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Next-Gen Nuclear Power Plant Breaks Ground In China
An anonymous reader writes "The construction of first next-generation Westinghouse nuclear power reactor breaks ground in Sanmen, China. The reactor, expected to generate 12.7 Megawatts by 2013, costs 40 billion Yuan (~US$6 billion; that's a lot of iPods.) According to Westinghouse, 'The AP1000 is the safest and most economical nuclear power plant available in the worldwide commercial marketplace, and is the only Generation III+ reactor to receive Design Certification from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.' However, Chinese netizens suspect China is being used as a white rat to test unproven nuclear technologies (comments in Chinese)." Update: 04/20 07:28 GMT by T : As several readers have pointed out, this plant will generate much more than 12.7 Megawatts -- more like 1100 MWe.
Nexr-Gen Nuclear Power Plant
Is "Nexr" either an acronym or abbreviation for something I should be aware of, or is this a "typo in title" case?
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
I don't know where the submitter came up with his number.
12.7 MW sounds a bit low. Even a DeLorean could generate 1.21 GW.
But seriously, my home entertainment center uses more than that. Well, OK, not so seriously. But still, I'm just sayin.
Y'know, that troll works a lot better when the product in question isn't designed by an American outfit owned by the Japanese.
(~US$6 billion; that's a lot of iPods.)
That iPods have become an international currency? Maybe I should cash out my collection of iPods...
Next-Gen Nuclear Power Plant Breaks Ground In China
So... it was a surface detonation instead of a standard air detonation?
... suspect China is being used as a white rat ...
By now everyone should know it's the rats that are using us (or the Chinese in this case).
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
12 MW, 1200 MW, big deal.
I've crawled around a number of hydroelectric generators, from 1 MW to 300 MW; a 1 MW turbine "runner" is about the size of a truck tire. There is simply no way anyone would spend billions on a dozen of those.
And the math doesn't work either. At $100 per MWh, a 12 MW generator would have to run for about 5 million hours to earn $6B. TFA says 1100 MW, which is more like it.
Anybody want a peanut?
Either way, people may want to consider getting on the nexr plane out of China...
In all seriousness, 12.7 MW seems rather small for a $6 billion price tag.
The AP1000 produces 1150 MWe (megawatts electric). The 12.7 MW figure is either wrong or has to do with the start-up phase.
The AP1000 (which is plant they are building) produces 1150 MW. I don't know where the 12 MW figure comes from, but it is incorrect.
So people think they are being used as test subjects because they are getting an approved and new system.
In that case, maybe they should wait till they can find a plant that's been running flawlessly for a century.
All humor aside, there is no way to 100% test something as large, expensive, and complex as a powerplant until it's been built, and used for a significant amount of time. Not to mention surviving several unexpected disasters.
So if you don't want to be part of the test, you might be able to avoid it by going back to the time before the Industrial Revolution.
The AP-1000 isn't a new technology reactor. That's the whole point. It's a conventional pressurized-water reactor. It's built mostly from existing Westinghouse components which Westinghouse had type-approved by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, so that multiple identical units could be built without going through a full design review for each one. So far, nobody has ordered one. Until now.
Most US reactors are unique designs, which is a headache. France has 34 reactors of the same design, which has cost and maintenance advantages, although there's been at least one common design flaw found.
Westinghouse is no longer a US company. It's owned by Toshiba.
Seems to be a step forward from CO2 producing coal.
Since when did iPods become a unit of measurement?
"That kid was hit by a 2-ton truck. That's a lot of iPods!"
I had to laugh when a Chinese visitor recently said to me:
"I see you're going back to the windmill in Britain. We Chinese cannot afford that."
Don't worry, given the usual quality of slashdot summaries, cutting them in half is probably an improvement.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
I'm guessing it's about 12 GW rather than MW. Nuclear plants' power is usually in the order of (a few) gigawatts.
If this is, indeed, a 12 GW power plant, it's one of the largest I've heard of.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
It's a 1.2GW plant. The current order is for four reactors, for 8 billion dollars. The price is expected to fall to about 1 billion per reactor. China has a goal of building 100 reactors by 2020. IF the USA built that many, it would cut power plant greenhouse gas emissions by 30%, or the equivalent of nearly a million windmills.
This is my sig.
What, money is measured in iPods now? Maybe its output should also be measured in iPods it can power instead of megawatts?
No, it's just you.
- Dan
... (comments in Chinese)
I thought this was an English based forum. Have Slashdot been bought by a Chinese company?
Carbon based humanoid in training.
netizens suspect China is being used as a white rat to test unproven nuclear technologies (comments in Chinese)."
This is what happens when you have a closed government: people go wild with conspiracy theories. Happens in America too.....I knew people who seriously believed Bush was going to call martial law and cancel the last election.
Of course, who knows, maybe it is an experimental power station. But given that it is a standard design, I find it highly unlikely. Just like moon landing hoax theories are extremely unlikely. Open government is important.
Qxe4
I just gave a briefing to one of the engineers at this power plant a few weeks ago. Interesting place! It's sort of out in the middle of nowhere, at least as a far as coastal China goes. It's about an hour and a half from here, and the place would never have been built anywhere in the West. There is a Western psuedo-religion that automatically opposes anything with the word "atoms" in the name...it really retards progress. It's the sort of thing that really stands out in relief after you've been out of America for a while and gotten used to the sanity of daily Chinese life. It's really cool when you have a relationship with the guy who grows your vegetables, AND he's just a regular guy, not some psuedo-religious neogardener.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Surely you realize the difference between a civilian nuclear power program and a crash nuclear weapons development project? IIRC, every nation which has developed nukes has similar stories of abuse and malfeasance by top officials.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
In the last few months, I moved to a "McMansion" neighborhood. You know, upscale homes made en-mass with your choice of 4 shades of beige and 4 floor plans, which are really 2 floor plans but mirrored left-to-right.
At first, I thought that I'd hate it. But I love it!
The homes are spacious, comfortable, and stylish. The yards are small but pretty, and easily manicured with an electric lawn mower. The floor plan is just EXCELLENT with all the details thought through.
There's alot to be said for doing a single design very, very well and replicating it.
> Western nuclear technology is safe, for if it were not safe, then anyone harmed by it can sue the manufacturer for restitution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price-Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act (the page name says it all really (but IANAL...)
crash nuclear weapons development project? IIRC, every nation which has developed nukes has similar stories of abuse and malfeasance by top officials.
