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First New Nuclear Reactor In a Decade On Track
dusty writes "Plans to bring online the first new US nuclear plant since 1995 are on track, on time, and on budget
according to the Tennessee Valley Authority. TVA had one major accident with a coal ash spill of late, and one minor one. The agency has plans and workers in place to have Unit 2 at Watts Bar, near Knoxville, online by 2012. Currently over 1,800 workers are doing construction at the plant. Watts Bar #1 is the only new nuclear reactor added to the grid in the last 25 years. From the article: 'TVA estimates the Watts Bar Unit 2 reactor every year will avoid the emission of about 60 million metric tons of greenhouse emissions linked with global warming. ... TVA began construction of Watts Bar in 1973, but work was suspended in 1988 when TVA's growth in power sales declined. After mothballing the unit for 19 years, TVA's board decided in 2007 to finish the reactor because it is projected to provide cheaper, no carbon-emitting power compared with the existing coal plants or purchased power it may help replace.'"
Common sense prevails. Nuclear is the best option we have right now for clean, cheap, reliable energy.
Inconceivable!
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Nuclear power is the only true green power. Environmentalist wackos want us to turn off electricity and live in paper hats, but you just can't turn off civilization, it's too late. We're addicted to electricity and all the joys it brings-refrigeration being tops on the list, of course! So we're going to have to do something else to fight global warming. Nuclear power is that "something else." It's the only practical solution. There ain't no such thing as clean coal, and Americans will not stop their "unsustainable" lifestyle...and why should they, when they can just nuke it up and enjoy as much refrigerated food as before. The refrigerator is the true ambassador of civilization.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
1). Inhabitable? Don't you mean uninhabitable?
2). It doesn't "just take one". We've suffered more than one nuclear reactor failure in this country without experiencing mass-contamination events along the lines of Chernobyl. Three Mile Island wasn't the only one.
I hate to feed the troll, but:
one nuclear accident could render a majority of the US inhabitable. Presumably you meant "uninhabitable", but you'd still be wrong.
In the 1940s-1950s, the US detonated numerous nuclear weapons above ground in Nevada and New Mexico, releasing a hell of a lot more radioactive material than Chernobyl -- and Chernobyl-type disasters cannot happen with US power reactors (totally different reactor design). This hardly rendered even a significant fraction, let alone "a majority" of the US uninhabitable.
-- Alastair
Your car has four wheels and an internal combustion engine, traits shared by the 1907 Holsman Model 3. Have you stopped to consider the intense danger this poses to you?
But wait: The Holsman was built in a time before ABS, crumple zones, air bags, or even seatbelts. One might presume your 2003 Nissan Altima to be a little safer.
Chernobyl was a nuclear plant built with all the safety precautions of early automobiles. Comparing it with modern TVA-built plants is just as valid as the above Slashdot Car Analogy.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the US have naval submarines that are powered by nuclear reactors. And aren't those subs often docked near populated ports, San Diego for example. Thus, we have already accepted the risk of having nuclear power in populated areas, so it seems odd to be afraid of adding a few civilian nuclear reactors that are not in highly populated areas.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the US have naval submarines that are powered by nuclear reactors. And aren't those subs often docked near populated ports, San Diego for example. Thus, we have already accepted the risk of having nuclear power in populated areas, so it seems odd to be afraid of adding a few civilian nuclear reactors that are not in highly populated areas.
Agreed. It's mostly irrational fear.
I could see where one would trust a reactor that was built FOR the military and operated BY highly trained military personnel. Too many civilian projects and products get hit by lowest-bidder disasters.
I recently read about Chernobyl on wikipedia. That entire episode was apparently ... well, incredibly stupid and mismanaged. It was more of a "Titanic" incident than anything else I can think of in history. (The "nothing will go wrong" mentality that leads to some really, really stupid actions)
I'm kind of neutral about the whole subject. Neat tech, but trusting corporations is not in my nature.
Also, when compared to wind and solar, Nuclear is the one power source that allow corporations to retain control of power generation.
But balancing that is the fact that it's a pretty continuous source of energy...
