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.'"

Comments

Finally

[plague3106]

Common sense prevails. Nuclear is the best option we have right now for clean, cheap, reliable energy.

Re:Finally

[MrEricSir]

Or we could just, you know, turn off computers that we're not using.

Re:Finally

[all5n]

Can't we go back and re-refine the nuclear waste for further use later once we get rid of the stupid "no breeder reactors allowed to prevent proliferation" laws?

Re:Finally

[maxume]

Yes. The continued on-site storage of reactor waste and political failure of Yucca mountain is 'a good thing'.

Re:Finally

[ducomputergeek]

And the cost of energy and materials to produce the solar cells needed to capture said solar energy?

Re:Finally

[thule]

No thanks to Greenpeace et al that caused nuclear to be financially and politically less viable than coal. Think of what nuclear costs could be if over the top regulations didn't exist. If we can adopt sane regulations to nuclear reactors we would be much less dependent on coal.

Environmental groups have caused the greatest amount of greenhouse gases than any other group. Okay, okay, I made that stat up.

Vote Chuck DeVore (A pro nuclear power guy running for Senate in California).

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

What would help a lot is to get the NRC and various companies that produce reactor and genrating equipment together and establish a national standardized reactor design. You know, that approach that seems to have worked for France of all places. Once that's done, companies can compete on bids for parts and construction, but regardless of when and where it's built the primary circuit and controls/instruments will always be built exactly the same and to the same spec and same layout. No deviations. The secondary circuit pipe runs should essentially the same too. Perhaps the only allowable major design differences will be whether you're using evaporative cooling or using a nearby large body of water as the heat sink for the condensing side.

Get this done, and doing construction approvals and safety inspections could be streamlined. No more dicking around trying to figure out how each separate facility does stuff, because they will be (or should be) exactly 100% the same. Inspectors would be more likely to know exactly what to look for. The training for maintenance and operation also would be less involved because once taught the operation and schematic for one plant, a technician would know them all.

Re:Finally

[similar_name]

The amount of power delivered to the Earth from the sun is more than sufficient. The problem is, and ever has been, efficient conversion of that energy into a useful form.

What I find interesting is that oil and coal both got their stored energy from the Sun. Even uranium was made from the energy of a star. Wind energy is from the Sun.

Tidal wave energy is about the only thing I can think of that doesn't come from the Sun. Although I suppose we could take it a step further and say the Sun gets it's energy from gravity. Ultimately all energy it would seem comes from gravity. Just some random thoughts.

Re:Finally

[Xzisted]

Well, if solar panels were 100% efficient then we would only have to cover 1.8% of the land on our planet for them to cover all our needs.

Wait. The earth rotates with about 38% of the surface optimally bathed in sunlight at any given time. Doing the math on that means that we have to cover somewhere in the neighborhood of 4.2% of the land on the planet in 100% efficient panels to cover our needs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Oh wait, solar panels aren't 100% efficient. As a matter of fact, they aren't even nearly 20% efficient in most cases. Eh...back to the drawing board.

I love the idea of cleaner energy as much as everyone else, however there are a few things that many people don't realize.

1. Nuclear power is a known entity with known problems however it provides the most energy at the least cost in regards to both money and pollution.
2. Covering signifigant portions of any land mass in solar panels (solar farms) leads to serious erosion problems and other issues that are not widely publicized as a large problem. It is a large problem, so much so that some solar farms are only producing at about 60% capacity due to equipment failures caused by panel foundations shifting and wind issues. Read the article in Wired.
3. Wind farms can not adequately provide enough power to the grid to support everyone. In severely windy areas it can cause serious power spikes that our current power grid cannot handle potentially causing large scale outages. It is also worth noting that if you have an unusually non-windy month, your refrigerator might not turn on some nights. That sucks.
4. Technology is not there yet with geothermal, waveform hydroelectric or any other technology you hear routinely mentioned as a solution to all our energy problems. They are at least 20-30 years off before they start providing any useful power and that is at the earliest.

