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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)
A nuclear plant also produces less radioactive waste than does a corresponding coal plant. Of course since the latter doesn't fall under the authority of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the radioactive substances in coal ash (like thorium) just get dispersed into the environment along with the stuff that stays toxic forever like arsenic and mercury.
-- Alastair
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
A stranger was seated next to a little girl on the airplane when the
stranger turned to her and said, 'Let's talk. I've heard that flights go
quicker if you strike up a conversation with your fellow passenger.'
The little girl, who had just opened her book, closed it slowly and said
to the stranger, 'What would you like to talk about?'
'Oh, I don't know,' said the stranger. 'How about nuclear power?' and he
smiles.
'OK, ' she said. 'That could be an interesting topic.
But let me ask you a question first. A horse, a cow, and a deer all eat
the same stuff - grass. Yet a deer excretes little pellets, while a cow turns out a flat patty,
and a horse produces clumps of dried grass. Why do you suppose that is?'
The stranger, visibly surprised by the little girl's intelligence, thinks
about it and says, 'Hmmm, I have no idea.'
To which the little girl replies, 'Do you really feel qualified to
discuss nuclear power when you don't know shit?
1. Reactors don't explode.
2. A Chernobyl style accident is impossible with a light water reactor.
3. Even with a Chernobyl style reactor and even if they had the exact same accident the problem would have been manageable if they had a freaking containment building.
4. Reactors all go critical. What you don't want is for them to go super critical.
5. No modern reactor can go super critical the fuel they use isn't enriched enough to go super critical and they all need a moderator like water to work.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I guess nobody in power to stop these things never takes into account that one nuclear accident could render a majority of the US inhabitable.
I think the keyword here is could. I can imagine many disasters that could cause enormous damage too, but the question is how likely they are to happen. What is more likely, a meteor strike, or an accident in a nuclear power station of such a magnitude as to render US uninhabitable? I don't know, but lets say they are comparable. If so, we should be willing to spend as much money on protection against meteors as we are on not using nuclear power, including, arguably, the cost of our military operations in the middle east, the increased danger of terrorism (potentially nuclear too) etc. Either way it's a cost/benefit analysis and you have to look at both sides of the equation.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
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
Plus, since the feds own the vast majority of Nevada (>85%), it was already illegal to inhabit those areas, anyways. I'm not bitter; I'm just Nevadan.
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)
1) Mostly true. They can have a steam explosion, which is basically the first thing that happened at Chernobyl. That said, they can't result in a nuclear explosion.
2) Exactly. To be specific, the Chernobyl (RBMK-1000) reactor design used a graphite moderator in order to make it more suitable for production of weapons materials. Graphite moderators are bad for a variety of reasons, both in regards to reactor stability, and the fact that it's extremely flammable (which is where most of the atmospheric contamination from Chernobyl came from - burning graphite.) No US civilian power reactor serves such a dual purpose.
3-5) Don't really need to say more
Additonally:
A typical coal plant releases more radioactive material into the air in a day due to traces of uranium in the coal than TMI released in its lifetime
Also, in addition to the fundamental deficiencies of the the RBMK-1000 design, they were running an experiment with the reactor that could only be described as "fucking dangerous". Well not only, "fucking stupid" works too. By the time the incident occurred, the reactor operators had overridden most of the reactor's safety features - the reactor SHOULD have SCRAMed long before the incident occurred but the operators kept it going to run an experiment because they feared retribution from their superiors. (The experiment failed the first time, and rather than continue shutdown they tried to restart the reactor to try again.)
The biggest problem currently is waste. Sadly, there are reactor designs that are both far more efficient in fuel use (hence produce far less waste per kWh) AND also produce far shorter-lived waste (plus can use traditional LWR waste as fuel), but were killed because politicians translated "breeder" into "proliferation risk" even though traditional LWRs were more of a proliferation risk than the IFR was. Also, a past president (Carter?) banned all nuclear fuels reprocessing in the U.S. with an executive order. Back then, reprocessing = PUREX and banning PUREX was understandable (it WAS a major proliferation risk), but now there are many other reprocessing technologies that are not proliferation risks but are still banned under the wording of the executive order.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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
Nope. The 100 or so bombs detonated above ground on the US mainland were relatively small, releasing a few kg of material each. Chernobyl released tons of material. To match that, you'd have to go to the US thermonuclear tests in the Pacific ocean, some of which released about of ton of fission products each. (Some of those test site islands are actually still uninhabitable.)