What I'd really like to understand (I always ask this and I've never gotten an answer) is why some people are so for it. They aren't going to make money off it, overall it will not save them money (Even those of us who live exclusively off dams don't have THAT much of a money savings)...
I can understand people being really against it. Fear of the unknown, lack of understanding, history (quite a few people have died in the past)
I can also understanding someone being somewhat for it (I'd be tempted to vote for one in my city, although the last one here was a complete cluster-fsck) but where does one get the motivation for the positive passion that this topic so often seems to create?
Don't forget:
6. Coal power stations, worldwide, release approximately the same amount of radioactive material into the atmosphere every year than Chernobyl did, ever.
Which means we that if we could replace those coal power stations with nuclear ones then we could have a Chernobyl-style event every couple of years and still come out ahead.
I think it's great to see new nuclear power coming online, but it's too bad this is simply the completion of a project begun in the 1970's. There hasn't been enough work done in the US to advance the design of nuclear power stations in the last few decades. I wonder how much more efficiently these stations could be built and run today if we had been focused on the problem all this time.
I think I'm probably just feeding a troll, but you're mixing apples and onions. Coal, natural gas, nuclear, wind, water and solar are for stationary power (i.e. electricity). Oil is for portable power (i.e. planes, trains and automobiles). The current discussion is about stationary power generation.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
The article doesn't really provide enough information to support the conclusion. All
Summary: Radioactive elements in coal and fly ash should not be sources of alarm. The vast majority of coal and the majority of fly ash are not significantly enriched in radioactive elements, or in associated radioactivity, compared to common soils or rocks.
Right, but that doesn't help because it discounts the quantity of coal, and the fact that it is being burned and released into the atmosphere. It didn't answer at all the amount of radiation released in total, only the density of the radiation. The question is: Does a coal plant release more or less radiation than a nuclear plant with equivalent output?
About Coal Creek Station: In 1993, the Nation consumed more than 2 million tons of coal per day.
And the article you linked to says:
concentrations of uranium fall in the range from slightly below 1 to 4 parts per million (ppm)
But don't know what 2 million tons x 1 part per million means.... soo... Aha!
Coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste
The editor clarifies, at the end of the article:
*Editor's Note (posted 12/30/08): In response to some concerns raised by readers, a change has been made to this story. The sentence marked with an asterisk was changed from "In fact, fly ashâ"a by-product from burning coal for powerâ"and other coal waste contains up to 100 times more radiation than nuclear waste" to "In fact, the fly ash emitted by a power plantâ"a by-product from burning coal for electricityâ"carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy." Our source for this statistic is Dana Christensen, an associate lab director for energy and engineering at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as well as 1978 paper in Science authored by J.P. McBride and colleagues, also of ORNL.
As a general clarification, ounce for ounce, coal ash released from a power plant delivers more radiation than nuclear waste shielded via water or dry cask storage.
The USGS says that this claim is not true and that "The vast majority of coal and the majority of fly ash are not significantly enriched in radioactive elements, or in associated radioactivity, compared to common soils or rocks."
That doesn't necessarily mean it's not true. Even if there are only small amounts of radioactive material (enough to make it not "significantly enriched"), it could still be the case that when multiplied by the amount of ash released, the result is a larger amount than is produced by a nuclear reactor of the same size.
I don't know if it is, but it's possible. I'd like to see numbers.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
And the military isn't?
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
This is patently not true. There is a long term solution to nuclear waste. toss it in a feeder/breeder reactor and use it to make more electricity.
By the time you are done with it you have two kinds of waste products...
Those with a half life so small that storing it for a few years will eliminate its radiation hazard.
Those with a half life so long that they are no more a radiation hazard than natural granite.
No one answers the question: Where are you going to put the waste? You can't recycle or reprocess everything and whats left is mind bogglingly bad.
The reason is, there is no answer for a 250,000 year problem like that. Even if you find a 'solution' to keep it out of the easy to parts of the world we use you still have left future generations a crap load of trouble in addition to what every they will have to deal with.
Thanks mom.
