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McCain Backs Nuclear Power
bagsc writes "Senator John McCain set out another branch of his energy policy agenda today, with a key point: 45 new nuclear power plants by 2030." So it finally appears that this discussion is back on the table. I'm curious how Nevada feels about this, as well as the Obama campaign. All it took was $4/gallon gas I guess. When it hits $5, I figure one of the campaigns will start to promote Perpetual Motion.
There's plenty of fissionable material, especially if you include the recyclable secondary material, somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,000 years' worth I once heard. I'd hate to strip mine half the planet to get it, but I suppose it's a better choice in the near term than burning all our oil.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Yeah, and Mexico's ban on private capital investment in oil production is why Mexico imports 25% of its gas from the US, even though it's the world's 5th largest producer.
You know why?
Economics 101: Price controls create shortages. Every. Time.
More likely he will say that, "Nuclear is an important part of our national ongoing energy strategy, along with clean, renewable energy in the form of wind and solar and whatever."
Means the same thing really; McCain pushed so-called "clean coal" at the same time as he pushed Nuclear, which is a bit more Republican of him, since coal states are red states, and big electric has no desire to stop building coal plants.
Nuclear is the best of a lot of bad options, and regardless of presidents, the return to nuclear power has already begun, as witnessed by the resurge in permit applications since last year.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I don't know the current gas prizes in the UK are, but here in the Netherlands, the current price is 1.62 euros per litre, which Google calc converts to...
9.50 USD per gallon.
I can't recall when we had gas for 0.68 per litre (=4 USD per gallon), that must have been like 10 years ago. Quit whining.
Hell I WANT it in my back yard. I have a Coal plant within 30 miles and it is an eyesore of the comunity. the piles of coal and the huge ships coming and going are ugly ugly ugly. and the days when the scrubbers fail or are offline you can see the crud going up in the air.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I have nothing against nuclear power, I just do not trust deregulation-happy business criminals to run them. With proper designs, regular inspections, and a safety-first mentality, nuclear power is clean and safe. With Enron-style profit-raping and criminal evasion of government regulation, we'd be fucked and glowing in the dark. I wouldn't put it past them to try and build crappy Chernobyl-style reactors just to give the finger to the Greenies, the same way they have the hard-on for drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
With the election of President Bill Clinton in 1992, and the appointment of Hazel O'Leary as the Secretary of Energy, there was pressure from the top to cancel the IFR. Sen. John Kerry (D, MA) and O'Leary led the opposition to the reactor, arguing that it would be a threat to non-proliferation efforts, and that it was a continuation of the Clinch River Breeder Reactor Project that had been canceled by Congress. Despite support for the reactor by then-Rep. Richard Durbin (D, IL) and U.S. Senators Carol Mosley Braun (D, IL) and Paul Simon (D, IL), funding for the reactor was slashed, and it was ultimately canceled in 1994. [Just 3 years before completion.]
Emphasis mine. See all those bold 'D's for Democrat? Uh huh.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
With effective breeder reactors, thorium utilization, and REPROCESSING the number is closer 100,000 years.
Ah yes, TMI.
The amazing thing about TMI is that, had everyone left things alone and let the automated safety systems do their job, a normal shutdown would have occurred. Instead, the human operators intervened and basically did everything they could to cause a meltdown. Nonetheless, the whole thing went out with a fizzle, with essentially zero radiation being emitted to the outside. You'd probably receive more radiation smoking a pack of cigarettes or flying across country than you would have sitting in TMI's backyard.
Nonetheless I'm sure when the general population hears TMI they think (OMFG! Meltdown!!!!!111)
I'm a Nuclear Engineer.
Let me help clarify a few things.
1. In the 70's, our technology was not sufficient for reprocessing. It is arguably that we might have the ability to develop the tech now.
2. The HLW (high level waste) from reprocessing is hotter longer after final use than once through methods.
3. 10,000y is a design specification for HLW storage facilities. HLW is less radioactive than the materials dug up to make it after only 700y.
