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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."
The ABWR seems like a fairly standard design. Nothing too exciting, although the submitter might want to note that no reactor drives the turbines "directly": there is always a heat-exchanger between the primary & secondary coolant stages, otherwise you're circulating highly radioactive water through a complex series of pipes and turbines under very high pressure.
We used them TWICE over a half century ago in a war against another nation state, and only when we were in the most dire of need to find a solution that wouldn't have slaughtered countless millions of not just our own soldiers, but Japanese as well. I guess what the rest of the world hates is that we're able to do the math. 100,000 or 10 million? And we're not afraid to make those kinds of decisions when we have to. Frankly, I don't trust Iran not to develop and then export either the components themselves, or the scientists and materials needed to make them to other states or groups that could strike the United States or our interests overseas. The restraints we have in place (it begins with secular Democracy) don't exist in Iran. Excuse me for not trusting a mad religious crack-pot dictator with an apocalyptic world view not to use a nuclear program to leverage his position in the world, and intimidate or harm "the great Satan".
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Before blasting nuclear energy as *potential* radioactive hazard READ THIS FIRST: coal-fired power plants dump tons of mercury polluting water and fish and turning good source of omega3 into a poison:
http://www.epa.gov/waterscience/fishadvice/advice.html
http://www.environmentaldefense.org/documents/3370_MercuryPowerPlants.pdf
thank you for your time
For reference. I found these here.
Coal-fired plants - 49.0 percent
Nuclear plants - 19.8 percent
Natural gas-fired plants - 19.2 percent
Petroleum-fired plants - 1.8 percent
Conventional hydroelectric power - 7.1 percent
Solar, wind, etc - 3.1 percent
"Well..here I am..." - Jubal Early
>we don't want more territory
The native Americans, French, Spanish, British, Mexicans, Canadians, Hawaiians, and Filipinos might have a little something to say about that. Do you know nothing about American history at all? We've been violently expansionistic for hundreds of years.
Where is that being done currently? All I found was this:
- The West Valley plant was deserted by its owners in 1972, leaving 600,000 gallons of high-level liquid waste and 30,000 gallons of radioactive sludge as a legacy to the State of New York. Solidification of this waste has been estimated by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission to cost about $500 million, once they solve the associated technical problems, which (it is estimated) will take a minimum of 14 years.
- Occupational exposures to radiation were very high at West Valley. In 1971, almost 1000 transient workers were hired to keep exposures to the 162 full-time workers down. Nevertheless, over three-quarters of the full-timers were over-exposed.
- Radioactive effluents into the environment from West Valley were very high. Concentrations of strontium-90 in local creeks were from 1000 to 10,000 times higher than projected. Over 65% of all the available Iodine-129 (half-life 17 million years) was released, either as a gas of liquid, showing up in the thyroids of wildlife and in cow's milk.
Yummy.I think that before any new nuclear facility is licensed, its operators should be required to pay in advance for the disposal of its spent fuel. I don't think it's right that the cost should be borne by the taxpayer.
This is already built into the cost of every kilowatt-hour consumed by those purchasing nuclear power. Unlike coal, oil, and even solar and wind, the cost of interring the waste from nuclear power is built into the cost from the onset.
Also keep in mind that half-life is generally inversely proportional to the amount of energy something radiates. If an isotope, like U238, has a half-life of 4.5 gigayears, then it is, for all intents and purposes, stable. The stuff that has a half-life in the range of tens of years is the dangerous stuff.
Hi,
The DOE has guaranteed to monitor and control the radiation output of Yucca mountain for a million years. That's right, 1 million years - it's the furthest out the government has planned anything.
We have spent $2 billion to study the geology of Yucca mountain, and there is no concern of someone getting hurt by any catastrophic event.
This is paid for, in part, by selling electricity to the tax payer from DOE's reactors.
No nuclear power plant can blow up in a nuclear explosion. First, the enrichment level of nuclear fuel for power plants is far too low to be able to cause an explosion, and second, even those reactors that use highöy enriched fuels have fuel elements in configurations that are unsuitable to create explosions. Remember that atomic bombs both need a very high enrichment level and a very precise shape to be able to explode. That's why it is difficult to produce atomic bombs.