Except the irresponsible waste handling at Cold War manufacturing plants Hanford, Oak Ridge, etc weren't part a crash project. They were just criminally cheap bastards who couldn't see 5cm beyond their noses.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
They should have built a proper base first. Place solid concrete slabs before building nuclear power plant. Maybe then their ground would still be intact. Stupid chinese.
You might not be familiar with the long running court case between Australian veterans and the British Government over the exactly the same treatment. Soldiers got a pretty raw deal during nuclear tests.
Except the irresponsible waste handling at Cold War manufacturing plants Hanford, Oak Ridge, etc weren't part a crash project. They were just criminally cheap bastards who couldn't see 5cm beyond their noses.
All that was part of the Manhattan Project which was the original crash project. And the hustling continued for decades afterwards due to the nuclear arms race with the USSR.
And the hustling continued for decades afterwards
No one, even during the Cold War, hustles for decades. Especially bureaucracies.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Yeah. At the end of the day, they're both guitar amps that'll blow you across the workshop.
Hence my many comments in this forum about Westinghouse stuff just being the old stuff painted green.
The important thing before building a lot of a new design is to get something that works well for the purpose. With France they needed something that could give them military material with civilian power generation as a side benefit so they were not in competition with other forms of energy. Purely civilian nuclear power has a lot of competition and for one thing needs to be economicly self supporting without government handouts - thus it needs a lot more development before it is viable.
Unfortunately the fantasy mindset of nuclear PR has taken over, as seen by those people above saying stupid things like "it's not really just 12.7MW - it's all because steam lets nuclear down". If it's considered in the realm of reality and not nuclear fantasy perhaps it's a small pilot plant and a step forward and catch up with nuclear technology elsewhere. Personally, since it's Westinghouse, I think it's just a demonstration plant to get the US taxpayer to shell out for a whole pile of this 1970s technology and be a burden on the taxpayer for decades. IMHO we should forget about them until they show some progress - they are about twenty years behind South Africa!
Actually, it's not the submitter's fault, and he's not the only one to be caught out. All of the press kits were sent out with faulty abaci.
Except for that whole resembling a strip of crispy bacon thing.
Bullshit - they are talking about building it in stages. It would take a long time anywhere and any decent government can deal with delays from over-regulation and departmental empire building. Nobody but a government wants to risk money on nuclear power anyway.
I disagree. Nuclear weapons development is a good counterexample. The space race leading up to the Apollo program is another. Bureaucracies can be and are pushed along. They aren't agile or fast, but my term, "hustling" doesn't imply either.
$2.35 per watt.
The problem with Nuclear plants is they tend to build them in the middle of nowhere, usually on the coast so they can pump the "waste" heat into the ocean. This means they can never really be much more than about 40% efficient. Really you should implement a District Heating and District Cooling systems as well if you're spending billions on new nuclear power plants.
The other thing is the current generation of plants (and AP1000 is such) are basically once through designs. The fuel is enriched, left in the reactor till the poisons build up, then removed and ... well, left lying around for 10,000 years till they figure out what to do with it. They're really pretty inefficient with the fuel as well as being inefficient with the heat produced.
The most efficient Nuclear plant would be.
1: In the middle of a city.
2: Attached to District Heating and District Cooling networks as well as the electrical grid.
3: Of a design which breeds it's own fuel and burns the radioactive waste within the reactor. (Thorium cycle, molten salt reactor or integral fast reactor).
So they're basically 3 times more expensive and much dirtier than they should be.
Deleted
China is building up powerful clean power-stations, while the US is wasting billions on bullshit projects intended to keep people working, rather than doing something useful.
Why aren't we building these stations so as to be able to stop polluting the atmosphere with coal and whatever else gets burned to produce electricity here? The Chinese bloggers suspect, we aren't sure of the technology and want to test it in China first, but the truth is much less sinister — and much more worrying...
We have simply lost the drive and our ability to take bold steps and initiatives. Would I like a nuclear plant in my backyard? Yes, as a matter of fact, I would certainly prefer it to a coal-burning one (with its radioactive smoke) or to a wind-turbine, which would take up the entire plot to produce enough electricity for a single light-bulb.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
At a cost of $5.85 billion, and assuming a lifetime of 40 years, an interest rate of 6%, this nuclear plant will have an annual mortgage of $389 million. With a nameplate rating of 1100 MW, if it runs 92% of the time, it will produce 8.9 billion kWh per year, so the capital repayments will amount to $0.044/kWh, assuming it doesn't go over budget. Assuming an optimistic cost for fuel around $0.005/kwh, this gives a total cost of $0.049/kWh, neglecting the cost of maintenance, waste disposal, and any risk of contamination or weapons proliferation.
Now let's look at a new wind farm. A 50 MW wind farm would cost around $96 million (at $1923/kW), which yields an annual capital repayment of $7.5 million (assuming a lifetime of 25 years). If the plant runs at a 35% capacity factor, it will produce 153 million kWh per year. So the total cost will be $0.049/kWh.
So, which would you rather spend $0.049/kWh on -- a nuclear plant that might go over budget, might leak radiation at some point during its life, whose waste will need to be carefully controlled and permanently stored somewhere that hasn't yet been identified; or a wind farm whose costs are much more certain and which comes without all those ancillary risks?
Yes, any individual wind farm will not provide a firm supply of power. But if a lot of wind farms are used, and they are combined with solar, geothermal and other renewable resources, they will provide a fairly stable power supply. There is also a lot of potential for reshaping electricity loads to match the supply of power (e.g., recharge electric vehicles when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining). And finally, if you must have a firm supply of power, you can convert a wind farm into a completely firm supply (at 35% of its nameplate rating) by spending about 10% extra and building rarely-used natural gas peaker plants ($634/kW * 35% = $222kW).
If it hadn't been for these retarded 1960s throwbacks who start a fscking crusade as soon as anyone mentions the word nuclear we could have had far more nuclear power plants. But no, what we need is more windmills , right? Gimme a break.
So, which would you rather spend $0.049/kWh on -- a nuclear plant ... [blather] ...; or [exactly the same figure on] a wind farm ... [blather]?