4. Furthermore, since HLW is loaded with rare earths and lanthanides, and our knowledge of their special and sometimes unique chemistry grows every day, and HLW is actually the only reasonable source for some of these elements, its possible that HLW would enter its own reprocessing cycle after just 200y.
Regards,
Jerry
I'm all for building more nuclear plants and think they, along with fuel reprocessing, are a key element in reducing our dependence on fossil fuels. McCain's plan, however, ignores the realities of what it would take to physically build 45 plants in the US by 2030.
There was an article covered a while back (http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/14/1238233) talking about the 600-ton steel forgings required for a reactor containment vessel and the fact that on one company in Japan can, currently, make them. Given that their production rate is only 5 per year and their first open slot is in ~2015, the US would need 80% of their output from 2015 to 2027 to hope to meet that goal.
Unless the rest of the world stops building nuclear plants or someone else starts making containment vessels, all this is just talk.
You make a big deal about how Obama is generally a bad guy and thus won't support this, but it's just a troll post. Obama specifically has stated that he supports nuclear power during his campaign. One of his biggest campaign donors is Excelon, a nuclear power company. The only anti-nuclear power thing he's done isn't really anti-nuclear power: he introduced legislation to force nuclear power plants to report leaks.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
The newer designs of reactors have no CHANCE of doing what either Chernobyl or 3-Mile Island did. Pebble-Bed reactors fail "safe" (without guidance, they simply hit their equilibrium temperature which is well within the structural design limits and stay there). Plus, they cool by inert gas rather than water so there's no chance of a contaminated steam-cloud explosion (which was why Chernobyl was so nasty).
Well, in the northern US, it would/could make a big difference. For some reason up there...they use heating OIL to heat their homes during the long, hard winters.
Perhaps if we had more nukes providing cheaper electricity...we could get the heating done up north without so much oil usage.
I mean, if you think gas prices are bad now...wait till you have to buy oil to heat your house...something you REALLY can't go without....and be prepared for sticker shock...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Number of people dead due to TMI incident: zero.
Number of health problems conclusively linked to TMI incident: zero.
Amount of radiation to residents: 8-100 millirem.
Improvements in power station design since 1979: lots.
Chance of same incident happening again: ~zero.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Excuse me? We lose only 5% of our electricity in transmission in the USA, and it could be even lower if we just stepped the voltage up further.
Anyway, *I* live in the most geothermally active region in the world, just down the hill from "The Geysers" in California. (Iceland is the megawatt leader; this region is the leader in hotspots per square mile or something.) And the problem that they have here is that Arsenic (and other shit) collects on the turbine blades, then gets power-washed off, concentrated, and buried. If that stuff was dispersed into the air like it naturally is, it would be at background levels. But now we have a toxic dump site in the county thanks to the way in which we are implementing geothermal power.
The sad thing is that I can point at a ridge that has constant 25 MPH wind, and which has no wind turbines on it. Geothermal power as it is dealt with today is a big mistake, especially in the USA, and even more especially since wind and solar both work just fine.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You think that way because you are ignorant of nuclear technology.
It is not really your fault. It is the fault of the hysteria-spreading, anti-nuclear, tree-huggers. They spent years spreading anti-nuclear disinformation and succeeded in stopping the building of nuclear reactors. More money was poured into coal and petroleum for energy production.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
The worry is that they'll accidentally tap a high pressure area, and cause a blowout (e.g a small volcano). Or that the water that they inject into the ground (so they can harvest the energy from the steam) will "lubricate" a fault line, and cause a plate to shift. Or that some of the steam will come out where you don't want it to come out, or form pressure elsewhere, causing a rupture.
I don't know enough about it, but there are valid concerns. There was a deal a few years back in Indonesia where a gas company accidentally sparked a nasty mud volcano thru exploratory drilling.
