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Are you seriously saying that you turn to the nuclear industry mouthpiece for all your unbiased news? Just have a look at the membership list of the World Nuclear Association. This is an association made up of companies who profit from the from the continued use of nuclear energy.

Who could really believe that any genuine problems with nuclear power will be accurately reported by a body set up to defend the industry? Why is it that absolutely EVERY story in the media about this incident has been labelled as histrionic scare stories? Sure, the media might collectively receive millions of dollars in advertising revenue for the news reports on this topic, but the nuclear industry stands to earn billions from new power plants, continued uranium mining etc.

It's not the number for Fukushima reactor cleanup.

The Three Mile Island cleanup "took 12 years and cost approximately US$973 million" and was completed in the early 1990s. Here we're talking about a worse accident (not much debate anymore), with 3 operating reactors with damaged fuel, one of which may have a containment breach (reactor #2), and 4 spent fuel pools in various states of damage, and (unlike Three Mile Island) significant amounts of radiological material spread around the region, into the sea, and apparently also into groundwater. Plus there is a lot of damaged reactor building (non-containment-related) to clear away and dispose of before even getting to the difficult stuff, whereas in Three Mile Island the reactor building was fine.

It's a total wild-assed and non-expert guess, but I think a factor of 4 for the multiple damaged reactors, spent fuel pools, and buildings, and a factor of 10 for either cleanup of or losses in the surrounding region (which were insignificant in the case of Three Mile Island) would be conservative. If people can't safely come back to their homes and businesses, can't fish the waters or farm the land around there anymore, it will be very expensive. Make a reactor cleanup an even billion for inflation since the 1990s for Three Mile Island and do the math. So, yes, 300 billion is an exaggeration. We're probably "only" talking about tens of billions, maybe "only" 10 billion via the economy of scale from dealing with 4 reactors at the same site as they learn how to do it. But it's definitely billions.

The 300 billion is the number being bandied about in news reports as an estimate for the total tsunami reconstruction costs.

Sorry to tell you this, but coal ash in Europe contains uranium, too—about 80-135 ppm, in fact. And similar levels can be found in Australian coal. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most coal deposits that are readily accessible are probably contaminated with a fair amount of uranium....

Also, the uranium problems from burning coal aren't just about smoke. If a plant does not use scrubbers, the uranium goes up into the atmosphere. However, if it does have scrubbers, the uranium still ends up in the fly ash. They dump that ash into giant ash pits that leach those heavy metals into the water supply, into rivers, etc.

But at the end of the day, you're still left with a boat load of radioactive waste that you have to store somewhere.

"Whether used fuel is reprocessed or not, the volume of high-level waste is modest, - about 3 cubic metres per year of vitrified waste, or 25-30 tonnes of used fuel for a typical large nuclear reactor. The relatively small amount involved allows it to be effectively and economically isolated."

And at least you CAN store the waste, unlike coal and gas...
http://www.world-nuclear.org/education/wast.htm

Not if you're like India, building U-233 and Thorium plants:

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf53.html

You do know humans have radioactive isotopes in us without nuclear power or coal plants right?

You do know that 1 millionth of a gram of plutonium is a carcinogenic dose in the human body, it analogues iron when presented to a human metabolism, as high energy alpha emitter in the body it is extremely toxic. From World Nuclear Association's website on the Chernobyl disaster ;

The resulting steam explosion and fires released at least 5% of the radioactive reactor core into the atmosphere and downwind.

5% of a 160 ton Nuclear reactor core that was about to be refueled - let's call it 100 tons, that's 5 tons of radioactive core into the atmosphere. At conservative estimates thats 5000,000,000,000 fatal doses. If we accept that an extremely conservative estimate of 1% of this makes it into the food chain via bio-accumulation and of that a conservative estimate of 1% of people are exposed and a conservative 1% of those exposed actually get some sort of fatal cancer that's 5,000,000 fatalities.

So please don't try to convince me that I can have pu-239 in me without a nuclear plant.

Radioactive decay has been occurring in humans since the first one was born in Africa.

Please don't be ridiculous, you know very well we are talking about radioactive isotope emissions from the nuclear industry. You focus on the reactors only instead of the entire industrial process over which radioactive isotope emission is inevitable. These are the types of radioactive isotopes that eventually end up bio-concentrating;

Those radioactive isotope emissions have been going on since the nuclear industry began, so which of them would you prefer to be decaying in your body.

Tens of thousands of humans die a year from natural Radon while deaths from nuclear accidents number in the single digits a year.

At TMI large amounts of contamination were released beyond Nuclear Industry assurances. The gamma radiation monitors on the top of the auxiliary building were not designed to measure such high concentrations and they went off the scale when the accident *began*, the release of contamination went on for several *days*. Estimates were based on thermoluscent dosimeters on the fence and Alpha and Beta emissions weren't even measured.