Well, I'll go for the nuke, thank you, but then I'm not a luddite. I prefer my power not to fail every time we have a calm day, and not to have ridiculous amounts of land used per unit of power generated. Your own optimistic figures show no advantage to wind power, and do not take into account that the cost for nuclear power plants would drop precipitously if they were mass produced.
I hope everyone in the U.S. makes sure to wave to China as they fly by us in nearly every aspect in the near future. They may lack human rights, but technological freedom will only enhance that in the future.
With everything going on, we better hope they have a revolution sooner than latter.
Mod parent up!
I would also venture that wind farms will produce a whole lot of more jobs over their life times than a single nuclear plant. Better jobs, too, cause you get to get outside and travel from time to time for maintenance.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
How much land does that 50 MW wind farm take up?
More important how much land will those 58 (8.9 billion / 153 million) 50 MW wind farms take up? Not to mention what is the cost of building conventional power plants to supply the power on days when it is not windy. Did you factor that in to your price =)
I'd also venture a guess that maintenance costs on 58 wind farms (+ supplemental power)would actually be more than the one nuclear plant just due to the quantity of them.
I'm all for alternative energy as supplements and for using it where it's practical, but at our current state of technology we can't depend on it yet.
The only one that I can give any level of dependability to is geothermal and obviously you can't build those just anywhere.
The U.S. needs Nuclear power plants, but I fear it's not going to happen until it's too late.
Moderation is not supposed to be used as an indicator of agreement.
Let's look at two numbers here:
8.9 billion kWh per year
and
153 million kWh per year.
And - oh wait, there's just the trivial need to have them...
combined with solar, geothermal and other renewable resources, they will provide a fairly stable power supply
A nuclear power plant needs none of this to provide a *very* stable power supply, and is neatly placed in one spot, with a much smaller overall infrastructure build than a miscellaneous hodge-podge of various power sources scattered wherever the environment is suitable for them. It's also proven to work very well at base load generation.
So, which would you rather spend $0.049/kWh on -- a nuclear plant that might go over budget, might leak radiation at some point during its life, whose waste will need to be carefully controlled and permanently stored somewhere that hasn't yet been identified; or a wind farm whose costs are much more certain and which comes without all those ancillary risks?
I would prefer to spend my 4.9cents per kWh on something that will reliably produce base load power 24/7 thanks. Come back in 20 years when some other sucker^W fearless forward-thinker has lost a pile of cash getting the tech tamed and into the markeplace.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
I work at a pressurized water reactor so I'm really getting a kick out of these replies....
No, seriously, I'm not an expert on the radionuclide table, but that's hardly why one would choose a pressurized water reactor over a boiling water reactor. (Those are the two big established types. The United States has dozens of both varieties in commercial operation.)
One big reason to pick a pressurized water reactor is that you limit your contamination to the primary reactor coolant loop and it's support systems. The steam plant- the electricity generating side- stays completely radiation free.
This makes servicing the steam-electricity side of the plant much cheaper and simpler.
Most electricity generating power plants in the US operate on steam power.
In a pressurized water reactor, there's a separate reactor coolant loop that passes heat through metal tubes, boiling 'feed water' in the steam generator, and the steam spins the turbine that makes electricity. The primary coolant and the feed water/ steam do not come in contact.
In a boiling water reactor, the reactor directly boils the water that spins the turbine. One big advantage of this is cheaper construction.
Both types 'burn' Uranium to generate the heat that boils the water. Pressurized Water Reactors simply have an additional segregated loop of water.
There are probably a number of advantages to either type that other folks could fill you in on. I assure you though, as an operator of an American Westinghouse Pressurized Water Reactor, tritium is nothing more than an occasional annoyance.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
If you don't get rid of the heat then you don't have such a big temperature difference so you can get a lot of energy in the first place. While you can get a bit from power plants as industrial heat you really need a really reliable heat sink such as evaporative cooling (those big towers) or sea/lake water.
The second point has been shown in practice by the French - reprocessing of highly radioactive material is very difficult and very expensive since for one thing everything has to be done remotely. Lead lined gloves aren't enough - the stuff might as well be on Mars because it has to be handled so it doesn't get near anybody. That was really the thing that killed Superphoenix (where the waste was far more radioactive again and even more difficult to handle) and the idea of a commercially viable fast breeder reactor. What that has meant is that even though it takes a lot to make the fuel in the first place it is far easier to do that than reprocess. Accelerated Thorium is a different story since it appears that far less handling of fuel materials is required and it can apparently use up discarded weapons materials and uranium fuel rods.
IMHO the answer is less money on PR and more on R&D. Having nuclear power pushed by brainwashed zombies into conspiracy theories that think it was all perfect in 1970 is counterproductive.
The plant itself shouldn't be radioactive at all. Maybe you are talking about the fuel?
BTW: I just visited a VVER-type plant, which was never finished. It takes ages to tear it down (they are working on it since around '95), but all the metal and debris is worth more than the destruction costs. I've put some pictures online here and here in case anyone is interested. I even made some pictures of the core-area, but I haven't scanned them yet (it was way too dark for my digital camera).
I don't read replies by ACs.
So, which would you rather spend $0.049/kWh on -- a nuclear plant that might go over budget, might leak radiation at some point during its life, whose waste will need to be carefully controlled and permanently stored somewhere that hasn't yet been identified; or a wind farm whose costs are much more certain and which comes without all those ancillary risks?
Remember China doesn't have the NIMBYism that the US and Europe has. The waste will be recycled when possible and put in the ground when not possible.
You've started with wrong numbers. The 40 billion Yuan cost is not for one reactor; it is for two of the same kind.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-04/19/content_11217433.htm
So in fact, under your assumptions, the levelized cost of these reactors is 1/2 the cost of wind.
The AP-1000 isn't a new technology reactor. That's the whole point. It's a conventional pressurized-water reactor. It's built mostly from existing Westinghouse components which Westinghouse had type-approved by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, so that multiple identical units could be built without going through a full design review for each one. So far, nobody has ordered one. Until now.
Actually, it is a new design - passive safety systems,fewer components - that has little in common with earlier 2 and 4 loop W plants
The idea was to certify a design, and as long as you built a certified plant you could get a license to operate in a one step, vice the old two step, process. This is intended to reduce the uncertainty and hence cost.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Nothing demonstration about the AP-1000, it's a full 1 Giga Watt production reactor. More than likely the chinese netizens are right and Westinghouse has found a sucker^H^H^H^H^H^Hwilling customer to shell out for the build and also the ongoing cost to uncover the basis design issues, which of course are still unknown with the AP-1000.
