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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."
Everybody busy reading TFA?
A monkey is doing the real work for me.
So this is what Ahmadinejad was called there to inaugurate! Cool.
Given the vast alternative resources available to the US, why do this before building large scale solar and wind plants? Is it really going to be cheaper than (say) paving large areas of desert with ever-cheaper solar cells? Or building the really large wind-farm projects in the many available on/off shore locations? As technology advances, these alternatives have got cheaper and cheaper..
And the full cost of Nuclear Waste disposal is still not known, nor is it included in the quoted "price" of the electricity..
"A nation that forgets its past is doomed to repeat it." - Churchill
There are many reactors which have problems operating right now because of local/regional water supply issues. Either water levels are too low or temperatures are too high... And it will only get worse in many states.
Worse as in 'even if the climate stops screwing around, most states have done a shitty job managing growth in relation to their water resources'.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
The goggles....they do NOTHING!
[Taps fingertips together.]
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
On the one hand, no matter how much time and effort is put into building a nuclear reactor, there's always a small chance that human error will cause a catastrophic meltdown leading to an almost incalculable loss of human life.
But, on the other hand, they're going to build it in Texas.
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
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.
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?
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.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
It's about time we started building new nuclear reactors. Anyone who wants to seriously reduce our oil addiction must look at nuclear -- it's really the only cost effective alternative, and it's safe, all the FUD aside.
/shrug.
Ironically, the FUD comes from greens, that should be supporting the things. But then again they've protested hydroelectric (kills fish), wind (kills birds), geothermal (OMG, it is cooling our crusts), so
If you throw white phosphorous and napalm under the chemical weapon boogie-man umbrella then you have to include every weapon that explodes. Trinitrotoluene (TNT) and cyclonite (C-4) are as much chemicals as WP and Napalm. Sorry to rain on your US-bashing parade.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
I just call... vaporware!
R Tape loading error, 0:1
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*
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
If you make biofuels the "traditional" way, you use microorganisms to break down molecules. These organisms use part of the energy stored in the fuel, and on top of that they are usually quite specific. What would be better would be to build a big nuclear reactor, and use its energy to heat up your (agricultural) waste to plasma temperatures. Inject coal, water or air to control your final product, and allow the plasma to condense, possibly in contact with the right catalysers. Voila: biofuel. And instead of having removed lots of joules from it, you will have injected some. At the same time, you got yourself an eco-friendly way to get rid of organic pollutants like insecticides. (You will have to find another way to treat heavy metals.)
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
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.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
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.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
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
Iran? I thought you were referring to GWB there for a moment.
The Republic of Iran is a democratically elected theocratic republic.
-metric
If you think that one sounds good, have a look at this paper on liquid metal cooled reactors:
http://nucleartimes.jrc.nl/Doc/ICONE13-50397.pdf
Essentially the safest reactor by far is the lead cooled fast reactor. It uses molten lead as a coolant in a non-pressurised vessel that doesn't have any tubes entering or leaving bellow the lead surface, making a loss of coolant accident virtually impossible. Thermal expansion of the fuel will shut it down well before dangerous temperatures. Because lead has a high thermal conductivity and heat capacity it doesn't need any pumps to circulate the coolant, natural convection from the temperature difference is enough. Thus even a complete loss of power, loss of pressure in the pressure vessel, and failure of the control rod shut-down system, will not damage the core.
As an added bonus it can operate with a fast neutron spectrum, allowing it to destroy the long lived isotopes of nuclear waste, leaving only fission products that decay bellow uranium levels within 300 years. It could even be used to destroy existing waste from PWRs. And the cost? Well, because it doesn't need any cooling pumps or pressurisers for the primary loop, can operate at high temperatures with good thermal efficiency, and due to the modest size of its containment structure, it is expected to be one of the cheapest design of all reactors, putting it bellow many fossil fuel plants even before carbon quotas are taken into consideration.
Really, pebble beds are good and nice, but it is nothing compared to some of the designs in the pipeline...
About the only educated people they want connected with nuclear energy these days are the advertising agencies that tell us how they don't need anybody that knows about Radiation becuase the reactors are clean green new and improved protected by American knowhow instead of that nasty Russian stuff. You are better off heading overseas where they take radiation risks seriously.
Wait, you're using something that happened in Russia 23 years ago as a reason why the US is not ready to have nuclear power today? Or maybe you mean Three Mile Island, which was 28 years ago in Pennsylvania, but caused no deaths or injuries? How many people died this year in coal mining incidents?
And then you cite hackable control systems for oil power plants are a reason to avoid nuclear power plants (which are generally far more security-conscious)?