Because of the weather conditions it was known that emissions from TMI travelled a long way and were measured in Albany, NY. Joeseph Hendrie (former chairman of the NRC) was quoted (at the time) "We are operating almost totally in the in the blind, [Governor Thornburgh's] information is ambiguous, mine is non-existent and - I don't know - it's like a couple of blind men staggering aroun

Doesn't mean the material needs to be exploded; it can be fizzled for useful power.

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

There is no known material worth the expense of mining it on the moon

It would be about time that the media talk a bit more loudly about the uranium deposits found on the moon. Is it worth the expense vs. mining on earth ? Yes, because it allows a use that would otherwise need uranium to be lifted out of the earth's gravity well : build a refinery that produces fuel for Orion-style ships. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion) Or even that beam power back to earth without having us manage nuclear wastes.

First off - you do realize that Orion ships don't "burn" bulk natural uranium in a manner anything like a chemical rocket, right? That is, the uranium mined on the moon must be enriched to nearly pure U-235, and then fabricated into nuclear bombs. All of this infrastructure would have to be built on the moon to get that "weight savings" of shipping U-325 off of Earth.

Second, how much U-235 does an Orion ship require? According to the Wikipedia page a mid-size Orion craft weighing ~2000 tons (the Space Shuttle orbiter itself weighs only 78 tonnes so this is a huge ship by today's standards) needs 1080 bombs for a fuel load. Each bomb requires about 1 critical mass of U-235, weighing 15 kg or so. Thus the total weight savings in fueling up the Orion is 16 tonnes, less than 1% of the mass of the ship. The bombs themselves (since they require a lot of mass in addition to the fissile fuel to arrange the explosion and focus their energy) weigh something like 500 tonnes, so we are only saving 3% of the weight of the bombs. So the great expense of duplicating Earth-side uranium mining and enrichment save only a trivial fraction of the mass that must be lifted off Earth (how much do those Lunar factories weigh?)

Second - the cost of a gram of U-235 content in reactor fuel (before fabrication) is about $55 per gram. The cost of going to highly enriched uranium will raise this somewhat, but enrichment is only half the cost and most of the separative work to make highly enriched uranium is already done just to make low enriched fuel. Meanwhile the Russian Proton can lift payload into orbit for $4.30 per gram, so the added cost to sending HEU to the moon is a small fraction (~7% or so) of the cost of making it on Earth. Any production process on the Moon will be far more expensive.

So no, this is not a reasonable idea.

All nuclear reactors, at least in the west, are insured. Not only so, they are a sought-after risk because of their high engineering and operational standards. Beyond the cover for individual plants there are national and international pooling arrangements for comprehensive cover.

Perhaps the World Nuclear Association has some bias or they're refering to something different than you are. It's hard to evaluate that since you don't include a source, though.

I just work in power generation but here's the way I see it: They've been trying to build more capacity.

In my area we already have a nuclear plant that's been in operation for 38 years. There have been talks about building a coal plant, but it's met fierce opposition by just about everyone over air quality concerns.

While it's true that some new nuclear designs have been under review for quite some time http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/design-cert.html they'd still need to get approval for building locations to really get power where it's needed. Also, because no new reactors have been built in 30 years, we've completely lost our infrastructure to make many of the components necessary to complete building of any plants. Probably the most significant component, the vessel and head enclosure, In all of the world there are currently 3 plants (Japan, Russia, China) that can even build them. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf122_heavy_manufacturing_of_power_plants.html

At this time, it's not just the USA that's building nuclear plants. Any plant that you want to build right now is still very likely 10 years away from being built.

There are also natural gas(good), wind(unreliable), and solar plants(not ready) of course. I'll just stop here to prevent tl:dr's.

Cost? Excuse me if I don't trust peswiki's cents per kwh figures.

I mean, US nuclear plants are closer to 4.9 cents a kwh, not 12.

The second factsheet linked tells me nothing I don't already know.

Whatever the truth is : MASSIVE investments in windpower is being done by big energy companies, so it can't THAT expensive methinks.

Because they're also getting massive subsidies, up to 50% of the build cost in many cases and often including sweetheart deals for buying the electricity.

Personally, my non-hyrocarbon electricity generation 'mix' tends to be around 20% wind, 20% solar(day peaks), 40% nuclear, 20% 'other' which includes hydro, geothermal, etc...

By preference the Nuke plants would be cogenerating types - desalinating water, producing hydrogen, heating a town, providing industrial heat to produce ethanol or even refine oil sand/shale if we're not completely to using other sources yet. The options are pretty widespread, actually. Plus let's get to reprocessing, building breeders and thorium reactors, plants that can burn up our current nuclear waste safely.

Heck, have a process that you can ramp up/down elegantly and you can use nuclear plants as peakers even more efficiently. The CANDU already has the ability to scale in power production over 50%, so it's not like the ability isn't there, it's just not often used.

A major cost of nuclear reactors is the bickering of the NIMBYs. Construction can take fifteen years (ten for bickering, five for construction). An investor could be investing in something else which makes money during that time so to convince him to invest in your plant you have to garantee massive returns in the future.

