The Nuclear Power Renaissance

Actual Reality writes "It is ironic to me that much of the same sentiment that thwarted the nuclear power industry back in the 80's is partially responsible for reviving it. Nuclear power is very clean compared to any power source that burns fuel. The US has missed several advancements in nuclear technology. We can only hope that environmental concerns will not again stifle our progress."

Comments

The thing is

[rastoboy29]

We KNOW that converting to nuclear energy would largely solve the global warming problem.  Have a nice gander people, the solution to this seemingly intractible problem is staring us in the face.

No, nuclear isn't perfect.  But in combination with electric cars, the CO2 problem is solved.

Then we just have to worry about the CO2 we've already put in there.

Re:The thing is

[iamlucky13]

The CIA world fact book says 2004 electrical production (not counting transportation energy, etc) was 17.4 trillion kW-hours, so we'd need at least 2 TerraWatts of capacity. A relatively large nuclear reactor produces about a GW of electricity, which translates to 2000 plants. Add in other energy needs currently met by fossil fuels and account for capacity factors and that CalTech professor you reference is probably within an order of magnitude of the actual need.

The problem with that argument is it only demonstrates the scope of our energy needs. It says nothing about the feasibility of nuclear versus other technologies, and ignores the fact that the exact same challenge applies to any energy source. To cover our needs with just coal (currently 25% of the world energy supply and something like half of the electrical supply) would similarly require about 10,000 coal plants. You want to it with wind? You need roughly one million of today's highest capacity wind turbines. Solar? About $20 trillion dollars worth of solar panels near the equator will do it. Hydro? Well...forget about that one. Hydro power options are mostly in use in developed countries.

We'd run out of nuclear fuel in decades (actually, I've been told centuries) if we continued to utilize it as poorly as we currently do. Reprocessing, however, can dramatically increase the available energy from existing fuel and potentially the economics of developing new mines. Not to mention reducing the waste by 90% or so.

Don't forget we're just talking about nuclear fission here. If we can get fusion working commercially, the picture changes.

Anyone who thinks we'll get all our energy from one source in the foreseeable future, however, is out of the loop.

Re:The thing is

[ttfkam]

But, really, the only reason we don't have space based solar power already is because it would devalue fuel and energy and destroy every power structure on earth that relies on it, and that's a tough sell politically. Capitalism relies on scarcity to keep everyone obedient.

That or the fact that no one has ever beamed energy from a satellite to a terrestrial site. Ever. Remember that thing called "an atmosphere?" So we're talking lasers, right? You want to show me where the prototype exists to convert a very-high-powered laser beam to an electricity source? Just one will do. Go on. Show me one example.

Won't sell because of a power conspiracy? Give me a break. If a company could do this already, they'd be launching satellites on a daily basis. Think about it for a moment: you could be the company that supplies most of the world's power while waving the banner of environmental responsibility. But *no one* has even built *a prototype* because of your supposed cabal?

I think your tin foil hat needs to be cleaned; you've been wearing it far too long already.

Re:The thing is

[TheLink]

The military would be interested in satellites that can transfer lots energy from the sun accurately to targets on the ground.

Other countries might object a lot though ;).

This Could Be a Good Thing

[MOBE2001]

The US has missed several advancements in nuclear technology.

Well, this is good because it means that the US has the opportunity to move straight to the latest and safest state of the art nuclear power plant technology.

I happen to quite agree with TFA:

[CaptainPatent]

When I try to explain the benefits of Nuclear power to some of my friends, many come back with the (rather cliché) horror stories of Three Mile Island and of course Chernobyl. What many don't know is the computational power to safely keep a reactor going was generally greater than what was available and the failsafes there were not entirely figured out or developed. We have had many years to develop the technology and as TFA points out:

among the 104 reactors currently online in the United States, none have had any disasters since the infamous Three Mile Island incident in 1979. The technology has vastly improved, the safety measures are in place, it's time to go Nuclear.

Re:I happen to quite agree with TFA:

[Firethorn]

Large quantities of long-lived radioactive isotopes are produced as waste and even after 60 years we still don't have any place to put them.