There are issues with nuclear power plants, specifically what to do with the waste long-term.* However, nuclear power plants themselves are actually quite safe, in large part because everyone involved respects the harm that can come if something does go wrong.
[*] - France has largely solved that problem by recycling, something the US refuses to do because it creates weapons-grade plutonium.
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.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Simply allow the power generators to choose their preferred technologies. The most economically viable solutions will be popular, the unviable ones will fade away. If nuclear is viable it'll get rolled out. if not, it won't.
Deleted
You seem to have a very unrealistic view of nuclear energy. It can be done right. Modern civilizations, even including Chernobyl and TMI, have a very good track record with regards to nuclear energy. More people die mining coal per annum than the number of people, in all of human history that have died due to nuclear energy.
And I would go overseas if I thought I could pull it off before accumulating experience in my home country. I'd go to France in a heartbeat, et je parle français, if any French recruiters see this.
Believe it or not, the Armed forces employs a large number of contractors.
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
http://financialpetition.org/
Reprocess it and generate mopre power is tho. Things that are radioactive are generally pretty good power sources.
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.
But isn't a better solution just to be much more efficient with the energy you already produce?
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.Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
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.
It's already being done for NOX, SO2, CO2 and other pollutants rather successfully. All the politicians have to to is sample the environment regularly and set maximum acceptable limits.
Deleted
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.
http://tdworld.com/projects_in_progress/business_in_tech/superconducting_cable/
"10001110101 - periodic table with a centerpiece of mind" -Clutch
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.
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.
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.
https://dalgamotor.wordpress.com/ - Elektronik beyinlere ozgurluk asisi (Turkish)
Plans for nuclear power in the UK seem to be taking an interesting turn. Greenpeace UK recently looked at proposed sites for new reactors in the UK and found that four proposed site may be unsuitable owing to the risk of sea level rise: http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/media/reports/the-impacts-of-climate-change-on-nuclear-power-station-sites. The South Texas reactor site is one of 14 currrent or decommisioned civilian power reactor site in the US that are located in tidal regions. With a 2014 start date, a 40 year reactor life and a 20 year decommisioning phase, the South Texas reactor site could be subject to 5 meters of sea level rise: http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1748-9326/2/2/024002/erl7_2_024002.html. That raises serious questions about the wisdom of siting the new reactors close to the present reactors and it might make more sense to seek an inland source of cooling water.
Another location issue pertains specifically to Texas. Texas wind power has been growing very rapidly and may easily meet anticipated demand. Wind costs about $1.30/Watt to build while the nuclear plant, at this early phase, is anticipated to cost $2.20/Watt without modifications that come up in the licensing process or construction delays that genrally plague large projects.
South Texas may not be the best place to test the waters on new nuclear generation.
> 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?"
You do realize that hydroelectric power requires lots and lots of water. It's not without it's own environmental effects. It takes a lot of land that could otherwise be forest, or something else, to create the reservoir for a hydroelectric plant. There's only a few places in the world that actually have the right geography for natural hydroelectric plants.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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 do we get rid of waste at night then?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
...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.
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?
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!
So waddaya do to restart it when it shuts down and all the lead solidifies?
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Err... I'm not quite clear on your message. Should we be building breeder reactors?
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.
Oh please, no one in their right mind will go for a power plant, unless you're a foreign country, going for full-out war, using bomber planes or other type of long-range warfare.
They're well guarded, seeing as they're the obvious target to go for. If you've got a bit of sense you'll go for the powerlines. Miles and miles of unguarded powerlines which it is close to completely impossible to guard against any kind of sabotage, yet takes rather a bit of work to fix again.
Coal is natural, it's cute, you can hold it in your hands. People have been using it for thousands of years.
Nuclear is something done by evil scientists wearing white outfits and radiation-monitor tags. It's obviously not to be trusted.
No sig today...
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.
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!
Power is the ability to make a change.
Sure, but did you know that Japan had two independent and advanced atomic weapons programs underway? One, in Japan, was destroyed before the U.S arrived, and the other was located in what is now North Korea, and likely gutted by Russia after the war.
An idea floated was to blow a boat/sub in San Fran harbour, but the two bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki beat them to it.
Check out the documentary:
http://tv-links.co.uk/listings/9/7830
The movies.
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
I hate how you glaze over the fact that France hasn't solved the problem of nuclear waste. Recycling cuts down on the volume of waste, but makes it that much more toxic. Will France still be here in 3000 years? 10,000 years? 25,000 years? Because their nuclear waste will still be here and just as deadly. Nuclear energy (fission) is not clean.
The Admin and the Engineer
There's a good chance the USA already have weapons of mass destruction!