Wikipedia has a page on the economics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_new_nuclear_power_plants

Umm.. did you actually read the Wikipedia page that you linked to? Do you realize that "bickering of the NIMBYs" and "fifteen year" construction period are not mentioned as a factor in any recent nuclear power plans? Do you realize that the high capital costs are even seen in nuclear-friendly France, were 80% of the power is nuclear?

To a degree opposition to nuclear power plants and changing nuclear power regulations in the 1970s did drive up costs of many plants in the U.S., but this was 30 years ago and licensing and regulation have been stable and plant-friendly for a generation now. (And the major reason that plant construction halted was that the expected electricity demand never materialized - not due to opposition or delays.)

Nuclear power has inherently high capital costs - the estimated costs for U.S. reactors and French reactors are about the same see: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf02.html ("$3382/kW for Gen III+ in USA, $3860 for EPR at Flamanville in France to $5863/kW for EPR in Switzerland, with world median $4100/kW"). U.S. plans actually are on the low end of the price spectrum.

It is getting ridiculous to blame the lack of new power plants on hippies from the 70s who will soon be drawing social security.

When a utiltiy builds a nuclear power plant, they are not only funding the cost of the plant itself, they are also funding 100% of your fuel cost up front plus containment and future disposal costs. See http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf02.html for the basis for some realistic cost estimates.

While it is cheaper for the consumer in the long run to run nuclear, there is a huge up front cost associated. Most banks will not accept the risks without an expensive reward. Governments can finance these types of needed infrastructure loans at a much better rate and reap the rewards (cheaper energy for the masses). If given the choice for the utilities to use an expensive bank loan or a cheap government loan, I am going to hope they choose cheap government loan. All of the costs of producing power are passed on to the customer in the rates paid by the customer. Utilities are regulated entities, and as such, are entitled to recoup the cost of providing service to the customer in the rate charged.

That's actually a misconception. Oil from "Persian Gulf" countries only accounts for 17% of foreign oil consumption, which is a mere 51% (same link) of our total oil usage, which is only 59% (Liquids + Natural Gas) of our total energy consumption. That makes Persian Gulf oil a mere 5% of our total energy usage. Our Nuclear usage is more than that (8%, second link), and everyone knows we hate Nuclear in the US.

The connection between our interests in the middle east and our oil needs is tenuous at best. What we really need the balls to do is build more Nuclear plants. Here China is again a great example, with 23 new reactors presently under construction.

It's not just solar, China has 24 nuclear power plants under construction, not to mention the world's most powerful hydroelectric power plant. So, they are embracing energy sources besides fossil fuels.

Are they big on nuke plans there? or the old COAL.

China: 12 reactors operating, 24 under construction. Plans are to quadruple those figures by 2020.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf02.html and http://www.solarbuzz.com/StatsCosts.htm and the crucial test, this article fails on my personal, does it sound like bull meter.

... To be honest I don't buy the "nuclear is expensive" thing. It's expensive the way you're doing it. Learn from the French...

Yes, I recommend ACTUALLY examining nuclear power costs in France and comparing them to other options. In France the projected capital cost of a new reactor (the EPR) is $3860/kW, MORE than the $3382/kW projected cost for the Gen III+, or the $2970/kW EPRI in the (presumably) "nuclear hostile" USA. See: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf02.html . It is impossible to compare ACTUAL CURRENT costs from equivalent recent projects in France vs the U.S. since there aren't any in either place.

But the capital cost of the ACTUAL competition with new nuclear power plants, which are gas-fired power plants not solar power plants, is only $635-1747/kW. This is the real reason nuclear power plants seem so difficult to get built. They are INHERENTLY much more expensive to build than the competition, and for a variety of reasons (the drive for short-term financial performance among them) utilities are reluctant to take a big hit up front, which will take them much longer to turn a profit. The historical rate of default (look up the WHOOPS project) cited in the article is an additional financial factor.

The regulatory environment for nuclear power plants in the U.S. has been stable and generally nuclear-favorable now (in that licensing is stable and well defined, and has favored standardized plants) for 30 years now (since the days of Reagan).

I was very surprised to find out how much water seems to be lost in nuclear power plants, on paper you are right, one would think that it would almost all get recycled. Either economics or changing environmental regulations seems to cause evaporative cooling to be used. (this is for rivers that you cannot put over heated water back into them due to environmental regulations.)

If you read the commentary about super critical coal powered plants at http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/cooling_power_plants_inf121.html you will see something odd about the water usage projections for super critical coal plants.

Super critical coal plants and Nuclear plants on the Mississippi use about 30% more water than one would expect and it seems that this is being lost to evaporation in some manner that is not clearly explained and is just a best guess. Is this a secondary cooling system to comply with environmental regulations? I don't know but it seems like coal and nuclear power plants on the Mississippi are losing a lot of water to evaporation. I like you am not really sure why, because as you say, you basically run a closed system with a cooling system that should make the water loss just that of the evaporative effects of the water being a few degrees warmer.