If you have so little faith in the future of technology, and the improvements it brings daily, then I have little faith about your future on slashdot.
The title is pretty misleading, as it omits "US." One might also look outside of the US borders for some examples of how new nuclear power plants are coming along -- or aren't.
That's not a thought experiment, that's an assertion.
"As a general clarification, ounce for ounce, coal ash released from a power plant delivers more radiation than nuclear waste shielded via water or dry cask storage."
That's a fairly big qualification, though, isn't it? Raw coal ash vs *shielded* nuclear waste?
I don't think many environmental protestors are claiming that nuclear waste, if shielded, emits radiation. The worries are about whether the shielding actually survives and doesn't break down over years, leach into groundwater, etc.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Name the others...
"...can you imagine a BEOWULF CLUSTER of these? That'd be some serious power!"
To me this seems a pretty easy answer once you look at the raw numbers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium-235 shows that when one atom of U-235, once fissioned, releases 202.5 MeV of heat. That's 202,500,000 electron volts, a.k.a., one huge amount of energy.
An atom of carbon when burned (C + 2 Ox->COx2) releases a few electron volts of energy and gives us carbon dioxide, which is said to be a "greenhouse gas". (I'm not debating that point).
Let's just do it with money, okay?
Hold an atom of carbon in one hand. Hold an atom of uranium in the other hand. The carbon's worth a few dollars. The uranium's worth Two Hundred Million Dollars. Which one do you pick? If you pick uranium, you just hit the Lotto Jackpot!
Bear in mind that you have to get enough of either to meet the energy needs of the country, and it's very hard to get enough coal, and much easier, by a factor of two hundred million, to get uranium.
Jimmy Carter made the unfortunate decision (funny how those words appear next to his name) not to include used fuel rods in reprocessing. There's a lot of energy there awaiting.
I think what we ought to do as a country is swallow some pride, go to France, which gets about 80% of its energy from nuclear, and say, "Obviously you have a well debugged design. Help! Show us how to do it!" The French do it right. You know how useful debugged code is.
Thanks,
Dave Small
So we should just go back to dumping all radioactive waste in the oceans? That's one helluva dilution factor right there.
the president is giving out free money for clean energy, and someone at the TVA with a yacht said, "i gotta get me some of that!"
but really guys, 19 years of rats and rain? just how efficient and on time do you expect this thing to be, let alone safe, once you bring it up? Almost two decades have passed, in which time things like the pebble bed reactor have come about as more efficient and powerful means of generating nuclear energy. its like trying to finish your kids new crib after theyve turned 12.
Good people go to bed earlier.
As the another commenter said, a coal plant releases a few tons/year of uranium into the air.
Uranium has an incredibly long half-life and tends to remain in the body due to its chemical properties.
Xenon-135 (which is what the majority of TMI's release consisted of) has a half-life of 9.2 hours and is chemically unreactive, so doesn't tend to concentrate itself anywhere.
Given a choice between living 5 miles from a coal plant or 5 miles from a nuclear plant (US-design, NOT an RBMK...), I'll take the nuclear plant any day.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Please get over you mindless fear.
1. When people talk about reactors exploding they are usually thinking big mushroom cloud destroying a city. Not going to happen. Even a massive steam explosion in a western style light water reactor is EXTREMELY unlikely. The reactor in Idaho people like to bring up wasn't a commercial reactor but an experimental military reactor. Even then it killed fewer people than died at my local oil fired power plant putting up Christmas decorations.
2. Since a Chernobyl style accident is IMPOSSIBLE then bringing it up when talking about a western light water water power reactor is tactic to use groundless fear to scare the ignorant. And yes you are correct there is no reason to protect a building more than a mile for the water from being rammed by the Titanic.
3. We can discuss that when they want to build a power reactor in the US that doesn't have a containment building. All planned reactors in the US will have them. Also the Social Science Journal isn't an engineering or even a physics journal. In fact this is on their front page today. "Child maltreatment in Disney animated feature films: 1937â"2006 "
How about a reference from a physics journal or even the IEEE to back it up?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.