We at slashdot are scientists, specialists and kernel hackers. Your FUD will be found out.
Don't play down the design aspect of Chernobyl. We're talking about a plant with no containment structure. A plant with an incredibly high void coefficient. A plant whose design didn't even take into account thermal expansion in an overheating situation. A plant whose control rods were graphite tipped. Graphite -- the tips of their control rods were made of their freakin moderator! It amazes me to think that even in the USSR such a design was ever approved.
Ever since, I've been suspicious of Jesus and very careful around chlorine.
It's worse than that -- the wood will rot in an anoxic environment, and produce methane, not CO2. Methane is a much worse greenhouse gas. You don't have to just consider the plant matter that was there when you flooded, but also incoming organic material. I saw a study that suggested that one dam produced three times more greenhouse gasses per megawatt than an equivalent coal-fired plant.
Hydroelectric was once seen as the "green" solution, but it isn't really anymore. It does have it's uses, mind you -- a good example being how quickly new power can be added and taken away from the grid. It pairs nicely with solar and wind as a consequence.
Ever since, I've been suspicious of Jesus and very careful around chlorine.
Yeah -- I find it amazing that the US nuclear power industry insists that nuclear grade graphite doesn't burn (I saw one study that suggested only 1-2% erosion in a meltdown situation), while the Russians are insistant (with many eyewitnesses) that there was burning graphite in Chernobyl. I'd propose the hypothesis that perhaps *fresh* nuclear-grade graphite doesn't burn, but leave it in a reactor for a while and let the radiation attack it's structure...
:) I wouldn't take a PBMR or sodium breeder, though)
(By the way, I'd take the PWR as well
Ever since, I've been suspicious of Jesus and very careful around chlorine.
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?
It's very patriotic to acknowledge the good we've done, but it's just as patriotic to identify the bad, and try to make it better. Critics of the U.S. are not antagonists, they are a whetstone for sharpening. From a narrow view the knife and stone are enemies, wearing away at each other. But in the long run the knife is better and more effective with the whetstone than without it.
The genius of our system is the rule by the people and the ensuing debate about everything. Calling half of that debate "propaganda" is not fair. No one's trying to convince us that "we" are the enemy...the question is: are we doing the best good in the best way we can? It's possible to acknowledge the good we're doing while still asking that question. Constant improvement means constant debate and questioning. The alternative is complacency and stagnation.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
This is the dumbest thing I've heard all day.
The answer? Yes. Sure as heck it would be a war crime, because the bombs by your definition did not bring the war to a close and did not save more lives than they cost.
Now -- if the Germans dropped the bombs and won, that'd be a lot better than a full-scale invasion of America, wouldn't it?
Have people forgotten how to think for themselves? Do they not remember what the war was like? How the Japanese disregarded every convention of warfare, attacked without warning, or planned to fight to every last man, woman, and child? The lame-brain stuff I hear any more is crazy. Given the thoughts you've expressed, it would have been better to invaded the mainland, lost a million soldiers and marines, god knows how many Japanese, and basically destroyed their culture. As it was, they got out of the war with a LOT more than they would have without the A-bomb.
What an idiot.
Excuse me. I "awoke" in 1963 when I was born. I saw all of this on television decades before most of you were born.
...because it's "Free" healthcare. The most expensive kind. You pay with lives.
You're clearly forgetting that the 2,000,000 dead bodies, shown as stacks of pyramids of human skulls and sheds stacked with femurs and such wasn't done by America: it was done by the Democratic Party that *demanded* we leave there, creating a power vacuum, and enabling Pohl POt to ravage hundreds of square miles. You don't remember the last person hanging onto the skids of the helicopters for dear life, I do.
There was a lot wrong with the Vietnam war. But notice: no 51st state. We've given them MONEY since then, it's now a tourist trap. We weren't there to wipe out the people, we were there to secure the peace and keep the flow of natural rubber at market prices.
Dumb ideas like *always* flying to the antiaircraft guns, dropping a bomb and *always* turning away in the same direction, so that many, many fliers would get shot down, that too, was a Democrat's idea: he was micro-managing the war.
And it didn't help that the young and nubile Jane Fonda was over there as part of the propaganda movement, sitting on an antiaircraft gun that the day before was firing at our troops. The left has been anti-American a long time. They still run thousands of newspapers and all three broadcast facilities. It's the biggest mind-control this Earth has ever seen.
Don't think so? How about universal healthcare? Don't you 'hate' the government? Don't you despise the waste and the invasion of privacy now? WHY ON EARTH would anyone think that giving the exact same government full control over our very lives would be a good idea?
[And now back to your regularly scheduled programming...]
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
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