A lot of it though is that whole, "We've never done it before, so as far as we know it could do anything." There was a percentage of scientists, who, at the time of the detonation of the first atomic bomb, weren't quite sure that the bomb wouldn't ignite the atmosphere and end life on earth as we know it...Like the people at CERN who aren't quite sure we won't spark an Earth devouring Black Hole with the LHC.
Not to say that the geothermal concerns are that implausible, it's just that no one really knows.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Much of your comments are accurate, especially how renewables do not eliminate the use of oil for transportation. But you're wrong about the state of renewables: wind is in large-scale deployment today (19% of electricity in Denmark, 9% in Spain & Portugal, 6% in Germany); solar is closer than 10+ years as the first large-scale installations are being built.
A little more about wind power in Germany: they're aiming for 20% in about the next 10 years. And their experience is interesting; it turns out that when you have large numbers of wind farms all across the country, the wind is always blowing somewhere, and the problem with intermittent output starts to go away. (Requires, of course, a power grid able to deal with shifting inputs, which may require expensive upgrades.)
C8H18 + O2 --> energy + H2O + CO2 (modulo a little balancing!)
Take energy from the nuclear plant, CO2 from the atmosphere, and every time a car burns that fuel, it's simply returning to the atmosphere, that which was taken from it. Carbon neutral octane!
This is NOT a crackpot idea, it's something that a federal lab has already worked out, and it can provide that fuel for $4.60 a gallon (before brilliant people optimize the process even further). That's not much more expensive than gasoline is today. To make it competitive, all you'd need is a $.60/gallon tax, and it's probably already competitive if introduced in the rest of the world which has higher fuel taxes.
I have no idea why this idea is not more widespead.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
Nuclear Information Generation IV reactors are horribly efficient, even the lest efficient CANDU's use about 8 to 10KG of fuel / day, most reactors are designed to used unprocessed fuel (U238 or Enriched Blackshale) or fuel that requires very little development, the nice thing about the new designs is that they all use light water or liquid sodium.
If I had moderator points right now I'd dump them all here. With plugin hybrids only a couple of years away, reliable generation of electricity is the solution for supplanting oil. Not some new way to distribute energy requiring a whole new huge fueling infrastructure. While building new reactors will granted take years, it will also take years for cars to switch over to electric. While nuclear should not be the only means for increasing electrical generation, it should certainly be a part of the solution. Now if you want to moan about the dangers of nuclear energy think hard on this fact: the US Navy has been using nuclear powered vessels since 1955.
I recently watched a segment on Fox News where they stated that Obama was against Nuclear Power. I did some research and as the parent states, he is FOR using Nuclear Power as part of an overall solution. Here is the letter I sent to Fox News:
Very early this morning I was watching FOX & Friends' coverage of the Energy debate between Senator Obama and Senator McCain. There was a graphic that showed the differences between the two candidates. I saw a difference that was curious to me as I had not seen it mentioned on any other news networks. The graphic and following dialog suggested that Senator McCain was pro nuclear energy while Senator Obama was against it. Energy is obviously a hot topic this election year and I personally believe that Nuclear Power is part of the solution. I found it odd that Senator Obama would be against using Nuclear Energy. I decided to "Google" it to learn more. The top two links were YouTube videos of a primary debate and a round table discussion. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjDmyToTYBE and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRxl2cVFTLw In both cases it was made clear that Senator Obama is FOR using Nuclear Power as part of an energy solution. I would like to know what sources Fox News used to determine that Senator Obama is against the use of Nuclear Energy so that I may more clearly understand his position on the subject.
GP mentions silly paranoia about breeder reactors. The reason people avoid those is fear that someone would get ahold of the materials used by them to make a nuclear weapon.
