [ShakaUVM]

Already discussed, but note that nuclear plants do generate small amounts of CO2 due to current enrichment and mining methods, as well as the curing of concrete containment domes. Averaged over the projected life of the reactors, this CO2 is only a few percent of the emissions from an equivalently powerful coal plant. Pebble bed reactors might be capable of safe operation without containment domes, but that unfortunate incident in Germany makes it unlikely that they'll be built that way for a while. Nuclear power is our best hope of maintaining a prosperous civilization. Please don't oversell it by making claims it can't live up to yet.

... It is possible to reduce our CO2 by 50%, maily because we can attack the problem in a centralized way at the power plant level. 0 CO2 emission is simply not on the table, but the fact that climatologists think it is doable is yet another bit of evidence for the fact that being good at science doesn’t make you good at policy. [ShakaUVM]

Dr. Knutti's emissions graph makes it clear that he's examining a scenario in which CO2 emissions only drop to half of 2010 values by ~2030, and a quarter of 2010 values by ~2070. That doesn't seem too different from the Lieberman-McCain "Climate Stewardship and Innovation Act of 2007" which seemed doable.

Because much of the CO2 emitted by nuclear plants is emitted in a pulse as the concrete dome cures, any nuclear plants built in the next few decades won't be emitting CO2 past ~2070 (unless we still haven't perfected mining and enrichment in the next ~60 years.) As you say, centralized power plants are easiest to upgrade, but we've got ~60 years to perfect electric cars in order to hit Knutti's target. They certainly can't universally replace gasoline vehicles in time (especially in developing countries) but biofuels can be produced carbon-neutrally (albeit inefficiently at present) in a centralized fashion. Distributing biofuels just like gasoline will avoid the need to make and sell billions of electric cars by 2100. Even if that fails, I'd be astonished if ~60 years isn't enough time for humanity to devise and implement a carbon sequestration program capable of making up the difference.

In fact, the only way the human race could possibly fail to tackle climate change would be if there were legions of crackpots arguing that climate "scientists" are actually just deceitful, shady, laughably dishonest, perverting, badly reeking, dogmatic, anti-scientific, idiotic, disingenuous, scurrilous, nefarious, damned, indefensibly guilty, laughably wrong, fundamentally rotten, self-discrediting, fraudulent, bullshitting partisan hacks with something to hide who do bad things, don't fucking know

I wonder if Areva is somehow involved with this project...

http://www.neimagazine.com/story.asp?sc=2052909
http://www.tvo.fi/www/page/2986/

Very old information. Japan Steel Works are no longer the only game in town. Moreover forging a 500-ton ingot (the bottleneck most people are talking about) is only necessary for the EPR. Read this.
http://www.neimagazine.com/story.asp?storyCode=2052302

Also, a recent rethink of the safety of the German AVR has also taken some luster off of the PBR concept.

Most of the stuff the US is still export-controlling either has commercial uses or non-US sources. If you look at the indictments, the big one was about someone exporting carbon fibre materials to the China Space Agency. Why is the US trying to stop that? There's some noise about how carbon fibre might be somehow used to enrich uranium. China already has its own enrichment plants, nuclear weapons, and nuclear reactors. They don't need a centrifuge enrichment plant, except maybe for cost reduction. The US tries, for some reason, to slow down China's space program by refusing to export certain space-related items. Not that it makes much difference; the Chinese space program seems to be doing just fine.

It's hard to think of anything in computing that you can't get outside the US. Nor is there any military computing application that really requires more compute power that you couldn't put together from stuff you could mail order from Taiwan or China.

Arms control and technology export control are different issues. Arms control is intended to make it harder for people we don't like to get firepower in bulk. It's not about the underlying technology; it's about production. Most of the cases mentioned are pure arms control issues.