First New Nuclear Plant in US in 30 years

Hugh Pickens writes "With backing from the White House and congressional leaders, and subsidies like the $500 million in risk insurance from the Department of Energy, the nuclear industry is experiencing a revival in the US. Scientific American reports that this week NRG Energy filed an application for the first new nuclear power plant in the US in thirty years to build two advanced boiling water reactors (ABWR) at its South Texas nuclear power plant site doubling the 2700 megawatts presently generated at the facility. The ABWR, based on technology already operating in Japan, works by using the heat generated by the controlled splitting of uranium atoms in fuel rods to directly boil water into steam to drive turbines producing electricity. Improvements over previous designs include removing water circulation pipes that could rupture and accidentally drain water from the reactor, exposing the fuel rods to a potential meltdown, and fewer pumps to move the water through the system. NRG projects it will spend $6 billion constructing the two new reactors and hopes to have the first unit online by 2014."

Comments

What about them terrorists?

[bjourne]

One reason against nuclear power is that it is centralized. That is, it is farily easy to bomb a nuclear plant to take out electricity for a lot of people. Wind or solar power which is much more decentralized doesn't have the same problem because you have to strike hundreds of targets for the electricity to go down.

And what about the terrorists? How hard is it to imagine a few devoted terrorists infiltrating a plant to deliberately cause a melt-down?

Re:Hypocrisy

[Errtu76]

Exactly! I don't know why this comment is marked as flamebait, because it's a fair question (although it could probably be stated better). I can't help but wonder if this isn't a reaction to the ongoing anti-Iran campaign (specifically their nuclear plans). And indeed, why would we (the people) trust the ones who started the most wars based on bogus reasons?

Okay, i guess *this* post could qualify as flamebait :P

Funny part about that....

[WindBourne]

We dropped 1 bomb, and warned the Japaneses gov. The emperor chose to try and continue this. Basically, he told us to drop another. We had no real desire to do so. We can be "blamed" for the first one, but the Japaneses gov of the time deserves the blame for the second.

Re:Hypocrisy

[pipatron]

That sizeable part is more like the lunatic fringe such as and including, Iran, North Korea, and Syria. There isn't anyone seriously questioning if the US is more credible than Iran. I'm sure you can find protest groups and fringe movements in nearly every country INCLUDING the US but no one is listening to these people or taking them seriously.

I don't know, maybe I'm biased since I live in Europe, but calling whole of Europe a fringe movement doesn't sound fair to me.

Check out this recent survey from the Financial Times

Re:Here's why:

[Alioth]

If you want to claim the credit for things your granfathers did, then perhaps you can also stop hating France too - after all, France was instrumental in helping the United States win the War of Independence. Without France, you'd still be a British overseas dependency.

There are far better uses for the money

[consultant]

Given this story http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/23/1639205 that was posted on Slashdot only a few days ago regarding the commercially ready form of Solar Power at around $1 per watt there are many alternatives to the arguably clean nuclear power. If you took just a small chunk of the money ($6 Billion?) proposed, let's say about $1 Billion..... put that into further research by the Uni team who originally developed the solar panels technology to for the future, then take another $1B and create some Solar Farms at $1/watt, that 1 Gigawatt available much more cleanly, and far more quickly that the 7 year timespan quoted in the article (I'm willing to bet that within 7 years that $1B research investment in solar research would pay huge dividends). Then take the other $4B and use it for the upgrading of whatever other unclean power options are available to develop and improve (whilst the sun isn't up). Given the speed that renewable energy development is progressing it seems almost dumb to make a plan for a nuclear plant for 7 years time!
I'm no expert, but it seems to make a bunch of sense to me, to encourage and nurture cleaner/safer power technologies that are mature and market ready.
Just my 2 cents.