Don't really need to put them anywhere, actually. A year's worth of radioactive fuel/waste for a gigawatt reactor is about a railcar's worth. Besides, it's still about 95% fuel, so when the price of uranium rises a bit more, we can take our decades old waste that's sitting in above ground casks and recycle it. Separate out the short lived waste isotopes, put the long lived usable fuel isotopes back in the reactor. You use the old stuff because while it's still radioactive, it's much less so than stuff fresh out of the reactor, so it's easier and cheaper to handle.

Result: 20x more power from the same amount of fuel. 5% of the waste needing medium term(much less than a thousand years) storage.

(Washington, South Carolina, Nevada, Tennessee) are contaminated with historical fission wastes that are poorly contained and could contaminate much larger areas as corrosion, wind, and rain allow them to spread.

I've looked at many of these concerns, and I've found pretty much one constant: It's all nuclear weapons production waste, not commercial power waste. Bad on us and our nuclear weapon production program during the cold war. It was dirty as all heck.

Large quantities of commercial fission wastes are stored in temporary facilities at nuclear power stations waiting for a safe long-term storage site to be available.

This is because the feds messed up. By federal law the feds essentially forced the nuclear industry into a contract that has them pay a fee per kwh in exchange for permanent disposal of their waste. The feds haven't solved the problem, so they came up with their own solution - one that'll work for the next hundred or so years actually.

Nuclear wastes don't 'go away' and don't decompose, at least in normal historical timespans.

Yep, like mercury, arsenic, and lead will decompose over time.

They just stay around and accumulate, requiring ever-greater expenditures and effort to contain them. Intentionally planning to produce even more of these wastes than we are already producing is ... insane. Windmills, bicycles, sweaters, walking, transit, oil, coal, gas, hydropower, and solar cells are all much better alternatives.

Let's see: Oil leads to pollution that kills tens of thousands each year, coal power spews more radioactive particles into the air than nuclear power produces, windmills still use concrete and steel in job lots, are only effective in limited areas, solar cells are currently six times as expensive(and require nasty chemicals to produce), and the rest are conservation measures that can be enacted even with nuclear power.

I disagree.

[iknownuttin]

I'm in favor of nuclear power - as long as no-one tries to run it at profit.

As opposed to someone who's working in the non-profit sector who will do anything to make his numbers?

Non-profit is just a tax status. Meaning, there's a restriction to what you can do with the profits: there's nothing restricting you from making as much money or as much profit as you want - you can get rich off of a non-profit.

My wife works for a non-profit and there's plenty of meetings where they are encouraged to cut costs. So, sorry, not making "evil" profits won't make the plant any safer. Neither will having it run by some Government bureaucrat. Do you really want the caliber of person that works at the department of motor vehicles running those plants?

Troll news?

[Vthornheart]

While I agree it's interesting that *some* environmentalists are rallying around Nuclear power, I think we need to make a few things clear that the poster of this news article seems to have missed.

1) Most environmentalists supporting the Nuclear option do so only because it is the lesser of two evils, the latter of which (Global Warming) was not known of or understood back when the Nuclear Power protests were going on. This isn't ironic, it's evolutionary. It's the scientific process at its finest: new data comes in, and those looking out for the best interests of everyone reevaluate their previous conclusions based on that new data. The two are NOT mutually exclusive.

2) The "We can only hope that environmental concerns will not again, stifle our progress," is a bit more blatent of an example of flamebaiting. The reason that environmental concerns occasionally "stifle our progress" is because it would be foolish for anyone NOT to think of environmental concerns. Would the poster of this article rather that environmental concerns never be taken into account in the case of new technology? It would be like a scientist intentionally ignoring a key variable in a study. You wouldn't tell a clinical group performing studies on a new (for example) vaccine to ignore if the vaccine causes heart attacks just because said vaccine is supposed to cure cancer.

Amazing

[ShakaUVM]

Amazing -- every time I make this point on Slashdot, I get a swarm of deluded people flaming me. Now that there's an article on it, maybe people will begin to see that if they're really serious about things like Global Warming, switching from Coal to Nuclear power would be the only cost-efficient way to do it. All other sources of non-emitting power cost about ~3x as much per kilowatt. According to the DOE (http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/page/co2_report/co2emiss.pdf) 40% of all CO2 generated in America is produced from electricity generation.