For that matter the accident sequence pre-cursors are also unknowns for the AP-1000 as it is an un-implemented design.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
...plays Famicom games.
Westinghouse is no longer a US company. It's owned by Toshiba.
You say that like its a really bad thing.
In reality, yes, Westinghouse is a child company of Toshiba. But in the US, most of the employees are US citizens, many parts are made in the US, and if an AP1000 was built in the US then US labor would build it. Westinghouse, while being owned by Toshiba, doesn't really have a lot to do with Toshiba. It's just a company we bought because we wanted the lucrative Nuclear business.
disclaimer- I'm an American citizen working for Toshiba in the US
The AP-1000 is a new technology reactor. The entire safety system is Passive. There are no diesel generators for this reason. This has never been done in an existing plant yet.
Wait, are you being sarcastic? If it generates more jobs, it will cost more, as you need to pay more people to be able to run it, a factor he did not include in his calculations. So you claim it to be better because it costs more to run it? I don't quite follow...
Dude! That's 1.150 Gigawatts!
They need to turn that bad boy up to 11 and make it 1.21 Gigawatts! That's how much you need to send a Delorean back to the future!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=XV_Dh2zvwLI
Luddites, by their very nature, are starry-eyed naifs. Just look at his comment about jobs, as if jobs were cost-free.
The next pasture is always greener
Actually, the plant does become radioactive. All those neutrons running around in a reactor do this thing called neutron activation which makes a lot of things radioactive. The primary coolant loop, the reactor itself, and the near containment all build up certain levels of radioactivity due to this.
"Free" energy has been suppressed for decades because it would not be centralized and under the control of the government/corporations. see: interview of George Green, and interview with Brian O'Leary. This needs to stop.
~ awaiting spiritual enlightenment ~
Hmmm... I thought China was concentrating on Pebble Bed Reactors. Had big plans to roll out modular 1MW units to stack to need.
According to Wikipedia and my own pet South African Nuclear Engineer, Pebble Bed Reactors do indeed not go into runaway chain reaction processes! There's some physical effect that stops the chain reaction leading to meltdown process. Kinda similar to the way you can't hold your breath until you die (without specific and additional actions that is).
Doesn't mean you can't get radioactive material release, but at least you can't get a Chernobyl.
Oriental Hero "I want to live in a city where the Police don't shoot you" Jean Charles de Menezes
The most efficient Nuclear plant would be. 1: In the middle of a city.
Look, I'm a fan of nuclear power, but even I think plants should be in the middle of nowhere until we get a handle on the likely correlation with Leukemia.
Will there be a web site to track progress on the plant? This may seem like a crazy question, but the first two European "new build" plants, Olkiluoto 3 and Flamanville 3, both have web sites.
Has anyone estimated the environmental impact of generating so much energy from the wind? We cannot assume no impact. If you are taking that energy from the wind, there will be an impact somewhere. Maybe drought in the upper mid-west US from cutting down gulf stream airflow through Texas? I don't know, just wondering.
"Written on the pages is the answer to the never ending story..."
With the US trade deficit at around 600B a year, a cutoff of trade would benefit the USA enormously.
This is my sig.
What? Radiation isn't magical. Even though the biological implications of radiation exposure are not fully understood, radiation is easily measured and tracked.
Anyone working with or near radiation sources wears dosimetry, and has their lifetime exposure tracked. Currently a worker at a nuclear plant receives a dose that is lower than the level at which there is a statistically-significant difference. Interestingly, airline crews get more radiation exposure (higher altitude -> less atmosphere absorbing cosmic rays), typically around 500 mrem/year, that a typical nuclear worker (~170 mrem/year).
And all that is for the WORKERS. Radiation intensity falls off with the square of the distance. So for average people living within a mile of a reactor, the radiation from the plant is totally overwhelmed by the natural background signal.
In other words, we have a good handle on the correlation between nuclear plants and health effects in the population: there is absolutely no detectable correlation.
I did some reading on wikipedia about the various nuclear reactors recently. So being a lay-person, there's some existing common wisdom.
The placement of the nuclear reactor to the sea is a safety issue. You NEED guaranteed large cool water in the condenser stage or reactor goes boom. Wiki says thermal heat is regularly used as hot-water heaters - similar to geothermal heating in iceland. Whether anybody actually uses this is anybody's guess.. Obviously you'd need to pipe the hot water to end locations, so existing suburbia obviously isn't anywhere near able to handle this.
As for breeder reactors:
A) All fission reaction is of a breeding nature. The ratio of bred material is what the different processes produce. The bred ratio varies from 0.5 to 1.2. Where 1.01 is the accepted min ratio to be called a breeder reactor (producing more fissile fuel than originally introduced).
B) Any of the high breeder reactors utilize some aspect of fast-fission. Canada, India and Russia (and France?). Fast fission requires the ABSENCE of water, as water (either light or heavy(deutreonic)) captures energetic neutrons. Instead reaction-neutral coolants are used such as sodium, molten lead, etc. The problem here is related to safety. It is harder to produce intrinsic stability into non-water-based fission. Namely, in boiler-based reactors, when a greater ratio of steam is produced, the reaction naturally slows down, thus naturally regulating the system if electronic control mechanisms don't catch and compensate the control rods in time. With non steam based systems, you use complex chemical fission-poisons (in high-pressure based reactors as found in subs) or are fully reliant on control-rod actuators. (possible single point of failure). (note: I could be wrong about liquid metal based systems not having alternate backup mechanisms such as fission-poisons)
C) Chernobyl was a fast-fission reactor. And it's melt-down was related to the inability to shutdown quickly enough.. (specifically pressure-valve failures and insufficient monitoring which would have initiated the shutdown sooner) The environmental DAMAGE, however was due exclusively to the fact that it was a warhead manufacturing site, and the construction apparatus is too large to enclose with a hardened concrete barrier.
D) 70% of Thorium is in India. Thus, even though Thorium is (likely) a less efficient starting process for a breeder reactor, it's a better long-term strategy for India so as to provide energy independence. This isn't true of most countries.