Science-to-car analogy translation:
All car engines use small explosions to provide power. What you don't want to happen is a really big explosion.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Here is a map of sites for which applications have been submitted to the NRC and are currently undergoing review. None of these will happen until the political will emerges to move the bureaucracy.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
All wrong:
1. Reactors don't explode. :
See SL-1, Chernobyl, and the one the AEC blew in Idaho just for fun.
2. A Chernobyl style accident is impossible with a light water reactor.
True, but there are still about 843 other failure modes that don't involve the many bad
design features of RBMK-style reactors.
3. Even with a Chernobyl style reactor and even if they had the exact same accident the problem would have been manageable if they had a freaking containment building.
Not feasible if you're a poor country that needs a RBMK style reactor that can be refueled while running.
4. Reactors all go critical. What you don't want is for them to go super critical.
Duh. And I think you're confusing super-critical to with prompt-critical. Very different beasts.
5. No modern reactor can go super critical the fuel they use isn't enriched enough to go super critical and they all need a moderator like water to work.
Nope. Enrichment has nothing to do with it. AT least three reactors have gone boom with low enrichment uranium.
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.
Breeders have been tried, to the extent of about 20 billion dollars, over the last 40 years. All have failed. It's really hard to make something that can run with the very high neutron fluxes for years and years. There are only so many different materials and alloys to choose from and they all tend to fall apart after a while with 10^38 neutrons per cm^2 per second buzzing thru them.
In addition we may have passed the point of no return re breeders-- i.e. if we had breeders right now, there isn't enough uranium left to run the current bunch of reactors and breed any usable amount of new material.
There's also the slight problem of building plutonium-burning reactors and not losing a few kilos to the bad guys.
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
that they were just waiting on Windows 7.
And the military isn't?
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
Quibble. President Reagan lifted the ban in 1981.
"TVA's board decided in 2007 to finish the reactor because it is projected to provide cheaper, no carbon-emitting power..."
Where does the waste go? (TBD) What is the cost of waste disposal? (TBD) Have they factored that cost into their calculations? (No)
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
What's with the reference to the coal fly-ash spill in the middle of the summary about TVA building nuclear power plants?
1. Not really an explosion. It was more of steam rupture. No combustion or nuclear explosion was responsible. Just think of it as venting in a hurry. But that can happen with your home hot water heater.
2. But none of those will cause a Chernobyl style disaster.
3. The US isn't a poor country that needs to refuel the reactor while it is running.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The hills of Dixie Valley in this case. Fallon, NV was witness to an above-ground nuke in the 1960's at some point. The whole town came out to watch the big boom (more than 25 miles away). Apparently you can still go out there to Dixie Valley and see the blast crater. And yes, I'm a Nevadan. I glow in the dark and sport an absurd immunity to arsenic. When the apocalypse does come around, I and my fellow Nevadans will be duking it out with the giant mutant cockroaches and their cthonic overloads atop the mounds of your corpses. (Texans ain't got shit when it comes to heat, environment, guns per capita, or any claim to be tough in general - we laugh in their general direction)
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
The summary is all over in terms of calling it new plant, when it is really a new reactor. But that is a good start. It would be nice if the pubs would push the concept of even 1 new nuclear plant / every 4 states. Heck, the stimulus money could have done a nice job of funding this and allowing us to move nicely to electric cars.
With that said, I do think that we need to continue with AE esp Geo-thermal and Solar Thermal. Both are capable of base load power, which is really what is needed.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
No kidding. I mean, we already have constant hydrogen fusion in the sun, making large swaths of the earth inhabitable. And we all know how THAT turned out.
THL phish sticks
Using these data, the releases of radioactive materials per typical plant can be calculated for any year. For the year 1982, assuming coal contains uranium and thorium concentrations of 1.3 ppm and 3.2 ppm, respectively, each typical plant released 5.2 tons of uranium (containing 74 pounds of uranium-235) and 12.8 tons of thorium that year. Total U.S. releases in 1982 (from 154 typical plants) amounted to 801 tons of uranium (containing 11,371 pounds of uranium-235) and 1971 tons of thorium. These figures account for only 74% of releases from combustion of coal from all sources. Releases in 1982 from worldwide combustion of 2800 million tons of coal totaled 3640 tons of uranium (containing 51,700 pounds of uranium-235) and 8960 tons of thorium.