We get it. We need cleaner energy. Now, listen to those of us who agree with you but are more well informed: Nuclear is your first best option for the next three decades. Do you really feel like complaining about how bad coal and oil are for another 30 years?

--X

Re:Finally

[sjs132]

I blew away my mods just to reply to YOU.

WHERE in your calculations do you account for cost of installation?

Where is your cost of batteries for non-sunny days?

Where is your ongoing maintenance costs? (Someone has to climb up and clean the panels occasionally!)

What if you live in a valley?

Solar may be nice in certain areas, but it is not as efficient as you portray it to be. You state 18 years of free energy over a 30 year life span... Where are your facts to back this up? I want to see some REAL figures! Oh, and don't even bother to include government incentives! That's not fair math, that's fuzzy math!

This does not have to be a "No Nukes", solar and wind only argument, but if you are presenting it like that, then bring the facts to the table. ALL energy sources are needed, not one size fits all.

I enjoy nuclear power

[Gizzmonic]

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.

Re:I enjoy nuclear power

[dogmatixpsych]

And of course now that we have such a "green"-friendly president we are now going to build a few new nuclear reactors!

[Yes, that was sarcasm]. It is unfortunate that our current president and Congressional leadership are so anti-nuclear. You'd think they all still believe the lies and exaggerations of 1960s and 1970s environmentalists. We need to build many more nuclear plants, recycle spent nuclear fuel, and figure out and build better electric cars. That should help out our economy and environment.

Re:I enjoy nuclear power

[ivan256]

Don't be silly. Our current president is much smarter than that.

He understands that opposing nuclear technology is much more valuable to him politically than using the technology to reduce our carbon emissions in a significant fashion. And maintaining power is more important than the environment.

Re:I enjoy nuclear power

[Randle_Revar]

>Environmentalist wackos want us to turn off electricity and live in paper hats,
Did you mean "huts"? Although living in a giant paper hat might be fun, at least until it rained.

Anyway, who are these nuts? Where are they? I have read about them, but I have not seen
any evidence that these creatures still exist in the wild. I am convinced they went extinct
in the 60s or 70s. Certainly I have not found any in the environmentalist communities I
frequent.

Re:Just Takes One

[DrMrLordX]

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.

Re:Just Takes One

[AJWM]

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.

Intense danger

[StreetStealth]

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.

Re:Just Takes One

[Avin22]

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.

Re:Just Takes One

[kannibal_klown]

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.

Re:on track, on time, and on budget...

[Red Flayer]

1.5 years into a 5-year project, the project is on-time and under-budget?

Quite conceivable, especially since the main contractors (Bechtel, Siemens, Westinghouse) are not operating on cost-plus contracts. But this early into a project, it is a bit premature to assume that it'll continue to be under-budget and on-time. But who knows, maybe it will be. The reputation of the contractors (especially Bechtel, as primary contractor for most of the work) depends on it. This is especially important given that the market for construction of nuclear facilities in the US has the potential to, um, explode over the next decade or two.

Keep in mind that the biggest boondoggle of over-budget and past-due construction (the Big Dig in Boston) was under budget and on time for the first several years of construction.

Re:Just Takes One

[CannonballHead]

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)

Meh

[bill_kress]

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?

Re:Meh

[plover]

Because nuclear power is greener than fossil fuels (the emissions are tiny, solid and containable, and it doesn't destroy whole ecosystems like hydroelectric dams), it's more effective/efficient than terrestrial sources (a nuclear plant is very "compact" compared to the land mass of solar array or a giant farm of 1MW windmills ) and we have enough fuel to run them for centuries (as opposed to oil and gas which are rapidly dwindling, and could be used for other purposes such as plastics and lubrication.) Read all of the above posts to understand more of the benefits. They are very exciting.