E) Breeder reactors are the basis of nuclear warheads, thus it's an extremely hot-button issue. The US and Russia specifically discontinue their breeder reactors to comply with arms control. Russia now strip-mines their old warhead supply to fuel existing reactors both domestically and abroad. I suspect that China is not indifferent to this topic as well. The french reprocessing plant is actively/heavily monitored by the UN (IAEA).
F) The French rebreeding process is apparently NOT cost effective by any measure. The reason they do it is similar to the Indian Thorium objective - international energy independence.. China is not likely to be short-supplied of uranium mineral deposits - but I'm not aware of their status. I know Canda has massive Uranium supplies.
Currently boiler and pressure based reactors are 'cheap' to build and are cheap to operate (so long as raw Uranium ore is cheap). They both require 'pre-processing' of the ore to increase the concentration of U-235 to a sufficient level. So it's slightly more expensive in the long run as both ore prices will increase over time, and the added cost of pre-processing.
heavy-water and liquid-metal and inert-gas based reactors facilitate 'raw' Uranium, (e.g. U-238 and possibly thorium), and thus make the operating costs MUCH cheaper, but they don't have the longevity of trivial passive boiler-based plants, and thus the high capital costs are for shorter terms - and thus the average cost is higher.
-Michael
OK, looks like I got that wrong, at least for this press release. But those costs do not seem to be in line with what U.S. nuclear plant developers expect to pay.
For example, this Wall Street Journal article (follow first link for full text) indicates that FPL Groups expects new AP1000's at its Turkey Point plant in Florida to cost $6-$9 billion each, and Georgia Power Co. expects a 45.7% stake in two similar reactors (i.e., 90% of one reactor) to cost $6.4 billion. (The first two reactors at Georgia Power's plant cost nearly $4.5 billion each 20 years ago, over 10 times the $330 million per plant originally estimated.)
So I'd be pretty skeptical of anyone who claims they can deliver nuclear power for less than $0.06-$0.10 per kWh. On the other hand, lots of wind power is being delivered at those costs or lower.
Texas passed a law in 1999 requiring 2 GW of wind power by 2009, but they keep exceeding their goal. By 2007 they had around 2.7 GW of wind capacity. Then they added another 1.6 GW in 2007, and another 2.7 GW in 2008, bringing the total to around 7 GW. This is driven hardly at all by the Texas requirements, a little bit by the federal tax incentives (around $0.01/kWh), and mostly by the fact that Texas has great wind sites and wind power is now competitive with other sources of electricity.
The industry has been growing by 30-40% per year worldwide, and that kind of growth has a way of sneaking up on you.
So the nucular plant puts out 58 times as much power for the same cost, it's basically the same, though...
There is a 'diesel generator building' in a picture here
Send your spendthrift head of state this
Mod parent up.
Yes, the AP-1000 generates about 1.1GW of electricity. Yes, it's a traditional pressurized water reactor. That's because all the alternatives to pressurized water reactors have in practice turned out to be worse. Gas-cooled reactors have a troublesome record. Pebble-bed reactors tend to have jams in pebble handing.
It's an ongoing frustration with nuclear plant design that the operating temperatures are low, which makes for low efficiency and too much waste heat. But to date, nobody has ever built a gigawatt-sized plant with any of the more exotic technologies. So it makes sense to go forward with the classic approach.
The space race leading up to the Apollo program is another.
That was 9 years, then NASA quickly merged into an over-engineered, sluggish beast that still managed to blow up the Challenger by not listening to the line engineers...
They aren't agile or fast, but my term, "hustling" doesn't imply either.
You seem to be thinking of "grindingly persistent".
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Its as if China and US are swapping places because China is not afraid of high technology. (A little more caution might do them good.) China is steadily advancing its space program while the US lurches from political space goal to another. China is trying all kinds of advanced energy production with nuclear power and all-electric cars. China also became the worlds largest coal consumer in 2007.
When I've been in China on a extended visits, the science enthusiasm reminds of the US in the 1950s and 1960s, before Vietnam and Earth Day soured the public on hard science.
Only 40% eh? even with that number you picked out of a hat. Solar power is generally not put in the city So it will suffer the same loss. And the sun is clearly not going to max the panels 24/7 so they might get 30% of their nameplate value BEFORE shipping. Wind similarly gets about 30% of its advertised amount before it even gets transported. Nuclear gets over 90~95% of its nameplate value.
Don't use once through designs. Or get the waste recycled. The only reason we aren't right now is because why bother? Fresh uranium costs pennies. We could reprocess and reuse the spent fuel no problem.
Or how about coal plants killing thousands and thousands of people a year. No one sues them. Its too hard to prove. Though that would be a good way to get the us to switch to nuclear.
Not true. India has constructed thermal breeder reactors that use thorium-uranium fuel and heavy water moderator / coolant.
Nope. You just need to ensure you don't moderate the neutron spectrum. Supercritical water coolant has a high enough heat capacity and low enough neutron absorption cross section to make this feasible. Google for the Fast SCWR if you doubt me.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Chernobyl was a thermal spectrum reactor that was heavily moderated with graphite and cooled by water. Wikipedia has a good article about the causes of the chernobyl disaster. In summary it was caused by a heavily over moderated design ( the opposite of a fast reactor ) in combination with flawed control rod design and the lack of a containment building.
U-233 in thorium fuel has a much better capture to fission ratio than U-235 and Pu-239 which means you don't need a fast reactor to set up a breeding cycle. The waste products are also less long lived since the thorium cycle only produces trace actinides.
Every single plutonium based nuclear weapons program in existence has used low-burnup thermal reactors and not fast reactors. Furthermore most designs of fast reactors are not practical to be run on a frequent refueling cycle, making them substantially less suitable to produce weapons grade plutonium than more traditional methods. The reprocessing methods needed to recover the minor actinides are also unsuitable for separating pure plutonium, making the entire fuel cycle significantly less prone to proliferation than the thermal + PUREX cycle.
Russia has commercial breeder reactors in operation and actively develops fast breeder technology, including their BREST project based on lead coolant and dry reprocessing.
