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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 certainly better than burning oil/gas
In terms of carbon footprint, it's miniscule in comparison.
Sure there's toxic side by-products, but who's not to say that plutonium can't be used in something else?
Oh wait it can,
radioisotope thermoelectric generators (think long lived spaceprobes)
annnndd.....
fast breader reactors, which produce more Plutonium than they consume, which can then be used as fissile material for OTHER nuclear reactors...
Processing it is admittedly difficult, but a well known problem and established procedures.
So storing it is only one option. Take your scaremongering about nuclear energy back to the 80s where it belongs. It's by far the greenest option IMHO.
There is plenty of uranium, especially if you include extraction from sea water (which is probably economical since the price of uran is a very small part of the cost of running a nuclear plant.)
Besides, reprocessing spent fuel (which is not currently done in the US) increases the energy output of a given amount of uranium 60 times . In addition, reprocessing removes (burns) various troublesome byproducts which would otherwise require long-tem storage.
> I guess what the rest of the world hates is that we're able to do the math. 100,000 or 10 million?
Quote from Leo Szilard (Wikipedia) who played a major role in the Manhattan Project:
"Let me say only this much to the moral issue involved: Suppose Germany had developed two bombs before we had any bombs. And suppose Germany had dropped one bomb, say, on Rochester and the other on Buffalo, and then having run out of bombs she would have lost the war. Can anyone doubt that we would then have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and that we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them?"
Chernobyl was one such example.
To achieve this goal, instead of being water-moderated (like in all civilian US reactors), it was graphite-moderated.
This meant that if the water boiled off, it would actually increase output power (among other things). U.S. civilian PWRs lose the ability to continue the reaction if the coolant disappears because it is also the moderator.
In the case of Chernobyl, the graphite moderator had other problems - When the initial steam explosion occurred, the lid on the reactor pressure vessel was blown off, and exposed the graphite to air. Superheated radioactive flammable material + oxygen = BAD.
Chernobyl could not have happened in any U.S. reactor, both due to differences in safety policies and in fundamental reactor design. The worst accident in U.S. history (TMI) released less radioactive material into the environment than some coal-fired power plants release in just one day of operation due to trace amounts of uranium in the coal they burn. (There's one coal plant in Utah that is especially bad I believe.)
Given the choice of living 5 miles from a nuclear PWR, and 5 miles from a coal plant - I'll take the PWR!
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?