However, your comment is still paranoia, not justifiable fear. What exactly would terrorists do to holding areas at nuclear power stations to make the eastern US uninhabitable for 5000 years? Fly a plane into a holding site for nuclear material or waste? That wouldn't disperse the material much at all. The worse-case scenario is someone in the US stealing the material and using it to make a nuclear weapon -- something that's already possible using other sources. Even trying to blow up a nuclear reactor would cause limited damage, and they're not trivial to blow up.
This is a pretty interesting & relevant graphic.
-Ted
-=-=- Quantum physics - the dreams stuff are made of.
To the best of my knowledge, the amount of mercury emitted by my car's exhaust is zero. Mercury is THE major problem with coal, and it receives far too little attention.
You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.
The years of engineering and construction required to turn a plant that exists into the doomsday device of your imagination would be difficult for the terrorists to achieve.
This program was made possible by a grant from the Ultra-Humanite, and viewers like you.
In many places people use electricity for heating and it is efficient. We use heat pumps.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Your use of "enviro-nutjob" and somewhat ODDLY placed caps also tends to UNDERMINE your argument by casting your comment as just a plain, old, non-enviro nutjob with an axe to grind.
-Ted
-=-=- Quantum physics - the dreams stuff are made of.
Yes and no.
Plutonium is a small part of the waste. And is more radioactive than Uranium. But you can shield yourself from the radiation from plutonium by wrapping the plutonium in toilet paper - it's an alpha emitter. Note also that "more radioactive" than Uranium isn't really saying much - unless you eat the stuff, or otherwise metabolize something containing plutonium, it's pretty much harmless (IOW not very radioactive at all).
That said, most of the radioactive waste or a nuclear reactor isn't plutonium. It's a diverse mix of fission by-products and irradiated structural material. Half lives of "nuclear waste" vary from seconds to millenia, with the overwhelming majority being in the seconds part of that range. As an example, the nuclear power plants I worked on a few decades ago had radiation levels in the millions of REM per hour when operating. Shutdown, they dropped to less than 0.1 REM per hour within a day. And to trivial levels (less than a milli-REM per hour) after three days.
That's how quickly nuclear waste becomes inert. What's left after that point is the long half-life stuff. But "long half-life" is identical with "not very radioactive". So what goes into the holding tanks as "nuclear waste" isn't really much more radioactive than the average brick. And can be shielded quite effectively by the water in the tank (or your clothes).
Where you have problems with "nuclear waste" is when the (slightly) radioactive material is metabolized (mostly impossible - if you eat a chunk of plutonium, you'll shit it out unchanged in a day), or when it is chemically combined with something you CAN metabolize (not impossible, but difficult), or when you breathe the crap in (possible only when the radioactive waste has chemically combined with something that can produce airborne ash when burned). This last possibility isn't especially likely to be a problem, mostly because the stuff is much heavier than air - most of us don't keep our lungs around our ankles.
Note, by the way, that we've never had a person die of exposure to "nuclear waste". Not even at Chernobyl. And noone died at all, or was even exposed to much radioactivity, at TMI.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
"They all have at least one good point though: what do we do with the waste?"
Reprocess most of it. Bury the rest of it.
There's no technical or economic reason to ban reprocessing. Up to 92 percent of spent fuel can be re-used if reprocessed. Current law bans the practice. That's a political decision, made by the Carter Administration, because reprocessing spent fuel rods creates small amounts of Plutonium as a byproduct, and the argument was "but terrorists might get the Plutonium!". Well, they wouldn't if you secured the Plutonium. It's a silly argument. If that's the reason, then a President could solve the problem with a stroke of a pen; simply mandate that the military takes charge of the Plutonium and is responsible for guarding it. For those of you that have served in the military, you know how fanatical security forces are about the nuclear weapons in their charge. Recent USAF screwups aside, try and approach a nuclear weapons storage facility and see what happens to you. The security argument against reprocessing is simply farcical. France supplies nearly all of their power with Nuclear, and they reprocess their fuel to minimize waste. To date, Al Qaeda or Islamic Jihad doesn't seem to have been able to steal the French plutonium.