Ummm .... just how many deaths and how much radioactivity was released by 3MI? Approx: None.
The ONLY lesson to be learned from Chernobyl is that a tin roof over a bad rector design isn't a good combination. Modern reactors have both failsafe designs AND better containment, so no, it can't happen here. Reactors like (eg.) the Pebble Bed reactor have no unstable state. Even if some lunatic director goes berserk in the reactor control room he can't cause a meltdown.
No sig today...
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.
ABOUT FUCKING TIME!!!!!
It's great to hear about someone finally building another nuclear plant in stead of another coal- or gas-fired plant. Here in the People's Republik of Kalifornia, nuclear power is verboten, and mentioning it will get your ass drummed out of town by "newspaper scientists" and politicians who allow themselves to be led around by the nose by environmentalists who wouldn't know a rational thought if it bit them on the nose.
However, unless this is a PBMR, the problem is only half-finished. Nuclear wast cannot be stored for the thousands or millions of years that it would need to decay to a safe level. The solution would be to use a breeder reactor to efficiently reprocess the waste fuel, instead of simply storing it underground. This would reduce the amount of raw fuel production that would be needed, and would greatly reduce the quantity of radioactive waste, which could be separated into usable isotopes. Apparently, Jimmy Carted, despite his nuclear degrees, thought that it would be better just to let waste accumulate in huge quantities underground, instead of *RECYCLING* it back into usable nuclear fuel, and caved into the demands of the Greens and banned breeder reactor construction.
Here in the People's Republik of Kalifornia, Greens attack every form of power generation, except, for some reason, gas turbines.
1. Solar - Uses up too much valuable land, not efficient enough for the energy demands of the state. Extremely expensive and not useful on cloudy days. Technology not advanced enough.
2. Wind - Indefinite moratorium in CA, because the places windy enough to make them efficient are in the flight paths of birds. Banned in Altamont, CA, the windiest place on the planet.
3. Nuclear - "Sen." Feinstein has vowed to oppose any form of nuclear power. Not going to happen in CA. Feinstein refuses to educate herself on PBMRs, and instead listens to lobbyists.
4. Geothermal - Not efficient enough due to too few suitable locations (Many in open spaces and parks).
Rep. Ellen Tauscher, a Democrat from Kalifornia, is one of the few Democrats to actually see the advantages of nuclear power generation over those who remain blinded by politics. Although a democrat, I still have to give her serious props in her position on nuclear power.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
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.
Almost. The delayed neutrons are actually the ones emitted by the fission products as they decay to more stable isotopes (by neutron emission, obviously). What you are thinking of is fast neutrons. Most neutrons emitted by fission reactions (whether prompt or delayed) are fast. Depending on your fuel and reactor design, you may be able to use fast neutrons to cause fission (hence fast breeder reactor), or you may need to slow them down (turn them into thermal neutrons) using a moderator first. Other than that nitpick, you're spot on.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
Wikipedia also says: "A 1,000 MW coal-burning power plant could release as much as 5.2 tons/year of uranium (containing 74 pounds (34 kg) of uranium-235) and 12.8 tons/year of thorium." One big difference here is that an event like the Three Mile Island accident is usually a one-time event, while the coal-burning plant goes on releasing its radioactive material year after year after year....
I'm not going to take sides because I don't know how many curies you get from the release of 5.2 tons of uranium and 12.8 tons of thorium, or what the typical lifespan of a coal plant is (the multiplication factor here), but I definitely don't think it's quite as simple a matter as your brief post suggested. Can you show your work in a little more detail?
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.
You're being unfair to the Titanic. In order for it to be a fair comparison, you'd have to have the crew of the Titanic cut hols in all of the interior bulkheads, cut apart all the lifeboats and life-preservers, and then steer the ship at full speed directly into the biggest iceberg they could find. Only then would the Titanic incident be somewhat comparable to the sheer negligence of the Chernobyl technicians.
Our reactors are NOTHING like Chernobyl and it is that NIMBY crap that keeps us using coal instead of something better for the environment like Nuclear!
With Chernobyl you are talking about an ancient Soviet era nuclear reactor that had been scheduled to be shut down years before it went off, but they were simply too poor to afford to take it off line. IIRC they are actually still running the second reactor at Chernobyl as we speak!