One of the most notable individuals with this opinion was then-General Dwight D. Eisenhower. He wrote in his memoir The White House Years:
"In 1945 Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives."
and "The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan." Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.[35]"The use of [the atomic bombs] at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender." Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to President Truman.
The pebble-bed reactors are still several years out; they're considered gen IV, which are expected to arrive in 2030. The thorium reactors aren't particularly new (MSRE was what, the 60's?), but operators have been reluctant to build one, as they are radically different and nuclear power plant operators are a tad conservative... I suspect it might require a little nudging from the government. The ABWR is a gen III+ reactor, and not a particularly advanced one at that. They, however, do have a proven success record and, like most modern designs, incredibly safe.
Well Im in the UK so Ill say Sellafield which if you read that youll probably say "But that had a large leak recently!". And yes they did due to a design flaw. Also Japan does a lot of reprocessing. It has a bad reputation around the world due to things like West Valley that you mentioned. However I dont think this makes the idea of reprocessing invalid as such. I mean I dont see nearly as many people being concerned at the enormous amount of uranium and thorium being released into the atmosphere from coal fire power plants. As power generation system has their pollutants.
The CANDU is a nice design. It will not be licenced in the US as it has a positive temperature coefficient under certain operating conditions. That is that power generated increases as temperature increases. This can lead to a very bad feedback loop. (Indeed was one of the issues that contributed to the Chernobyl accident. )
The other issue is that deuterium is still expensive so you make a design choice about spending money on enriching urainium or makeing deuterium (which is really just enriching the water). There are other options, eg graphite but that was another problem with chernobyl, graphite is flammable.
Most of the military reactors use more enriched fuel so they can be small. Low enriched uranium fuel (used in us commercial and most research reactors) was a compromise with cost and lesser risk of diversion to make nuclear weapons.
If you are serious about working in the industry, try one of the plant vendors - GE (the one in the article), AREVA, or Westinghouse. Last I heard, they are all hiring to support the new plant construction. Alternatively, nukeworker.com is full of temp jobs in the industry to support maintenance outages.
Would you point out where he said he hates France? It's un-fucking-believable that you got moderated insightful for applying a stereotype to all of America.
If it's not a fast breeder reactor, it's not a solution to the energy problem.
U235 would run out within the next 60 years, IIRC, if we got all of our power from traditional nuclear powerplants like this one!
However, the world has tons of U238, so breeders could provide power for a long time. And if you made the changes necessary to run the breeders on Thorium instead of U238 (Thorium is even more abundant), then you coul provide power nearly indefinitely.
Breeders also solve the waste problem: The reason radioactive waste is so dangerous is that it still has tons of energy in it; the decay is the slow release of that energy. Since breeders extract so much more energy from fuel, their wastes have much shorter half-lives, and decay to the levels of naturally-occurring ores within a few hundred years -- which isn't great, but (1) sure beats the millennia we're talking about with our current wastes, and (2) seems to be a timescale society can handle.
We need breeders. Pebble-beds are wasteful; they (1) don't breed, and (2) generate a lot of pebble-coating waste. Anything but breeder reactors, and solar/wind/geothermal/hydro, is a waste of time. Breeder reactors are the only technology we currently have that can solve the energy problem. We should be building breeders.
How long it will last will depend on HOW MUCH is used. I predict we (the planet) will be using more power than predicted over the long term, thus it will be less than several centuries.
It basically becomes impossible to achieve that and still have a net energy output.
To simplify things greatly - Many of the byproducts (especially the final one, lead) poison nuclear reactions and make it so that if the fuel contains more than a certain amount of those byproducts, it is no longer capable of sustaining fission.
Unfortunately, most current reactor designs (including new ones) are quite inefficient in this regard. More efficient reactors get shot down for various reasons. For example, the IFR research reactor was shut down by politicians because of proliferation concerns - even though the reactor was less of a proliferation threat than even normal civilian PWRs. (They saw "breeder" and instantly thought "nuclear weapons" even though the IFR waste material would have been useless for producing weapons-grade fissiles.)