The real cost of nuclear power is interrest , amortisation, capital, insurance. The fuel and the production cost *nothing*. Cost of nuclear pwoer all counted

production cost

So it is quite clear to me, if solar *win* one day, it is only because of the heavy burden financially and insurance on the nuclear power. Otherwise nuclear electricity, even counting decommissioning and fuel cost, is dirt cheap. *cheaper* than coal, gas , oil, or whatever.

NO, QuantumG is not one of my aliases.

And No, I don't make comments designed to piss people off. However, that is often the effect when they find out their reality or opinion is wrong or simple doesn't make sense in the real world.

Here is a good source of reactor information. Here is another source of reactors as of 2010.Be cautious because they don't clearly date their articles so it might be a few years old and all you have to do is search for the reactor names and find out if they are under construction still or built and in operation. And yes, I do understand that it is a propaganda site pushing nuclear power as it's the website of the nuclear trade organization claiming to represent the world. But that is where the information is and you can simply search for them in google and find independent sources on the costs and operations.

Now if costs is a concern, then I suggest you take a look at this wikipedia article. Yes, I know it's wikkipedia but it's referenced and you can validate the claims with a simple search is you choose to. But if you notice the costs estimates which include actual costs, you will see that cost is highly influenced by the country of installation as well as type of unit. Most are within the op's price range, some are over it. With units like the GenIII AP1000 units, the buildings are pretty much modular and construction costs can be controlled pretty well. But as you notice with their installation in Vogtle, the cost is not only higher by about 4b, but a transmission line upgrade of about 3 billion had to be installed too.

Actually, the data says an over abundance of regulation and irrational fear is what causes drastically increased costs on nuclear power...

Umm, no, the data does not say that to me.

First off - note that nuclear power advocates (which includes me) are quick to point out the admirable safety record of nuclear power plants, and how even a worst-case disaster like TMI had negligible practical consequences (beyond destroying an expensive reactor and incurring a complex and costly clean-up effort).

The safety of these plants and the capital cost of construction are not unrelated - it sounds like you are up for stripping out lots of costly safety measures (like the containment dome that kept TMI safely bottled up despite hydrogen gas explosions in the building). If you do this, then the plants aren't nearly as safe as they were.

Nuclear power advocates can't have it both ways. Appropriate safety standards cost money. New designs can trim this, but not at the cost of getting rid of that 'irrational' safety stuff.

Second, reactor cost data do not back you up at all. Nuclear power plants have been built all over the world, with many different regulatory environments and cost structures. In a "nuclear-power friendly" but high-cost nation like France the capital cost of a new reactor (the EPR) is $3860/kW, MORE than the $3382/kW projected cost for the Gen III+, or the $2970/kW EPRI in the (presumably) "nuclear hostile" USA. See: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf02.html .

You have to go to Asia (China) to get nuke capital costs below $2000/kw.

But the kicker here is that the capital cost of a gas-fired power plant is only $635-1747/kW. This is the real reason nuclear power plants seem so difficult to get built. They are INHERENTLY much more expensive to build than the competition, and for a variety of reasons (the drive for short-term financial performance among them) utilities are reluctant to take a big hit up front, which will take them much longer to turn a profit.

The only people I have come across that support Nuclear are Nuclear scientists, and deluded Slashdot posters, indulging in wishfull thinking.

And the French. Don'f forget the French. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France

Or the Japanese... - http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf79.html

Or the British even... - http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2009/apr/15/nuclearpower-edf

How about the rest of europe... - http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/ukfs_news/hi/newsid_4710000/newsid_4713300/4713398.stm

"Our own socieconomic models are designed for the military industrial complex to provide a reason for its existence."

Japan has one of the lowest military expenditures as a percentage of GDP in the world [1], yet is the third largest nuclear power user in the world [2]. Granted, most energy is imported as fuel. But your argument that the military industrial complex demands centralized power is flawed: industrialization in general demands centralization.

Who's going to build the "natural gas turbines, solar power, gas, oil, solar and wind and geothermal, nuclear and space [sic]" plants? I suppose those parts will be built in factories. Where will those factories get power? Well, it would be most cost effective, due to economies of scale, to build one large power plant to power the factories. And now you've ended up with a single, large power plant in order to build your hypothetical small ones.

Costs of transmission versus costs of production and fixed capital costs favor centralized power. Indeed, as Freeman Dyson will tell you, cheap, centralized power enables Western prosperity.

Decentralized energy production is what humanity had for most of its history, and relative to today humanity was for most of its history utterly destitute. Cheap energy means less poverty. That's why we love oil; that's why the Chinese burn so much coal; that is what makes us so advanced today.

Thus, though you're concerned with socioeconomic problems, I consider "14 families [controlling] all of the worlds energy supplies" (a gross exaggeration) a small price to pay for bringing billions of people out of poverty.