With reactors in the USA, we constantly inspect them, we have full size trainers designed to simulate just about any possible problem that could arise to train the crews that man them (one of the problems with Chernobyl is a poorly trained crew IIRC) and ours are well maintained and serviced. The simple fact is we NEED nuclear power if we are gonna get off coal, which spits poisonous smog and greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. And the technology for powering a country the size of the USA with solar or wind simply isn't there yet.
So I welcome the new reactor in Tenn and welcome the folks of Tenn into the "cheap power" club. As someone who lives in AR and enjoys cheap clean power thanks to Ar 1 & 2 I say welcome to the club and don't let the NIMBYs stop you.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Hahahahahaha. You do realize that all the military nuclear propulsion reactors were built by private company low-contract (or blind contract) developers, right? A good number of them were under my father's control while he was the Branch Manager of the NRF (Naval Reactor Facility) at the INEL (Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, now INL, formerly INEEL). The reactors such as S1W (Submarine 1 Westinghouse), A1W (Aircraft Carrier 1 Westinghouse), S5G (Submarine 5 General Electric), etc. were built by private contractors; the INEL/INEEL/INL has the DoE reactors operated currently by Bechtel, previously by some Lockheed-Martin subsidiary, someone else before that ... it changes every few years. Bechtel also runs Bettis and Knolls Atomic Power Labs.
The military and government reactors are already built and run by low-bidders. And yet, even with that, there has been one (1) fatal nuclear accident in the US. Three military personnel died in a meltdown and explosion in 1961 at SL-1 reactor at the INEL. So, thinking that military reactors are safer... well, in the US they have the same record for the last 48 years - 0 fatal accidents; but military loses before that...
It was more of a "Titanic" incident than anything else I can think of in history.
Do I really need to point out the obvious here?
Property is theft.
Name the others...
"...can you imagine a BEOWULF CLUSTER of these? That'd be some serious power!"
Criticality is a function of free neutrons: if there's not enough to sustain a reaction, it's subcritical; if it's break-even, it's critical, and if there are enough to grow the reaction it's supercritical. Contrary to the movies, a reactor that's critical is not a failure state (it's normal operation). Even "supercritical" isn't necessarily trouble (though if you stay supercritical for too long it will eventually be).
When a reactor finds fault with 'most everything you do or say, it is said to be "hypercritical".
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
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
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
The following links are to a couple of interesting Google Tech Talks on Youtube, covering the subject of Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors. Carlo Rubbia (Nobel-winning physicist) is pushing another class of thorium reactor - the accelerator-driven system.
I hope you find them of interest - they're quite long.
So we should just go back to dumping all radioactive waste in the oceans? That's one helluva dilution factor right there.
Western designs are absolutely nothing like the RBMK series reactor that was built at Chernobyl. Reactor design may have stood still in the United States over the past three decades, but other western countries (& a few non-western countries) have been building new reactors and improving reactor design while the US has been sleeping. Modern CANDU designs, the Westinghouse AP1000, ABWR & APWR are not 1950's technology.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
Uranium is basically harmless, radiation-wise (any radioactive material that has been around since the Earth formed is not meaningfully radioactive).
Ask the people of Cornwall in the UK (and some parts of the US, I can't remember which) about Radon. Here's a handy map:
http://www.hpa.org.uk/webw/HPAweb&HPAwebStandard/HPAweb_C/1197636998945?p=1158934607683
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radon#Radon_concentration_guidelines
How the danger of Radon building up in houses to the general public was discovered:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_and_radon_in_the_environment#Radon_in_houses
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.
Nuclear... the OTHER n-word Americans are phobic about.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
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?
Criticality is not a function of free neutrons. Criticality (or rather, the multiplication factor) is an eigenvalue of a system and is independent of flux. A reactor can be critical with zero neutrons flying around. This is actually a real issue, because when a reactor is being initially loaded while offline, you need a constant, external neutron source to provide some flux- otherwise if the core was misloaded you could be critical and not even know until it was too late.
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.
The US uses about 1.1 billion tons of coal per year ( http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/coal/page/special/feature.html ), or a minimum of (http://www.reade.com/Particle_Briefings/spec_gra2.html - assuming solid anthracite, the densest form of coal) 35 billion cubic feet of coal per year. Total US spent nuclear fuel by the year 2015 is projected to be about 75,000 metric tons, or 82,500 US tons ( http://www.sdi.gov/lc_nucle.htm )
So getting about 50% of our electrical power from coal per year requires us to burn over a cubic half mile of coal.
I think it's clear that nuclear is the winner here.