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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."
It's not instead of. It's in addition to. "Pave Arizona with solar cells" vs "Build new nuclear plants" is a false dichotomy. All of these things are better than oil, especially given the foreign dependencies that entails. So we do several of them in parallel, while we figure out what the best answer is. My hunch is that we will continue to generate electricity from many sources for a long, long time to come. Just as the best approach to renewable energy is not solar, or wind, or hydro, or biofuels, but probably a mix of all of these, the best answer to reducing fossil fuel usage probably includes a mix of alternatives.
Maybe one day we will have thermonuclear power plants, the nuclear reactors will be obsolete, and we will have abundant energy. I dunno. Right now, however, there is a shortage of energy. We rely too much on natural gas and petroleum. The exporters of those feel their power and twist the arms of the importers. The money made from gas and oil are insane and they are the foundation of too many of the world's tyrants and lunatics-in-power. Cut their revenue streams and they will suffocate.
It seems that making abundant electricity can alleviate that problem at least as far as natural gas is concerned, so we can get rid of the natural gas racketeers (mainly Russia). If we go to hydrogen economy we can liberate ourselves from the petroleum racketeers as well. To have hydrogen-based economy we need a lot of energy. People get excited by the progress in fuel cell technology but rarely ask themselves how hydrogen is to be produced in gigantic quantities.
True, there are risks in nuclear energy production that can't just vanish. But, dammit, nuclear energy has no alternative for the moment.
I'll equate nuclear fission energy to other forms of energy when somebody finally releases the true figures of the cost per kW/h.
They must include the expenses for keeping nuclear waste in safety from leaks, terrorism and international crime, the expenses to cure people when depleted uranium is dumped into the environment during wars and so on.
Basically we are betting the safety of the planet on the assumption that future generations will find tech to render radiation harmless AND that this tech won't be used to enslave people (in a polluted world the ones with that tech decide who lives and who doesn't).
I think better try fusion, or even recreate what Nikola Tesla did. At least we know it's already been done once.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
You should look into how they handle the radioactive waste from coal plants. CO2 isn't the only bad thing they throw into the atmosphere.
I had hoped that when new nuclear reactors showed up in the U.S., they would be of more sensible designs, like pebble-bed or thorium. *sigh*
Because most of the UN is made up, not of noble scholars and thoughtful people...they're the kind of people who took control of a small nation in the middle of the night from their cousins, kill their own civilians for fun and bully the nation next door to get more resources, once they realize they've squandered their own. See also Chavez; taking the farms from the white owners left a lot of land to work, and at gunpoint it gets worked quite poorly, lowering the amount of food for the populace.
America after World War Two was magnanimous; we had freed a billion people, almost completely for free (the Brits had a lend-lease thing going on) then we started pumping in millions for all the cities we'd just blown up: we realize, at the state level, that we need the other nations...but we don't need to conquer the other nations.
America has never said it wants to attack, change the government and own another nation; we don't want more territory- we just want wars there to stop. It's maddening when we take part in a distant war (think Bosnia) where we bombed the Christians and worked for the Muslims, and then come home. But we're not about expansion-for-expansion's sake, many/most of the UN members cannot make such a claim.
The president of Iran for example has spoken many times of using a nuke to wipe Israel off the planet (in direct violation of UN law) so many times, we're pretty sure he means it. So...what do you think he'd do if he had one? And after that job was done, he'd bully the neighbors.
We used the atomics at a very, very early stage; we were in the largest war, ever, working against time with the Germans who were close to getting it first. But notice: in 60 years or so, we've never used it in anger. As a nation whose leaders are accountable to the people, it makes it very hard for a madman to rise to the ranks and do the deed. (And notice Regan didn't; he was trying to scare the Russians, and the best way to do that is to tell the Liberals something scary, since the friend-of-my-enemy is a Liberal. The Kremlin was behind the No Nukes Movement...I know what I'm talking about, here.)
It's just so surreal, though; knowing the good we've done, the 40,000 men who died to clear France for example, the play-by-the-rules military that we have, and there's a world of bloggers trying to convince us *WE* are the enemy. George Soros is definately getting his money's worth. I just hope there are History books that can be written, to store the history of the greatest propoganda posed by man.
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While I can't agree with the sibling post's tone, I can understand his/her frustration that the plutonium toxicity myth continues. I suppose once these things get started they never die, particularly if the alternative is cognitive dissonance.
The standard delusional fantasy is that a pound of Pu 239 can cause 8 billion cancer deaths, plus or minus. Which begs the question, what are we all doing here? What with the hundreds of pounds of plutonium atomized into the atmosphere in the 40's & 50's.