The IFR had some great advantages - It was far more efficient in terms of extracting energy from uranium, and it could burn basically any actinide (including those normally considered "unburnable waste" from other reactors). Compared to PWRs, its waste was MUCH more radioactive (bad), but significantly shorter lived (very good) - Something like 50-100 years half life for the longest-lived byproducts, as opposed to thousands of years for the waste actinides from PWRs.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
But the problem is that there's a limit to how far you can take energy efficiency. It's like short-cuts; you might be able to shave a whole hour off a journey by taking a different route, and there might even be another short-cut that knocks off another ten minutes, but eventually you're going to be taking the most direct route possible and there is no quicker way to get there. Well, at some point you will have everything as efficient as it possibly can get -- then, there's no more saving to be had. For instance, if you replace a gravity-fed hot water system with fully-pumped, you increase efficiency. If you improve your home's insulation, so you aren't heating outdoors, you increase efficiency. If you replace the old permanent-pilot boiler with one using electronic ignition, you increase efficiency, and if it's a condensing boiler, you increase efficiency even more. If you replace the boiler and hot water cylinder with a condensing combination boiler, and you have perfect insulation, you now have the most efficient hot water and heating system that exists: every joule of potential energy that you can liberate from the gas is ending up in your hot water or your radiators.
Even if you can get the per-capita energy requirement as low as possible (and the trend over time is generally upward, with infrequent downward spikes as energy-saving technologies are invented), the population is still growing. Energy conservation is very much a game of diminishing returns.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
...in Sweden. All three plants have enormous funds put aside for the construction and operation of long-term storage facilities. I've been down in the one they use for medium-level waste, and it's pretty impressive. Think underground Bond villian lair.
he half-life of plutonium is about twenty-thousand years. Only a tiny speck of will start a fatal cancer if inhaled or ingested.
Michael, according to the US Department of Energy, the risk of plutonium is somewhat exaggerated:
How are we going to store the nuclear waste in such a way that no one is hurt by it? Who will guard this facility for a million years? How much will that cost?
First, there's no reason to dump large quantities of plutonium. It's viable reactor material. Second, we can vitrify (turn into glass) nuclear waste and fix most of it in place for geological periods of time. Third, it's irresponsible to worry about a material, 40 half-lives later. That's a decline in amount by a factor of roughly 10^12. Finally, it's not our responsibility to protect people a million or even a thousand years from now from a slightly elevated risk of death. This more rational approach is reflected in how we handled our other refuse. Where's the protection a million years down the road for our junkyards, garbage dumps, and other dump sites? These present a greater risk down the road since heavy metals have no half-life. Where's the giant concrete pylons of doom that will warn future generations for hundreds of thousands of years that CRTs, rechargeable batteries, and mercury thermometers lie herein?
I think that before any new nuclear facility is licensed, its operators should be required to pay in advance for the disposal of its spent fuel. I don't think it's right that the cost should be borne by the taxpayer.
I see no problems with this requirement as long as we don't require ridiculous protection measures. Keep in mind the current approach is to dump fuel rods into a cooling pond. We probably can do better than that.EBR2, the IFR test reactor was built and operated. I'm not sure if you meant to imply that it wasn't. Of course, a commercial - scale power generating IFR has not been built, so it's still a highly experimental technology, but the test reactor was built and tested.
Two years ago I was part of a student panel discussion on what went wrong at Chernobyl. My part of the discussion focused on the human error involved...and it was huge. There were numerous failures of the state and those in charge of the plant. Many bad decisions were made and it ended up costing them lives, land, and dignity. So you all know, Chernobyl went up during a test that every other Soviet reactor had turned down. The test required disabling the emergency shut off button that dropped all the cooling rods into the core at once. The idiots did this all while continuing to operate the reactor. In the end, the technicians at the plant were heroes. They all worked extremely quickly to, many knowingly giving their lives, to make sure that it wasn't worse than it was. If you want to know more about Chernobyl, check out 'The Chernobyl Notebook' by Grigority Medvedev. It is a chilling account of everything that went wrong.
--- Bah, who needs a sig?
Yes, but there is still a finite amount of resource that exists within the earth, and an even smaller finite amount that can fundamentally be retrieved in a net-positive-energy way, regardless of the tech used.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
Afghanistan was in the middle of a civil war--in fact, on September 9, 2001, Ahmad Shah Massoud, the military leader of one of the warring factions, was killed by suicide bombers, two days before September 11 and almost a month before the US gave air support to Massoud's faction, the Northern Alliance, helping them drive out the Taliban and their al-Qaeda allies. The only mistake with Afghanistan was losing our focus and going to Iraq.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
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