The stupid, stupid environmental prejudice against nuclear power has come back to bite us all on the ass. If we had all nuclear power plants now instead of majority coal plants, we'd have eliminated almost half the CO2 production from our country which is MUCH MUCH more than reductions mandated by agreements like the Kyoto protocols, which specify either minimal cuts (8% for Europe) or capping increases (Australia can go up by 8%).

If you're an environmentalist, you should be for nuclear power. Either shit or get off the pot -- if you just talk about "climate change" and then live in some sordid China Syndrome fear of nuclear power, you're not just an idiot, you're a hypocrite. If you're not an environmentalist, you should also be for nuclear power, since it's cheaper than all the alternative energy sources being pursued right now, and everyone likes low power costs.

Re:Amazing

[FroBugg]

I'd love to see some numbers for this miracle cheapness you're talking about.

Nuclear power plants cost ridiculous amounts to construct and operate. Lifetime cost per kwh, including amortized construction, fuel, maintenance, etc, for nuclear is approximately double that of a fossil fuel plant (coal or natural gas).

If you want to address non-polluting sources of power: Hydro is actually cheaper than anything else we're using, but it's already maxed out in much of the developed world. Wind has seen tremendous growth in the last fifteen years or so, and is actually cheaper than nuclear. Solar still has a ways to go, but right now it's only about double the prices of nuclear per kwh. Geothermal has great potential, but I don't know what the costs are right now.

This doesn't even begin to address the waste disposal problem. Every nuclear plant in the country has decades worth of waste piling up on site because we never figured out a place to put it.

Re:Amazing

[dbIII]

Nuclear power would be the only cost-efficient way to do it.

Cost effective and nuclear power do not belong in the same sentance unless you subscribe to the idea that the Brits, Russians etc are stupid and you have a high enough clearance level to know the US costs and know they are far less than anyone expected.

Intersting to see the little bullying insults for anyone that dares to take a different opinion to one only based on conjecture. Nuclear power should be argued on it's own merits and not on perceived personality defects of it's detractors.

Please do not state a guess or perhaps even outright lie passed on to you third hand as a fact. Every now and again on this site I ask a nuclear troll "what is the name of this cheap plant you talk of?" and have never received an answer to that question.

Re:Amazing

[Zoxed]

> if they're really serious about things like Global Warming, switching from Coal to Nuclear power would be the only cost-efficient way to do it.

Do you (or anyone) have any links to a complete life-cycle costing of nuclear power ? I mean everything; including the waste disposal (or storage for n thousand years, and including accident insurance (ie not subsidized/underwritten by the govt ?) I keep hearing it is cheaper, but see little evidence ?

And ditto for a full environmental analysis, not just plant side CO2, but including the mining of the uranium, and the impact of the long term storage facilities etc.

(FWIW my main answer to energy problems would be tackle the depend side with improved efficiency.)

Re:Clean nuclear waste

[Dr. Spork]

If you think spent nuclear fuel is clean, why not make useful consumer goods out of it?

Umm... we do. Don't you have a smoke detector?

Re:Nah, fuck off

[ShakaUVM]

he waste remains deadly for hundreds of thousands of years.

Guess how radioactive something is with a half-life of 100,000 years? Answer: Not very.

I'd really wish there was like a prerequisite of high school physics before people were allowed to start talking about the energy issue in America.

Re:bleh

[m4cph1sto]

You gotta be kidding me. We don't use nuclear because it would hurt the oil industry? First off, there's a difference between oil, which runs our cars, and coal, which runs our power plants, which you don't seem to grasp. Second and more importantly, the real reason we don't have much nuclear power in the US is because for decades "environmentalists" have been waging a misguided war against nuclear power. These activists eroded public support for nuclear energy, and their lobbyists got our politicians to impose such stringent roadblocks and regulations that it became impossible for any company to even think about building in a new nuclear power plant in the US. Thanks to their ignorance and short-sightedness, these activists contributed in a major way to the problem of global warming, which they now say will be the doom of us all. And what makes it even more ironic is that the activists are still at it today. Sure nuclear is not perfect. But the safety issue was settled long ago. So the only downside is waste disposal, and the technology to process nuclear waste is advancing rapidly. And anyway, the stuff comes out of the ground, so we just have to put it back there, and make sure it stays there. All this talk about nuclear waste being a terrible hazard and environmental concern for the "next 10,000 years" is ridiculous. Some time in the next 500 years we'll figure out an even better way to handle, or use, nuclear waste, and it'll become a null issue (unless global warming kills us all by then of course).