Another thing is, I wonder if you could concentrate the "badness" of CO2 into a small enough volume that would enable you to store it indefinitely instead of releasing it into the biosphere, how nasty would that substance be? Pretty nasty I would think. But if you could, would you? I bet you would. So in fact what the Munch-style disaster fantasists consider to be nuke's Achilles tendon is actually something you would like to do with other technologies, if only you could. Funny, huh?
And finally with regard to the BWR design...once again it's the American approach of using partially enriched uranium. Which goes way back to the original decision to use that fuel strategy because you can make smaller cheaper reactors and what the hey, the U.S. has all those enrichment facilities sitting around that were built for...other things. Too bad it would be impossible to buy Candus because, well a) no enrichment facilities needed, they take natural U (if Iran really just wants to generate power they could do it without all those scary centrifuge thingies) and b) its a clever reactor structure that consists, and I'm not kidding here, of a series of tubes instead of one gigantic bucket, which makes it structurally redundant and intrinsically failsafe (did you know Canada had their own TMI event where the main reactor structure cracked and the big result was, radioactive water on the floor?) and c) you can shove fuel in one side and take it out the other while it's running and you never have down time for refueling.
But that's a pipe dream. What the US will get is unfortunately, glorified aircraft-carrier power plants, because, you know, might as well monetize some military technology that's just sitting around. More profitable that way, don't you know.
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I'd be happier if the USA began doing nuclear fuel reprocessing, which I believe is currently banned. Uranium fuel production will peak in the next few decades, much like oil and gas, so reprocessing is a good way to guarantee a supply of fuel and allow the reuse of existing spent fuel.
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No. Chernobyl is a terrible example, and only brought up by those who don't have the slightest bit of knowledge of nuclear power.
Chernobyl was an insanely dangerous reactor design. Only the Soviets ever designed reactors like this - every other country in the world uses reactor designs several orders of magnitude safer than Chernobyl. Even military ship reactors are orders of magnitude safer. The RBMK design was made with one reason only: to quickly get a reactor going, regardless of safety, to be ahead of the West during the cold war and to be able to crow about technical prowess. The Soviets habitually designed machinery like this. Take a look at the old Soviet era airliners - no thought put into the 'user interface' leading to nasty traps for the pilot to fall into. Things like having to retard the throttles on landing, and then flick a switch and push them FORWARD again for reverse thrust: counter intuitive, but fast and easy to design.
The RBMK reactor as used in Chernobyl and other places had several serious safety flaws - not least, they were a "fail dangerous" design if mistakes were made (which made an accident like Chernobyl inevitable). The design of the control rods coupled with the high positive void coefficiency of the reactor meant that when the operators went to shut the reactor down, it had the opposite effect, causing the reaction to run away. The lack of a cointainment building - another breathtakingly awful Soviet "innovation", meant that when the runaway reactor blew its lid off, it spewed all that radioactivity into the atmosphere.
No one else, absolutely no one else, ever built civil reactors with such a dreadful "fail dangerous" design.
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Reprocess it and generate mopre power is tho. Things that are radioactive are generally pretty good power sources.
What you really want is a reaction which progresses fully, leaving only non-radioactive elements. After all, if the waste product is radioactive, that means it's still got potential energy in it, has it not?
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No. The design of a nuclear bomb is very different from that of any nuclear reactor. They CAN spew radioactive material all over as with Chernobyl, but that was a very different and flawed design.
It should be possible to design a completely idiot proof reactor that would automatically disable itself in the event of coolant loss. Dunno why reactors aren't designed like that from the start.
Considering that the majority of all CO2, particulate, soot and trace elements like mercury are spewed into the atmosphere by coal fired plants, I don't understand why the environmentalists aren't clamoring for more nuke plants. I'm guessing that the antiwar/antinuclear weapon factions didn't make the distinction between bombs and power plants.
If they ever manage to bring out cheap solar panels and an economical storage system I'll be first in line. Freedom from big utilities, no terror threat due to decentralization - no downside!
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
Uh, maybe it's painfully obvious, but Hiroshima and Nagasaki had nothing to do with nuclear power production. Nice spin!
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Your "lesser of evils" excuse for dropping the bomb is based on false premises. Both the argument that Japan would not have surrendered if not the bomb, and the argument that more would be killed in conventional war is heavily disputed. Still, try it the other way around: Let's say Iraq had nukes, and decided to deploy them on Washington DC as a response to the US invasion. Let's say 200.000 dead. Looks better than the 500.000-1M dead Iraqis estimates. Sounds good to you? Iran acts as rationally as any other country (and certainly USA does not excel in this regard) in terms of defending her national interests in the power struggle world of international relations. No crack pot, no apocalypse is required to explain her behavior. The USA has demonstrated in Iraq that she is willing to dominate with force non-nuclear enemies. The lesson everyone has learned is that if they are to go against the will of the US, they need to get nukes ASAP. It is the only deterrent.