Only if you compare it to coal or traditional nuclear. Compared to wind and other low-co2 energy sources it works out cheaper. In addition the French programs currently aim for research. Commercial reactors would likely use different designs to optimize economics rather than flexibility of the experiments that can be run. In addition they use the PUREX process for recycling the waste as opposed to newer dry-reprocessing methods. Because dry reprocessing uses salt rather than water ( a moderator ) criticality problems are heavily reduced allowing the plant to be smaller and cheaper. Furthermore while liquid sodium reactors are indeed more expensive than pressurized water reactors, it is fully possible to use other coolants such as Lead or Supercritical water. These would with high probability lead to a much cheaper plant ( by 30% or so ) since the lack of a phase change in the coolant allows the plant to be simpler and smaller. In addition the higher temperature increases the efficiency to about 45% as opposed to 33% for more traditional designs.
That act simply guarantees that people won't get the asinine rewards that are common in the courts today. It's more of a "You can't sue, but we will insure you against any injuries" thing. So it's not quite like the public is being hung out to dry, as your post implies.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
You ignore the waste caused storing the energy during windy periods for not windy periods. Also for wind power equivalent to the nuclear plant that is a 14,000acre area of land you are giving up. (Around the size of Manhattan). The nuclear plant would likely take 3~4% of the land. And windfarms are noisy and ugly (so are nuclear plants but they aren't 80m tall. Also if you try to build outside of a class 1 wind zone your prices will double or worse. And if you want to spread those towers out more so you dont lose a 60km^2 chunk you will end losing more again because of efficiency loss. Also to meet US' current energy needs you would need to cover an area 50% bigger than New York .... the STATE.
And since these are the first AP-1000 reactors built, they're expecting the costs of subsequent reactors to come down to about $1 billion per reactor, IIRC.
You ignore the waste caused storing the energy during windy periods for not windy periods.
I assume that all the wind or nuclear power is used when it is generated (which is a realistic assumption for the foreseeable future). Storage (if it were needed for either of these) wouldn't radically change the land use, but might change the costs.
that is a 14,000acre area of land you are giving up
The wind farms might actually be placed on a larger area of land than that. But only a tiny fraction of this land is actually occupied by the towers and roads. The rest is available for farming, ranching, etc. Have you estimated the land use for uranium mining, tailings piles, waste storage, etc.?
And windfarms are noisy and ugly (so are nuclear plants but they aren't 80m tall.
New wind turbines are inaudible beyond a few dozen meters away. People may differ over whether wind farms are more ugly than uranium mines and nuclear power plants.
And if you want to spread those towers out more so you dont lose a 60km^2 chunk you will end losing more again because of efficiency loss.
Wind farms are highly modular -- yes it helps if they are near existing power lines, but it is also possible to build new power lines. And they certainly don't decrease in efficiency if they are built in multiple locations.
The real issue here is not land use anyway. It's what sort of vision we have for the future of the power system. Big nuclear plants, which require a lot of faith in cost forecasts and our ability to control waste (at the mine, mill, plant and afterward). Or wind and solar, which also require some faith in cost forecasts, may use more land area (but in a different way), and don't have the other risks. Intermittent sources require more ingenuity to integrate into the power system, but this is not insurmountable (people on slashdot should recognize that, if anyone). And don't overlook the fact that nuclear plants are as inflexible as wind or solar power -- they have to run around the clock, so if we want to use them for a large share of our power, we will have to find a way to use their night-time output (if you throw it away, that will kill the economics of the plant).
"If you don't get rid of the heat then you don't have such a big temperature difference so you can get a lot of energy in the first place. While you can get a bit from power plants as industrial heat you really need a really reliable heat sink such as evaporative cooling (those big towers) or sea/lake water."
Pretty much all large cities are built near the sea or a large river. And the single largest use for electricity, domestic and commercial, is heat management. With a District Heating and Cooling network, you don't need to use electricity to provide the heating and cooling, so you don't need as much electricity and you can get a better overall efficiency from the fuel.
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" ... Have you estimated the land use for uranium mining, tailings piles, waste storage, etc.? ..."
I fly over said Uranium Mines all the time; the area required is not large, this includes the tailings ponds (not piles; water is an excellent barrier to radiation) and could be compared to the land used by a small city's airport. These particular mines currently supply 35% of world demand; less than the current US demand.
Currently, worldwide, spent nuclear waste is stored at the power reactor's site, again under water, and the assumption in the industry is that will never change, simply because a long-term solution is, for many reasons, not likely to arrive anytime soon. So, there is always room for all anticipated waste on site, and there is no additional land use penalty beyond the reactor site itself for waste storage.
Only 40% eh? even with that number you picked out of a hat.
Nuclear reactors use steam turbines to produce electricity and 40% is ballpark for a steam turbine.
e.g.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_turbine
Siemens say they have a steam turbine which can run at 48% thermal efficiency which is apparently a world record.
Nuclear gets 95% of it's "nameplate" value because they know fine well that they're going to throw 50-60% of the energy away right at the start. See "Carnot efficiency".
And you are right, energy is cheap. Today.
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> That act simply guarantees that people won't get the asinine rewards that are common in the courts today. It's more of a "You can't sue, but we will insure you against any injuries" thing.
I think it depends on how the numbers pan out: the Wikipedia page says it caps payments from industry at $10 billion. But what does it cover following an accident: people affected now, site cleanup costs and/or future generations costs ... ? $10 billion divided by a few thousand people could be enough that the tax-payer is not involved, but a major accident resulting in a major leak, huge containment and clean-up and storage costs the $10 billion would not go far.
> So it's not quite like the public is being hung out to dry, as your post implies.
That is not what I intended to imply: I intending to point out that it is a subsidy to an industry that tries to justify itself, at least partly, on cost.
The ratio of energy produced vs. fuel expended transporting and mounting large modern windmills is much lower than nuclear. There is a silly windmill farm being built in Ontario Canada set on an island, and the barge that carries the components across to the island has been burning almost 8000 gal (30,000L) of diesel fuel a week since last July, so far over 280,000 gallons of diesel fuel with absolutely no emmisions reduction processing whatsoever. Then there's the trucks that haul the components to the dock, etc. Altogether the emissions in this case rival coal, and they're produced before the energy is delivered.
Once it's running the real fun begins. Large windmills resonate a very low frequency that is inaudible to humans, but drives cattle nuts. It propogates through the ground, so the range is rather extensive, though not yet measured (to my knowledge). So the cattle farms on that island are probably going out of business, costing the community more jobs than the windmills created.