[1] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2034rank.html?countryName=Japan&countryCode=ja&regionCode=eas&rank=149#ja
[2] http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf79.html, more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Japan

"Will you create plastics feedstock from nuclear electricity?"

Yes, basically, if you have steam and a source of carbon (coal, waste plant material ...) you can produce any hydrocarbon you want.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf116_processheat.html

The following link has a table of reactors currently under construction (or with construction about to commence) in China.

Chinese Nuclear Build

It can be seen that the construction schedule is mostly in the range 3 -5 years per plant.

The capital costs of the new Chinese plants seem to be well under $2 billion per GWe capacity (avg ~ 1.5 billion). At this price they are probably cheaper than coal when the much lower fuel costs are taken into account. Notably some of these new plants are Generation III+ Westinghouse AP1000 reactors.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf02.html

The following link has a table of reactors currently under construction (or with construction about to commence) in China.

Chinese Nuclear Build

It can be seen that the construction schedule is mostly in the range 3 -5 years per plant.

The capital costs of the new Chinese plants seem to be well under $2 billion per GWe capacity (avg ~ 1.5 billion). At this price they are probably cheaper than coal when the much lower fuel costs are taken into account. Notably some of these new plants are Generation III+ Westinghouse AP1000 reactors.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf02.html

No nuclear plants are under construction

WTF?

http://www.google.com/search?q=nuclear+plants+under+construction

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf17.html

Nuclear power capacity worldwide is increasing steadily but not dramatically, with over 50 reactors under construction in 13 countries.
[...]

In Finland, construction is now under way on a fifth, very large reactor which will come on line in 2012, and plans are firming for another large one to follow it.

France is building a similar 1600 MWe unit at Flamanville, for operation from 2012, and a second is to follow it at Penly.

Slovakia is completing two 470 MWe units at Mochovce, to operate from 2011-12.

In Russia, six large reactors are under active construction, one being a large fast neutron reactor.

South Korea plans to bring a further eight reactors into operation by 2016, giving total new capacity of 9200 MWe. Of the first six, now under construction, four are improved OPR-1000 designs.

Japan has one reactor under construction

In China, now with eleven operating reactors on the mainland, the country is well into the next phase of its nuclear power program. Some 22 reactors are either under construction or likely to be so by the end of 2009.

On Taiwan, Taipower is building two advanced BWRs at Lungmen.

India has six reactors under construction and expected to be completed by 2010.

Pakistan has a second 300 MWe reactor under construction at Chasma,

In Iran nuclear power plant construction was suspended in 1979 but in 1995 Iran signed an agreement with Russia to complete a 1000 MWe PWR at Bushehr. Construction is well advanced.

(I've tried to remove all the "planned" and "likely"s)

To be honest my post was intended as a cheap shot on sweden and promotion for nuclear energy

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf42.html
"Sweden has a tax discriminating against nuclear power – now about 0.67 Euro cents/kWh."

2006: 43.6/46.3/9.4/0.7% water/nuclear/fossil/wind
2008: 46.9/42.0/9.7/1.4% water/nuclear/fossil/wind

"In 2008, Sweden generated almost 146 billion kWh, of which 42% was from nuclear (61.3 billion kWh)."

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf41.html
"The USA has 104 nuclear power reactors in 31 states, operated by 30 different power companies. In 2008, the country generated 4,119 billion kWh net of electricity, 49% of it from coal-fired plant, 22% from gas and 6% from hydro. Nuclear achieved a capacity factor of 91.1%, generating 805 billion kWh and accounting for almost 20% of total electricity generated in 2008. Total capacity is 1,088 GWe, less than one tenth of which is nuclear."

"The country's 104 nuclear reactors produced 799 billion kWh in 2009, over 20% of total electrical output."

So more than twice as much of the energy in Sweden already come from nuclear power than in the US, and have for long since we haven't built anything new but rather closed things down. In the US it seem like they rather want to build more.

More than 70% percent of your (if you're american) energy come from coal and gas, whereas our fossil fuel based energy is less than 10%.

Guess who wins?

the initial construction costs don't say a lot about the overall viability.

Exactly.

it's perfectly possible to use it for further energy generation with the proper reactor design.

True, I've had the impression that using the right type of reactor you could both get way more energy out of your fuel and also got waste which you need to store hundreds of years, not thousands.

So for actual work done by the biogas plant products you have a number hovering around 12GWh.

I have no idea what the efficiency of the buses are. I hate them, the city is rather small, taking the bus takes as long as taking the bike and atleast as long as they where driven on diesel you had the rather nasty hot fumes coming out of them when you ride the bike behind them. Not an issue now but whatever. They should close all roads and make it bikes only, no red lights and shit like that. Don't know how to solve the transport of goods though ..

Sorry, this is utter bullshit. Look up the European supergrid concept

You mean the supergrid that is still a couple of decades away before it can be implemented? Yeah, I was sticking to today's technologies not stuff that we might have in a generation or two. Besides, even the supergrid is projected to have sizable transmission losses, it's just they will be less than what we currently have.