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Hydroelectric is one of the most environmentally destructive ways we can produce power. That and most of the naturally prime spots to put hydroelectric plants have already been used.
I would use all other options before hydroelectric.
Gone!
Well sure breeaders are better in theory. However, France's SuperPhoenix sat idle for 10 years because of coolant problems and other "maintenace." It was actually consuming more power because of the problems than it was putting out before it was shut down. I am not trying to say "reprocessing" is wrong, just that breeders might be a little too "first generation."
The sun won't last forever either, so should solar, wind, hydro, etc be abandoned as possible energy sources. Yes there are differences in time scales, but several centuries I would think at least qualifies as a long term solution. All future energy problems aren't going to be solved today, but other break throughs will happen in several centuries that will lead to other ways of of converting energy.
several centuries != forever
Pff. All we need is relliable power for another 50 years or so until we can figure out fusion.
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Oh, the IFR was a LONG way from becoming commercially viable (It was a proposed research/test reactor for the technology), and breeders are still very much a research-only phenomenon, but a major contributor to this fact is that even research breeders get axed/not approved because of shortsighted and/or clueless politicians that don't understand what they're regulating.
You've gotta crawl before you can walk, but politicians keep on stopping researchers/designers from crawling.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
This is something I've found extremely ironic. It's old news, but relevant to the article. After years of doing damage to the nation by opposing nuclear power, Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore has officially renounced his anti-nuclear groups, and called on other environmentalists to do the same.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/14/AR2006041401209.html
What the real pity is, is that these people were the ones who made it so incredibly difficult (litigation and monetarily) to build a new power plant. Back when opposing nuclear power was the cool thing to do, they lobbied and pushed for increasingly ludicrous laws and fees to try to stymy the growth of nuclear power. I'm sure they had good intentions, but this is just a classic example of a bunch of people latching on to a flawed idea, and then doing a ton of harm with it. As a result of it, now that they realize how dumb they were, or maybe just ruled by emotion, and call on people to start building power plants again, it's almost impossible to do it based on the litigation they themselves fought for.
In some way (of course they aren't the sole reason), they helped contribute to our complete dependence on Middle Eastern oil, and if you buy into what they say the war is about, they started it themselves.
To be honest, I really do hope that environmentalists start jumping on board here to try to make up for the damage they did. Make no mistake, I'm totally for not littering, and maybe even not building on the land of endangered species, but man, Greeenpeace has done some dumbass shit. By all means, nuclear power should be regulated, and standards enforced, but it really isn't the anti-christ. Seriously!
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If you want to post bad science, please get it from a conspiracy site (ie. Hoagland's site). Bad science without conspiracy theories is just too boring.
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Not to mention seawater extraction, which could provide thousands of years of fuel. Sure, it's something like 8 times as expensive, but fuel costs for nuclear reactors are proportionally low compared to their overall costs (much of which deal with amortizing the capital costs for construction).
I find it a little bit amusing and a little bit sad whenever people rail about "We only have X amount of resource Y left!". It's idiotic. Natural resources don't work that way, as though it's some sort of canteen that we're drinking out of, that suddenly we'll take the last sip from, and that's it. In the real world, it's almost always "We have X amount of resource Y left recoverable at current prices with current technology." As prices rise or technology improves, what's recoverable increases. Think of it this way: your average granite contains 10-20 ppm uranium, and is the most common mineral in the lithosphere. I'm not sure of the percent; let's say half of the lithosphere is granite (other igneous minerals will also tend to contain similar amounts of uranium). The mass of the lithosphere is 1.365e23kg, so about 70,000,000,000,000,000,000 (70 quintillion) metric tonnes of uranium in the lithosphere.
Of course, almost all of that is not even close to economically recoverable. But it's there. We don't "run out" of minerals; we just run out of things that can be extracted at current prices. But then another issue comes up: as current prices rise, what becomes economically recoverable rises as well. Not just linearly -- generally exponentially. Ideal, cheaply mineable deposits of minerals tend to be rare. Poorer deposits, however, are often an order of magnitude more common. Poorer still, add another order of magnitude, and so on. But it's not only rising prices that make things economical; it's also advancing technology. We continued building oil rigs in the 80s and 90s when gas prices were down -- yet, earlier in the century, the concept of building rigs during a period of low prices would have been laughable. We advanced the technology to the point where it was no longer uneconomical to use. The same thing has been happening with bitumen extraction in the present-day; it gets cheaper and cheaper as the technology improves.
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One can show/prove how/why something is bad science, not state it without further comment.