What they don't tell you about solar power is that a household solar-thermal system with 60% efficiency is feasible, thanks to an ultra-efficient steam engine, and would only require a 6' diameter collector dish to power the typical power-frugal household, and a second could power an electric vehicle. I don't know where the pressure is coming from to prevent these from hitting the market, but they could be sold and installed for under $3000.
There is simply much more clean energy to be gotten from solar than wind. On a mass scale, solar plants can deliver 500+MW, the equivalent of a 333 windmill farm, almost half an AP1000 nuke, with virtually no ecological impact whatsoever.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
What exactly do they call 'The China Syndrome' in China? Scary....
...
In the short term, pebble beds sound good. The problem, if I understand correctly, is that those pebbles are next to impossible to recycle later in things like Fast Reactors. I'm not sure how many decades it will take to convince people, but the future of nuclear fission has to be technologies which reuse/breed the 'spent' Uranium. The joke about calling Uranium 'spent' or 'waste' is that we currently get like 1 percent or less of the potential energy out of Uranium. In this PBS Frontline interview, the former director of the IFR project explains some of the concepts of the now-cancelled Integral Fast Reactor project.
According to Dr. Till, the possibility exists to get approximately 100 times more energy out of Uranium, by recycling it, than any 'conventional' reactor technology (including pebble beds) currently extracts. I'm no engineer, but I believe that it is very hard, once you've put the Uranium into those graphite balls, then run them through a pebble bed reactor, to get the uranium back out of the pebbles for recycling.
Any reactor design which inherently makes it *more difficult* to recycle the 'waste' Uranium is, in my book, a dead-end technology and we should run far and fast away from it.
I'm not well versed on South African nuclear tech, but a quick google (http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf88.html) shows that their two reactors were both built in the mid 80s, so I'm guessing the design started well before then. Up until recently they were considering bids from Westinghouse to build 3 AP1000s, and Westinghouse is (was?) a partner in SAs PBMR programme. It reads like they're pretty current with the tech and not 20 years behind South Africa.
What? Radiation isn't magical.
Yeah, thanks for the tip. I think we covered that in my emag courses.
In other words, we have a good handle on the correlation between nuclear plants and health effects in the population: there is absolutely no detectable correlation.
Umm, New Scientist, for one, disagrees with you. There have been three respectable, peer reviewed studies now finding a positive correlation between leukemia rates in young children and proximity to nuclear plants. No one has tested a good hypothesis for the causation, but the correlation is highly likely at this point. Until we understand what is going on, we need to be cautious in where we build them.
Interestingly the French don't even use the reprocessed fuel:
http://www.wise-uranium.org/epfr.html
"No use of reprocessed uranium in French reactors in the near future
The uranium recovered from reprocessing of spent fuel in France is not expected to be used for the manufacture of nuclear fuel in the near future. French utility EdF rather has made provisions for long-term storage of the reprocessed uranium for 250 years. This was revealed in a report of the French Court of Auditors on the decommissioning of nuclear facilities and the management of radioactive wastes. "
We were talking about nameplate watts so either you are confused or disingenuous.
One thing I find curious isn't discussed more, is the possibility to do district heat systems with Nuclear Power. It doesn't seem very popular, but. . . Any heat-engine power plant (coal, gas, Nuclear) has to generate something on the order of 2-3 times more thermal energy than what gets converted into electric power (if you're interested, you can check a physics textbook section on thermodynamics and heat engines - specifically, Carnot Efficiency).
In cold climates, the potential exists to take part of the Gigawatts of thermal energy being produced, and use it to heat buildings, and heat water for use in your showers, sinks, etc, also for use in commercial activities that require heat sources (certain types of chemical reactions, distillation processses, etc).
Now, of course, that only is really practical within a certain distance from the nuclear power plant (even with well insulated underground pipes, eventually the water, steam, or other medium that you pump through the pipes to carry the heat to where it's needed), but even with that limitation, you could maybe provide many megawatts or even Gigawatts of heat to industry and residences, which is basically 'free' energy - so that you are no longer using oil, gas, propane, or electricity to heat those buildings, or heat water for those buildings.
If you could shift enough people away from other heat sources, to nuclear district heat, you could free up those other energy sources for other uses.
The South African technology is being put to use in a full scale pebble bed reactor, also in China (and probably operating by now or close to it). I don't recall the names of those involved but it was in the global press when the Chinese pebble bed reactor was announced. I believe a German company in in charge of construction.
The placement of the nuclear reactor to the sea is a safety issue. You NEED guaranteed large cool water in the condenser stage or reactor goes boom.
Nuclear power plants don't go "boom" (at least not due strictly to loss of condenser cooling). You can most certainly meltdown a nuclear core if you remove condenser cooling if you without alternative sources of cooling water. But western-designed cores have multiple sources of alternative cooling available to at least keep the nuclear core cooled in this event. (Part of the failure at TMI was the operators not recognizing that the core was actually being drained of water -- this fooled them into deliberately turned off essential safety systems during the casualty that would have prevented the meltdown).
The problem here is related to safety. It is harder to produce intrinsic stability into non-water-based fission. Namely, in boiler-based reactors, when a greater ratio of steam is produced, the reaction naturally slows down, thus naturally regulating the system if electronic control mechanisms don't catch and compensate the control rods in time.
What you're thinking of is the coefficient that relates change in coolant temperature to change in reactor power. Although it is true that boiling water reactors probably power down as the temperature increases this feature is by no means specific to coolant type.
With non steam based systems, you use complex chemical fission-poisons (in high-pressure based reactors as found in subs) or are fully reliant on control-rod actuators. (possible single point of failure).
IAAS and your description of submarine reactor systems is inaccurate (although Naval Reactors probably won't let me describe it in any more detail).
The environmental DAMAGE [from Chernobyl], however was due exclusively to the fact that it was a warhead manufacturing site, and the construction apparatus is too large to enclose with a hardened concrete barrier.
RBMK was designed to be useful for producing warheads but even neglecting that the more pressing issue preventing a proper containment is that the reactor was designed to be refueled at power, which necessitated a complex machinery arrangement to depressurize and open up a fuel channel, replace spent fuel with new, and reseal the pressure barrier (while operating the whole time). This mechanism above the reactor made building a containment much more difficult (so they went without instead...)
Currently boiler and pressure based reactors are 'cheap' to build and are cheap to operate (so long as raw Uranium ore is cheap).
