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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."
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
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.
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.
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
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.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
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
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.
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.
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?
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
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.
> 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?"
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.
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?
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.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
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...
One can show/prove how/why something is bad science, not state it without further comment.