The real answer is using small, reliable, nuclear reactors that can be used on a neighborhood basis and thus suffer nearly no transmission losses since the transmission distance is negligible. There are many designs which are extremely safe and can't possibly be used for anything but power generation. You drop them in place and then replace them when they are depleted, refurbishing them at a central location for re-use.

I want PROOF of nuclear plants that are cost effective (not excluding tons of government welfare.) We hear about next gen nuclear power and fuel recycling etc but its all just talk nobody ever cites an example. I've never seen it done yet so hypothetically, if examples are given, would they be verified credible examples?

There's tons of proof out there. Here are just a few examples I found:

The Costs of Generating Electricity: nuclear 2.26 pence/kWH, wind 5.35 pence/kWH
The Economics of Nuclear Power (average for EU 2007): nuclear: 6.4 cents/kWH, 9.8 cents/kWH

I'd say that The Royal Academy of Engineering should be pretty credible as a source. The Economics of Nuclear Power also cites a lot of credible sources which can be verified.

where are the magical no waste plants?

Less (a lot less) "waste":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor

Safety:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor

India is building them (and will go Thorium instead of Uranium):

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf53.html

Tell me, for how long did you research your convictions before posting insults?

"
According to this http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf41.html , 4-8 units will be build in the next decade in the US."

Too little, too late. We need probably close to 100 or more Nuclear Plants to get off coal powered ones. And we need to build more Hydro Electic Dams, but that is also held up because of environmentalism. Progress requires sacrifice and hard work.

Well rather than responding to Mr AC I'll respond to you and let see if we can break this down with some reasoned discourse.

Lets start here:

But it isn't many thousands.

The BBC interviewed a group who represent workers who cleaned up the Chernobyl accident. Whilst 30 workers died immediately, 15000 relief workers died and 50,0000 workers were left invalid. Ukraine's Health Ministry estimates that 3.5 million people, over a third of them children, have suffered illness as a result of the contamination, and the incidence of some cancers is 10 times the national average.

To get many thousands, which some studies do, what you have to do is say "Radiation is deadly, anyone who is exposed and dies, died of the radiation" and then "X years later, many thousands of people are dead" and conclude "Many thousands of people died from the radiation".

Except that it's the radioactive isotopes that were released into the environment that are radiation emitters. This demonstrates Mr AC has a very poor understanding of what it is that was actually *dangerous* about Chernobyl, bio-accumulation. Radioactive *isotopes* that escape into the environment analogue other elements when presented to a metabolism in the food chain. Take plutonium for example, it analogues iron when presented to a human metabolism, as high energy alpha emitter in the body it is extremely toxic.

What is plain to see is that many *thousands* of people are displaying signs symptomatic of radiation poisoning from being exposed from the radioactive isotopes released by Chernobyl. Can you understand the consequences of the accident are still unfolding and will be doing so for many decades to come?

To get a useful number...

Followed by the most absolutely disgraceful treatment of people who actually were there to clean up the mess. Only an AC could post such a callous justification.

The other way to get "many thousands" of dead is even more disingenuous. You pick a number out of the air (say, 0.01%) and then multiply that by all causes of death that we believe may be related to radiation exposure. Then, because these illnesses are fairly common, and the world is a big place, you say "thus, so-and-such many people around the world died because of fallout from Chernobyl". Which is completely unprovable and arbitrary.

Ok lets examine these facts. 1 millionth of a gram of plutonium is a carcinogenic dose in the human body. From World Nuclear Association's website on the Chernobyl disaster ;

The resulting steam explosion and fires released at least 5% of the radioactive reactor core into the atmosphere and downwind.

5% of a 160 ton Nuclear reactor core that was about to be refueled - let's call it 100 tons, that's 5 tons of radioactive core into the atmosphere. At conservative estimates thats 5000,000,000,000 fatal doses. If we accept that an extremely conservative estimate of 1% of this makes it into the food chain via bio-accumulation and of that a conservative estimate of 1% of people are exposed and a conservative 1% of those exposed actually get some sort of fatal cancer that's 5,000,000 fatalities.

In reality this disaster will continue, at conservative estimates, for many decades killing more and more people. Of course you have the rather convenient position that many of these countries are too poor to measure these fatalities so the true number of how many millions Chernobyl actually killed will never really be know.

Power Source: EROEI(actual)
Hydro: 50, 43 and 205
Nuclear (centrifuge): 18.1, 18.4, 14.5, 13.6 and 14.8
Nuclear (diffusion): 6.0, 6.7, 5.8, 7.9, 5.3, 5.6 and 3.9
Coal: 12.2, 7.4, 7.32, 3.4 and 14.2
Gas (piped): 16
Gas (piped a lot or liquefied): 3.4, 3.76 and 4
Solar: 10.6
Solar PV: 12-10, 7.5 and 3.7
Wind: 12, 6, 34, 80 and 50

As you can see, the estimates vary widely, there's a lot of guesswork involved in making these estimates. Overall the renewables don't fare that badly, especially wind and hydroelectricity.