As for what to do with the remaining waste, just store it. There's several ways to do it. The easiest thing to do is simply store it in a secure facility. Do you know what highly technical mechanism is required to store spent fuel rods? A pool of water, 3 feet deep. France stores all their remaining nuclear waste in one single building, in a pool of water.
If you prefer to bury it, just encase the rods in glass, and bury it in a place where there's no water table. For the people going "Gasp! Radioactive materials! Underground!"... where do you think we got the uranium from the the first place? We dug it up. Underground.
The utter hysteria over nuclear technologies far, far outweighs the actual risks of nuclear technologies.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Well there's the containment vessel and then there's the holding pools.
But no, flying a fully loaded jet into a containment vessel would NOT breach it. They're specifically built and tested to exceed stresses just LIKE that.
Also - for those who don't "get it" - a nuclear *reactor* is not those huge white towers with steam coming out. Those are just heat exchangers for cooling the plant. The actual reactor is in a rather small (by comparison) boring building around the middle of the plant.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
Well, here's a comparison
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_of_combustion
Gasolene - 47MJ/KG
Kerosene - 46.2MJ/KG
Diesel - 45MJ/KG
Atomic Fission (U235)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_dioxide
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Hbase/nucene/u235chn.html
1KG of U235 has about 17.5KiloTons of Energy
17.5(4.184*10^12J) or
7.322*10^10MJ
Atomic Fusion p+B11 *now with less killing! (it's called Anutronic Fusion since it has no radiation) p +11Bâ'3(4He)+ 8.7 MeV (or 1KG of B11 can produce 17.7GWh of electricity)or 17.7(3.6*10^12J)which is about 63.7*10^10MJ
In terms of Energy:
1KG of U235 = 1.557*10^9KG of Gasolene
(that's 9 orders of magnitude better) 1KG of B11 = 13.55*10^9KG of Gasolene
So yes it's HORRIBLY efficent, not quite as efficent as Matter + Anti-matter however we haven't figured out how to build that kind of reactor yet, and we'd need a plentiful source of antimatter.
At $57/LB uranium is far cheaper than Gas. I'm pretty sure Borax is cheaper than Uranium.
The problem with using Chernobyl as an example for a nuclear disaster is that in a multitude of ways it wasn't built as safe as reactors elsewhere.
For example, you wouldn't get a Pripyat in the USA because all of our reactors are already contained in pre-constructed pressure buildings. Often it's a dome. It's designed to act as a second containment vessel in case the primary is breached.
Then there's the whole void coefficient thing.
I don't read AC A human right
Thank you.
The ignorance on nuclear reactors tends to irk me. I remember reading an Iron Man comic once, where Iron Man goes into the cooling tower, pulls out the reactor core, and throws it up into space, where it blows up in a nuclear explosion.
Problems being, as you noted the nuclear core is not in the cooling tower, and nuclear cores can't blow up like a nuclear bomb. Nuclear Physics 101. It just can't happen.
Fission bombs are set off by the rapid forming of a critical mass, either by joining two halves of a critical mass together in a millisecond's time, or, as with plutonium, by rapid implosion, usually of a sphere, causing the material to rapidly condense into a critical mass. (roughly described - I am not a nuclear physicist, so don't go all picky on the fine details everyone). It's an incredibly precise thing to get right. It doesn't just happen. Form the critical mass too slowly, and you create a whole lot of heat and radiation, but no boom.
I imagine that most of the fearful public does not understand this, even on a rudimentary level, and equates nuclear reactors with nuclear bombs. How many people think that Chernobyl was a nuclear explosion? Most I talk to. The no-nukes zealots commonly exploit this fear and ignorance. They are not interested in science, but in their ideology.
The waste produced by a coal plant is more radioactive than nuclear waste. We would have far less radioactive waste with nuclear power than with coal.
Mir tut es leid, Menschen daß Einfältigfehlersuchenbaumfolgendenaffen sind.