The drawbacks are all about the waste: how do you store a thing that's dangerous for tens of thousands of years? How do you adequately protect a thing that's desired by terrorists?

As engineers, we see those as solvable problems. But they are never implemented because of the political opposition, not because of any technical reason. And nothing pisses us off faster than pointing out a perfectly valid solution to a problem only to be told we can't do that because some ignorant people are afraid. "No, you can't run a nuclear train through my town, even though the cars have been crash tested at 150 MPH," or "You can't bury that waste thousands of feet below the ancient burial grounds of my already dead great-great-great grandparents, we must honor them properly from within our sacred Casinos."

That's where my passion comes from, and it's probably not an uncommon sentiment here on /.

Re:Meh

[shutdown -p now]

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.

I consider myself a sane and pragmatical environmentalist. That is, I believe that we shouldn't crap all over the place just because it's easy and convenient for us to do so today, disregarding the consequences of those actions tomorrow. Thus, I believe that we should gradually reduce the use of fossil fuels (i.e. as fast as possible, but without collapsing our economy and inducing quality of life decrease).

On the other hand, I still believe that needs of humanity come first, and that nature (and, in general, world around us) is something that we should use towards our goals and preserve for the sake of self-preservation; and not something inherently valuable in and of itself, or a god to worship. Thus, I do not support significant scaling back of our energy use - most of it really isn't excess, but is required to maintain our present living standard. Reducing energy consumption would require scaling it back very significantly, and I do not want to see that happen. We can definitely try to trim consumption down where possible, by using more energy efficient machines and technologies (such as those nifty insulated houses that leak very little heat). But in the end, this is still a drop in the ocean.

The only way I see to reconcile these two viewpoints is to embrace nuclear power (and in perspective, when they get it to work, fusion). It's reasonably clean - yes, there's waste, but that can be fairly easily contained and controlled. It is powerful enough to sustain our energy use, even extrapolating future growth. And it is going to last for very long, long enough to research the next step (be it fusion or something else).

Nothing else cuts it. Not solar, not wind, and not tidal. I fully support their use wherever possible, but they quite obviously aren't enough to cover our needs without scaling them back significantly.

Re:Meh

[plover]

The green reasons don't drive the passion. They're strong arguments, but that's not the answer you were looking for. The passion comes from the denial for purely political reasons. When it's important enough, we can keep stuff out of the wrong hands. We can indeed get rid of it by burying it deep -- hundreds of meters beneath the bottom of the ocean is an almost perfect natural storage repository. We can monitor the hell out of the corporations using it (we already do.) Every problem facing nuclear power has been solved.

Because there are no valid reasons to say "no", being told "no" by intentionally stupid people for invalid reasons ignites a negative emotion -- anger. Anger is just as motivating as the positive passions.

The real answer is anger at willfully stupid people. Ordinary, garden-variety stupid people don't bother me, because I know that some people don't have the capacity to learn. It's the ones that deliberately refuse to learn from history or from mountains of evidence that really piss me off.

Lost Time

[CopaceticOpus]

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.

Re:Less radioactive waste, too

[MobyDisk]

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.

Re:Less radioactive waste, too

[swillden]

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.

hit by lowest-bidder disasters

[aztracker1]

And the military isn't?

Its the waste stupid.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Externality (Waste Disposal)

[IICV]

TBD is better than the answers you get for coal:

• Where does the waste go? (Into the air, including all the little radioactive uranium and thorium particles that live in coal)
• What is the cost of waste disposal? (Absolutely free, because we're just farting it all out into the atmosphere. Not quite as cheap when you factor in the increased incidence of cancer in those who live downwind, though.)
• Have they factored that cost into their calculations? (Nope, and that's why we have the problems we do today.)

Re:Just Takes One

[Colourspace]

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.

First New Nuclear in a Decade?

[Kizeh]

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.

Re:Less radioactive waste, too

[lennier]

"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.