In case you were wondering, here's the CO2 emissions:

g/kWh CO2 Japan Sweden Finland UK: SDC EU ExternE WNA
coal 990 980 894 891 815
gas thermal 653 1170* -
gas combined cycle 450 472 356 362
solar photovoltaic 59 50 95 53
wind 37 5.5 14 6.5
nuclear 22 6 10 - 26 16 19.7 17
hydro 18 3 -

So yes, even with all the intensive energy requirements for renewables, they still are better than fossil fuels. The problems with widespread use of renewables are political (i.e. Republicans and conservatives don't like them), require intensive upfront capital costs, and infrastructural (the power grid is not designed to carry power where likely wind generation sites are).

Whereas the leftover warheads from the former USSR........well, they're not lost, I'm sure that former officials in Russia know exactly who they sold them to.

Yes they do. They were paid quite well for them. Of course why take the risk of selling them to a terrorist organization when there are legitimate agencies ready to buy them as well.

Yes, the cost of nuclear power has gone down since the 1990's because those decommissioned nukes are much easier to de-enrich to civilian nuclear power plant levels than it is to enrich normal uranium ore.

The Russian's have several nuclear devices in space: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf82.html

Why not use real numbers? Another post pointed to the a Wikipedia article on the economics for new nuclear power plants.. This includes a section that includes capital cost estimates of $3,000-5,000/kW. These projects new projects are all in the $10B ballpark. These numbers are sourced from a January 2010 report by the World Nuclear Association, a nuclear power trade group, so this is probably as optimistic as you'll get.

For wind power, we can turn to the US government reports a quick search turned up the DoE's NREL annual report on wind power (May, 2008) show an installed cost of "$1,240/kW to $2,600/kW, with an average cost of $1,710/kW." Even accounting for the capacity factor difference, Wind is looking pretty competitive vs nuclear. (Also, from the NREL report, you can see the average turbine size is 1.65MW - using a 3KW turbine to calculate costs is just mind-boggingly silly.)

The other salient point is that while thousands of megawatts of new wind generation is being added annually (according to NREL, 35% of new generation capacity was wind), 0% is nuclear (the last plant that went online in the US was in 1996. The $8.3B loan backed by the Obama administration for the $14B A.W. Votgle plants aren't scheduled to come online until 2016 and 2017).

All this is a long way of saying that I'm quite surprised that your comment could possibly be rated informative. It's a rant based on a hare-brained back of the envelope calculation (although I do admit there's some humor in the fact that the $14B price tag that you're aghast about is the actual cost of a new 2200MW nuclear plant) that seems to have managed to make many claims and conclusions without having done some pretty basic research.

Uranium and plutonium are toxic, but botox is more toxic and people inject themselves with it on purpose to have less wrinkles. Caffeine is more toxic as well, but people drink it in large amounts. Google the LD50 levels if you do not believe me.

Radioactive materials with long half-lives are not necessarily more dangerous. Usually it works the other way around, since materials with short half-lives tend to release energy faster, so it takes less exposure time to get sick. The danger depends on the kind of radiation emitted (alpha, beta, gamma) and the intensity of it. The worst are intense gamma emitters like Iodine-131. Uranium-238 for example is a pretty mild alpha emitter.

Nuclear reactors do not explode like a weapon. Chernobyl was not a nuclear explosion. It was a meltdown. The reactor got into a positive feedback loop and entered into a rampant meltdown. The meltdown caused steam explosions as pipe pressure went up and the graphite ignited. Depending on reactor design, a nuclear reactor will not have a rampant (positive feedback loop) meltdown if coolant escapes the core. Such reactors are said to have a negative void coefficient. PWR and BWR reactors, as used in the US, are usually safer like this. Chernobyl was an RMBK reactor with a positive void coefficient. Such reactor models are not used in the West.

A nuclear power plant has a high EROEI ratio. Especially when the uranium is enriched using now commonplace gas centrifuge technology. Estimated energy payback period is between 3 and 5 months. Not years, let alone decades.

Given the things you listed above - how come the French seem to make it work for them?

Does the U.S. have native coal and oil supplies that make these other sources more viable?

I'm just curious as to what the big difference is that allows one country to produce almost 75% of it's energy needs but elsewhere it's not possible?

Even better, according to the numbers given in the article the cost is still higher than gasoline.

If you go to the DOE site that breaks down gasoline prices you see that the costs of the crude oil and refining it into gasoline are approximately 74% of December's retail price average of $2.61, making that part cost $1.93 per gallon. The article has this to say about the price of cellulostic biofuel.

In the United States, Novozymes is working with Poet LLC, the nation's top corn ethanol producer, which plans in 2011 to open a 25-million-gallon cellulosic plant fed with corn husks and corncobs. Over the past year, Poet has nearly halved its total production costs to $2.35 a gallon, and expects to fall below $2 by the ribbon-cutting.