Deaths: Coal vs. nuclear weapons & nuclear pow

[FleaPlus]

Here's an interesting factoid: In the U.S. alone, pollution from coal power plants kills over 30,000 people each year. Of course, this is just a fraction of the worldwide number, and a fraction of those suffering health ailments from coal pollution. If you look at air pollution in general, the WHO estimates 2.4 million annual deaths worldwide.

This means that every few years (or less), more people die from coal than have died in the entire history of nuclear weapons and accidents, including Hiroshima (140,000), Nagasaki (80,000), and Chernobyl (4,000, although this has been argued about).

Re:Ban on re-processing

[evilviper]

You no doubt know that the fallout from Chernobyl circled the globe? That it contaminated neighboring countries fairly heavily?

...and the only people that died were those in the immediate vicinity.

Just like anything else, distance decreases risk.

A population center with a lot to lose and no way to evacuate in short order in the event of an accident will work very hard to make the plants as safe as they can be.

Work as hard as you want... Nothing in the world is 100% safe, and going out of your way to put extra people in danger is just idiotic.

Maybe it'll be a couple centuries, but sooner or later, there will be an accident.

Putting them away from population centers wastes a lot of energy in the transmission lines

It's not "a lot" of energy, it's a very small amount. And there plenty of progress being made on high temperature superconductors, which might be practical in such circumstances.

and also gives people a false sense of security

No, it's a very real sense of security. It would be even better if it was not just a distance away, but could be put behind a mountain range, or in a deep valley, that will naturally contain any potential fallout.

The Enrico Fermi reactor that melted would have contaminated the whole northeast corridor.

"Contaminated" != killing everyone.

and think setting them 50 or 100 miles away makes them safe. It doesn't.

It certainly makes you safer than being located closer to it. Like any other contaminate, the contamination disperses more the further you are away from where it's released... With a nuclear fallout, 100 miles away could be the difference between "radioactive poisoning" and "3% increased risk of developing cancer".

Re:My Retracted Solution to Nuclear Waste.

[Jerf]

I'm not sure if a few tons of plutonium distributed into a cloud by the explosion at that altitude would have wiped out life on earth as we know it,

Oh, for fuck's sake, it's radioactive material, not a RAVENING DEMON OUT TO CONSUME YOUR VERY SOUL.

Guess what? There's already orders of magnitude more plutonium in the world, distributed naturally. Along with Uranium! And Radon! And radioactive carbon! And an endless stream of cosmic rays!

If we'd tone down the mindless fear of OMG Radiation!, and treat the subject rationally, we may well not have the problems we do now, having switched to nuclear power a couple of decades ago. But no, people who's education on the topic of radioactivity comes from 1960s B monster movies continue to dominate the discussion.

You know what the most likely outcome of a shuttle explosion is? A whole lot of hand wrining, a whole lot of scare mongering, and... well... not a hell of a lot much else, since most likely it ends up in deep ocean, which doesn't have as much life as you'd think (mostly around the shelves), where it would promptly sink to the bottom, what with it being a dense metal and all. Even the volatiles wouldn't be that big a deal, though you wouldn't know it from the press coverage. Any ol' oil spill is way worse, it happens in a way worse location.

Now, that's the likely outcome. If it exploded soon enough, something might actually manage to land in Florida itself. It's still probably not the best idea. But it's not going to wipe out life on Earth. That's just mindless scaremongering. It's not anywhere near that easy with any real materials; only OMG Radiation!!1! can cause that sort of damage, and that only exists in the aforementioned movies.

Re:Nuclear Power for Everyone

[Bruce Dawson]

He didn't say using current solar generators, he said using current solar technology. Obviously we'd have to build some more solar plants to generate significantly more power. But good job knocking down the straw-man. It won't be getting up again.