Well designs that require a single reactor vessel are actually fairly expensive. It takes quite advanced materials science and design to do (AFAIK only Japan has the means to do it for civilian-grade reactors at this point). The design of Canada's CANDU reactor was influenced by this fact.
Other than that (and the other major reply you got) I'm glad you're at least reading about it, which is way farther than most people who have points to make go. Personally I feel nuclear should be at least understood before removing it as an option. If solar, wind, etc. is more cost effective then by all means use those but something has to provide baseload energy and I see no reason it shouldn't be nuclear instead of coal or oil (and that's even accounting for the cradle to grave concerns IMO).
That was 9 years, then NASA quickly merged into an over-engineered, sluggish beast that still managed to blow up the Challenger by not listening to the line engineers...
First, it's somewhat actually more. Sputnik, for example, was launched in 1957 and the US was launching prior to that point. The pressure stopped in 1969 when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. So it's not surprising that future efforts don't show the same urgency present in the early space program.
You seem to be thinking of "grindingly persistent".
No, I'm not. I really don't know why you seem to think this. Anyway getting back to the original story, the thing to remember is that the nuclear weapon bureaucracy was in a big hurry for several decades. Among other things, this meant that clean up was very sloppy and hurried. If a mess were made, it had to be disposed of quickly. I gather record keeper was similarly sloppy. There was a story recently about plutonium found in a jug in Hanford which was thought to be from the second oldest batch of plutonium ever made. Somehow it ended up in an unmarked safe in a dump in Hanford. It's one thing to dispose of dangerous waste in a criminal manner and another to dispose of near bomb grade plutonium in that way. I see this sort of weirdness as more indication of the haste with which the nuclear weapons program was conducted.
Convienent Source!
A: $660 Million B: 0M* C: 100MW, D: 50%, E: 5%(cost of capital)
Annual Power: 438 Gwh (438,000,000 kwh)
Annual Cost: $38M
Cost per Kwh: 8.7 cents
Almost 3/4 more expensive per kwh. Might not seem like much, but it would price some economic activities out of profitability. Be the difference between a $100 electric bill, and a $150 one.
*Unrealistic, but I'll be generous, likely there'll be a good amount of money spend repairing/cleaning the system.
I don't read AC A human right
I see this sort of weirdness as more indication of the haste with which the nuclear weapons program was conducted.
The huge nuclear power plan "swimming pools" filling up with hot waste is proof that weapons creation and waste disposal are asynchronous operations.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Would they have an America Syndrome?
Wouldn't Wikipedia be a great definition of 'common wisdom'? Some may argue that common wisdom is an oxymoron... but that is another day's work.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
I solved the daylight problem... I have a duplicate set of solar panel on the opposite side of Earth, wired into the house!
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
Solar power is generally not put in the city So it will suffer the same loss.
Why? Covering city rooftops in solar cells is the most practical way to deal with clean energy. Doesn't cost you any space that might be used for something nicer, and it's close to where it's used, so you get a lot of efficiency right there.
That said, there's also something to be said for solar power plants in the desert.
True but that results in massive cost increases. Being able to build something MONSTROUS in the middle of nowhere is good. You can angle them to catch light better. Centralizing gives energy savings. And you can buy panels cheaper in bulk. And building in thousands of locations that must be individually repaired raises cost again. Until they are reliable enough that they only need repairing as often or less than the shingles on your roof it wont be viable on a massive scale. (Don't get me wrong I helped a friend install one last summer and on an individual basis it can make great sense!)
Before any starts calling me a luddite, I should point out I was in the top 1/4 or my class in Cornell's EE school. Don't go there. I am an Engineer, and a very good one. The difference between me and a lot of the other posters is that I am not paid by the nuclear weapons (and oh yeah power) industry or any other purveyor of power generation technology.
Right now, there is no plan to store nuclear waste for any new power plants. The only planned nuclear waste disposal facility right now is the Yucca mountain site and it is apparently over committed already. Not to mention the fact that Yucca mountain is a science project, not something designed to good engineering principles.
First, let's talk about the scope of the problem: A million years. The EPA requirement for Yucca mountain requires them to plan for a facility lifetime of a million years. And it's only that short a lifetime because we can't predict the region to be geologically stable for anything longer than that. This means the nuclear reactor waste remains poisonous for MORE than a million years.
Right now, we think our best technology (satellites) are doing great if they last a few decades. Buildings we construct last for a few hundreds. The oldest man-made structures around (the pyramids) have lasted a few thousand years, but most have already failed at their intended purpose (protecting the possessions of the interned).
With the level of experience we have, any sort of design the claims to predict functionality for a million years is a fairy tale. Who do we think we are kidding?
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
$6/watt installed isn't much better than the current price of photo-voltaic cells. I thought the Chinese could do mass production and were wanting to go into hybrid cars in a big way -- so what's the problem with storage? Just require everyone to plug their hybrids into the grid.
Seastead this.
Nuclear gets 95% of it's "nameplate" value because they know fine well that they're going to throw 50-60% of the energy away right at the start. See "Carnot efficiency".
No, the 90-95% of nameplate is because a Nuclear Plant can RUN at 100% production 24x365 90-95% of the time. Yes, losses are figured into the nameplate. But 'capacity figure' is a useful way to tell how many kwh you'll get out of the system.
A 1GW nuclear plant is a different beast than 1 GW of solar panels or wind turbines.
A capacity factor of .9 means that it'll produce 3 times as many kwh, supplying 3 times as many homes and businesses than the .3 average that wind/solar manage to get.
Solar, of course, isn't going to get above 50%, even in a cloudless area with motors to change facings. Wind, well, if it's too slow or too fast the turbine can't produce as much(maybe any) power. I've heard that some areas will yield capacity factors of around 60%, but they're relatively rare.
I don't read AC A human right
Of course the primary coolant loop becomes radioactive. Same applies to the reactor itself.
But I see a big difference between parts which are in direct contact and "the plant". I'm no expert in this, but my guess is that less than 5% of the structure is nuclear waste. Your statement was implying that we have to burry the entire plant. This is not the case unless we are talking about Chernobyl.
I don't read replies by ACs.
I couldn't find that NewScientist article.
However, here's something interesting: http://www.ippnw.org/Resources/MGS/PSRQV1N1Cassel.html