Note that this price is heavily subsidized and it's STILL higher than plain old gasoline. They say in several years they might be able to get the enzyme costs down another 25 cents or so but I don't know if they are taking into account higher prices of feedstock as demand increases. Those increases will surely counteract some of the savings in enzyme costs.

I still don't understand what drives this technology. Years of research for something that is barely in the same price range as what it is intended to replace. Wouldn't we be better off investing in small nuclear reactors? They could be placed every few miles, provide cheap, plentiful, local electricity at very low losses which would charge electric vehicles or break apart water for hydrogen-powered cars.

Overall I dislike the high amount of government subsidies that go into alternative fuels. If a technology is promising then let the companies subsidize themselves, they can go out and get investors just like every other business.

This isn't a serious problem, and taxpayers _aren't_ paying for it.

But if it _was_ a serious problem, then yes, taxpayers should pay for it. Just like taxpayers pay for it if my house catches on fire.

Yes and no. Taxpayers only pay to stop the fire (so it doesn't spread to other taxpayers' houses). Your insurance (if you have it) pays to repair/rebuild your losses.

And taxpayers would pay for it if a wind turbine collapsed

...? Really? Why would taxpayers pay if a privately owned tower collapsed on privately owned land? Just because it's big???

and taypayers pay to clean up the pollution left by coal plants and coal mining. You do realize that cleaning up the acid mine drainage from coal mines is mostly paid by taxes, right?

Governments were unaware or paid off by various coal companies to ignore the problem for years. Legislation wasn't in place to force the coal company to account for the environmental cost of producing power from coal. Do tax payers pay for it? Yes. Should they? No.

If it's a small leak or a small accident, then yes, the plant should and will pay for it. But in a serious emergency, do you really _want_ them to take care of it?

Are you arguing about who is going to _DO_ it or who is going to PAY for it? There IS a difference.

The government has more training in disaster management, and they have more resources. Plus I'm not really gonna trust the people that caused the problem to fix it properly. So yes, taxes pay for disaster relief. That's the way it's always been.

Working backwards: argument by tradition??? (tossed)
Yes the government is better at this, and certainly I trust them more to fix the problem better than the company that caused the problem. However, that shouldn't prevent the government from saddling the company and the owners with the cost of fixing their mess.

But when was the last time there was a disaster at a nuclear plant in the US?

Umm, beyond right now you mean? How about the problems they had during the great eastern power outage a few years back?

I can give you several places where the government is paying to clean up after coal just within a few miles of my house. But the only instance of them cleaning up after nuclear that I can think of is Three Mile Island. And that wasn't exactly expensive.

Not expensive? "The cleanup of the damaged nuclear reactor system at TMI-2 took nearly 12 years and cost approximately US$973 million. "
Even now 1 Billion dollars is not something to sneeze at. That's what it cost from 1979 to 1991.

Taxes ARE NOT government insurance for corporations. Taxes are payed by individuals of society for the benefit of the individuals of that society. The government is not an insurance company for other companies, despite what they currently seem to think.

After perusing this page, a couple thoughts... first, they have 11 in operation and 20 under construction; a small number but a huge growth rate.

But why the continued big plans for coal? A major second factor is they do not yet have self-sufficiency in reactor design, construction, or fuel processing. Relying on foreigners for their energy supply would be a huge national security risk (just like the US and oil, look how many entanglements that has caused). Building a new industry from scratch takes a while, even in China. But they are planning to get from virtually nothing today to 16% of electricity generation by 2030.

My point is that nuclear is cheap in the long run. It's still fairly cheap in the long run if you add the costs of the plant. I'll cite a source. It's environmentally friendly too (scroll down to the External Costs section).

The US has one of the largest supplies of uranium, both mined and in the ground.

Errr no not even close...

Look at the Known Recoverable Resources* of Uranium 2007:

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf75.html

Australia is not part of the US...at least not officially!!!

I don't accept your premise.

(Or, I find your lack of faith disturbing.)

Though science, we can provide a first-world lifestyle for all those people. We can build enough nuclear plants to provide enough energy to supply them all with power, and desalinate seawater, and still have plenty left over.

Nuclear fuel is that abundant. You can even extract it from seawater. Growth problems go away with the application of enough electricity.

Besides: population growth is self-limiting. Affluent people have fewer children. As we see more people enjoy a first world lifestyle, with its education and contraceptives, we'll see worldwide population sizes level off just as it they have in first world nations.

There's a huge amount of nuclear fuel available. Nuclear fuel supply is not a problem.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf62.html

Seems there are zero commercial thorium-only reactors in the United States.

So, now I am wondering if the idea sounds great on paper, but is unable to be made a commercial reality.

Seem that if it was so easy to do, someone would have done it by now, as generating electricity for a utility seems a win-win in terms of profit.

yes, U is getting in short supply now

Not true.