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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."
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
Not true. Boiling Water Reactors - as well as more modern designs such as the PBMR/HTGR - circulate the coolant from the reactor straight through the turbine. In the case of the BWR, this means that there is considerable radioactivity within the turbine system during operation, but it decays very fast when the reactor is shut down - Nitrogen-16, one of the primary activation products within the water, has a half-life of seven seconds.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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