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A nuclear power plant design for 1000Mw, 500Mw, etc... has been approved for build by the appropriate agencies...The plant can be built immediately or as soon as possible and would only require inspections and testing, and would not require a design submission.

You mean something like Westinghouses AP600/AP1000 nuclear reactors?

The NRC has approved the AP600, they love it, and the AP1000 is simply a scaled up version. From what I hear at my workplace, the NRC now has a system in place to get plants up and running in 5 years or so, from a licensing standpoint. Most plants in the US are of Westinghouse design, so their work could be seen as a de-facto standard. Combined with potential federal loan guarantees for another 8,400 MW of nuke plants, and you may yet see nuclear construction in the next few years.

In terms of legal hurdles, the easiest way to expand the US nuclear fleet is to add reactors at existing sites. The local population is already quite used to living in the shadow of these plants, and will probably just see it as more jobs.

The power outage shut down nuclear power plants??? What the hell are those things for?

Short answer: If they have no place to put all the power they generate, they have to shut down.

My plant generates 1207 Mega-watts (which rounds to 1.21 gigawatts... hehhehe), and we only use 40 MW for in house loads- about three percent of our total output. We cannot ramp output from 1207 MW to 40 MW instantly, if we can at all (I'm new, so I still have much to learn. The only option, then , is to unplug everything and blow as much of the energy into the ultimate heat sink (ocean) quickly.

Once the plant goes offline, it takes about a day to start back up again- and we can't start without being connected to the grid, because our diesels only put out 12 MW at 4160 Volts. This is enough to shut down the plant safely, but far short of the 40MW (most of it at 13600 Volts) needed to run the seven big motors that are needed for circulating the reactor coolant and dumping waste heat into the ocean. Even if we could run off of only one waste heat and one reactor coolant motor, we'd still have to hook up the plant wiring in a creative way to do that, and it would take a long time to convince the NRC that was a good idea.

Really? Aren't you being misleading? Is this a Stanford where every square inch of land is covered by the footprint of a windmill? What spacing between windmills would actually be needed in practice? How much land would actually have to be used in practice? What wind load does your 14000 acres assume? Would not more turbines be needed for some areas less blessed with wind? I could probably stack every power poll in California vertically on Stanford's campus too with no room between poles. That doesn't mean they aren't eyesores anyway despite being spread out over the whole state.

Now if this is for real w/o distortion and in practice I can get that much power and only have to consume that little land, then I'd be surprised and impressed. And I'd be more interested in wind certainly as at least a more significant chunk of the total energy picture.

The heavily subsidized typical cost for U.S. nuclear power is around $0.12/kwh. That's with a blanket insurance policy courtesy of the Price-Anderson Act, and doesn't include the cost of waste disposal and other externalites like terrorism and natural disaster vulnerability, which can not be measured until it's too late.

Actually operating a nuke plant even in the super-expensive US is 2 cents/kWh [Utility Data Institute] The cost then is all wrapped up in the amortized capex for the Plant. And with standardization like in France you can get that plant cost down big time. Combining that effort with the new advanced reactor designs, and you have the cheapest energy out there.

Decommissioning costs are about 10% of the initial capex. But their present value is so small that they contribute only a few percent to the amortized cost. In the US this amounts to less than $0.002/kWh. So big farking deal.

d

There is naturally occurring blue food!

Lookee!

The four assed version is coming soon, watch for it!

"Also, you say 'right now' in your post - it's right now and looking like forever. There haven't been any new nuke plants commissioned since 1979. All orders after 1973 have been cancelled. Nuclear power is on its way out as a consumer power supply."

Wrong wrong wrong! No new nuclear plants have been ordered since 1979. There were several plants that completed construction and low power testing and received full power licenses all through the 1980's and even the first part of the 1990's! Look up the Seabrook Station (1990) in NH and check out it's entering commercial service date. Also ANO2 (1980), San Onofre (1984), Diablo Canyon (1985), Commanche Peak (1993), Watts Bar (1996). I could go on and on. But facts aren't going to dissuade you obviously, never mind.

Okay. This is too funny.

I post talking about Seabrook's P.R. retardation, then I go browsing their website some more and find that Blinky*, the three-eyed genetic-deviant fish, is their freaking MASCOT...

These guys are truly, truly clueless...

--Blair

* - that site is a horrific mutant freak, too...

Okay. This is too funny.

I post talking about Seabrook's P.R. retardation, then I go browsing their website some more and find that Blinky*, the three-eyed genetic-deviant fish, is their freaking MASCOT...

These guys are truly, truly clueless...

--Blair

* - that site is a horrific mutant freak, too...

People were scared by radiation in the '50s. All that "duck and cover" stuff. All that "godless commies" stuff. All that "godless commies are gonna irradiate the American Way of Life" stuff.

Three Mile Island just made the scare local and palpable. Until then, people blindly bought the promises of safety made by the nuke plant builders. Unfortunately, so did the nuke plant builders, and the nuke plant operators. So the promises and the safety went blind as well.

Chernobyl made it worse, but what made it worst of all is debacles like Seabrook, which failed to contain the politics surrounding its construction in the wake of Three Mile Island.

Nuclear power generation is safer and cleaner and less expensive than coal or natural gas, and the disposal of the spent fuel is less polluting than spewing it into the air. But the people who jumped into the industry are very sloppy with their P.R., and didn't react properly to negative publicity. They look like shills. Or they really were shills, cutting safety measures to reduce costs even more. Either of which degrades their position and keeps the polluter-fired powerplants in operation.

--Blair