Slashdot Mirror
Funds Dwindle To Dismantle Old Nuclear Plants
Hugh Pickens writes "The Associated Press reports that the companies who own almost half the nation's nuclear reactors are not setting aside enough money to dismantle the reactors, so many plants may sit idle for decades, posing safety and security risks as a result. The shortfalls in funding have been caused by huge losses in the stock market that have devastated the companies' savings and by the soaring costs of decommissioning. Owners of 19 nuclear plants have won approval to idle their reactors for as long as 60 years, presumably enough time to allow investments to recover and eventually pay for dismantling the plants and removing radioactive material. But mothballing nuclear reactors or shutting them down inadequately presents the risk that radioactive waste could leak from abandoned plants into ground water or be released into the air, and spent nuclear fuel rods could be stolen by terrorists. The NRC has contacted 18 nuclear power plants to clarify how the companies will address the recent economic downturn's effects on funds to decommission reactors in the future, but some analysts worry the utility companies that own nuclear plants might not even exist in six decades."
Why not let the government bail them out? That is what the government does, right?
We were touring the research reactor. The topic came up of how many students were majoring in Nuclear Engineering (or maybe it was just a specialization; not sure if it was actually a major). It was noted that there was exactly ONE student. Some people thought it was a strange major, since no plants were being built. Somebody else gave their $0.02 that the guy would be very much in demand--experts would be needed to dismantle plants.
I wonder what that guy is doing now.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
Of course; one should never let the truth stand in the way of their agenda...
Now this is probably true, but it applies to so many areas, I really can't fault nuclear power for the actions of a few companies.
Great Intellect...
Why is this treated any different then a gas station?
Gas stations have to put a certain amount in escrow to allow for digging up the storage vessels and decontaminating. Why don't nuclear reactors have to set aside the money before they're even allowed to build?
Lease the plants, specifically the plant's basements. In an year or two the required payment will more than pay off the costs, proving be quite a substantial investment for everyone. While some will be quick to argue that such an act would leave the subterranean structures flooded with geeks oozing from radiation, the Army will soon discover that it has enough material to bottle up and send straight to Communist Russia.
We have family friends who own a franchised gas station. Well they wanted to do some upgrades which meant new tanks; they purchased an old mostly hard case store. Well to make a long story short.
You cannot out pace the ability of feel good but short sighted politicians to impose fees/levies that simply make some business unsustainable. In other words, their best option was to rotate each store into a sub type structure and then let the subs who were burdened by feel good laws to bankrupt.
See, if they wanted to just keep the existing problems, like possible leakage, they were all fine and dandy. If they wanted to keep old pumps (still retrofitted with reclamation nozzles) they could. It was actually their audacity to fix things that sunk them. In the end they determined that they failed to do adequate research.
The original owner? Totally scot free - see he blew it by buying more than he could sustain an his properties were auctioned and such.
I would not doubt that the original planned cost to decommission a plant is far far from what it actually cost today with all the new laws, local, state, and federal.
The real question that we should all be asking is, why when we have a great example of "global warming approved" generation, one that many in Europe embrace, are we still held hostage by the green whackos out of California. Don't deny it, these freaks for whom no compromise exist because of their own internal factions end up leaving us with messes that are far worse that what they proclaim to protect us from.
We have the technology and man power to be free of relying on factional areas of the world for power yet we go out of our way to make any solution a miserable mess.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Why decommission and dismantle?
Sell 'em as "undisclosed locations" to Dick Cheney, John Yoo, Paul Wolfowitz and their ilk!
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
Is everyone sure this is all about money and nothing to do with allowing activated products in the reactors to die down to an acceptable radioactive level for workers to go in and start ripping things apart?
We really are not ready for this kind of power as mankind. Once we find a solution for the radioactive waste we will be. Till that time... there is always the sun..
I once tried to write a python script. Instead of doing what I wanted it crashed my computer. I've decided I'm not ready for the power of programming. Once I'm a good programmer, I might try writing code again.
If we give up nuclear power now we're never going to find a solution. With no nuclear reactors there isn't going to be any incentive. And that doesn't get into the definition of a solution. Yucca mountain and breeder reactors are both solutions, they just weren't acceptable solutions to people such as yourself.
Let's us be honest. You say not now but what that means is not ever.
Aside: I'd much rather live next to a nuclear plant than a coal fired one. If solar becomes economically viable that'd be great too.
What idiot came up with *that* idea?
Hey, we got these huge savings that can help us when we need it. Let's put it into the stock market. Because that one is known for its century-long stability. And the value of our stocks will hold perfectly stable, even in the worst times.
Protip: USE SOME FREAKING REAL GOODS! Gold, silver, countries, or things that go *up* in bad times. (Like bank manager incomes!)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Unless the plants in question are simply too difficult/expensive to upgrade, nobody should be decommissioning any nuclear power plants!
Cripes! Here we are looking at Cap & Tax legislation allegedly attempting to reduce carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants, and they want to decommission power plants that have among the lowest rates of CO2 emission?
Makes one wonder if the goal isn't so much to reduce CO2 emissions as it is to raise the cost of electricity and raise taxes, along with making certain politically-connected people and organizations tons of money from carbon credits while crippling the US private sector to make way for further government takeovers of the US economy.
"I don't want to run car companiH^H^H^H^H^ the nations' power generation."
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
That's irrelevant. The genie is already out of the bottle. Nuclear power is not going away. Even if you ban it in one place, another place will be more than happy to invest in it. Some countries, like France, would be in a lot of trouble if there were a unilateral ban on nuclear power plants and even the U.S., which doesn't have that many plants, would be in dire straits considering nuclear power is an essential part of the grid in several major U.S. cities.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
For some background on the Gundersens' work on the Vermont Yankee plant, see this story from the Burlington weekly from a few years ago: http://www.7dvt.com/2007/fission-accomplished
Looks like the nuclear industry looked at the big bank "too big to fail" strategy and liked it. Why bother cleaning up the mess when they can just let the taxpayers pay for the clean-up.
Fuel rods are replaced about every 18 months, and there are already systems in place for dealing with them. I don't imagine they would be the hard part of decommissioning; all the neutron-bombarded steel, lead, and concrete are the problem.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
if only we had a way to reprosses the waste until it has a short half-life~
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Good luck with the insurance policy. As AIG shows, what makes anybody think the insurance company will have the money - or even be around - in 60 years to cover the cost of dismantling a reactor?
The only way you can get nuclear power to pan out financially is if you have the government own and run all the reactors on what amounts to a non-profit basis (as in France, with EDF, which is something like 80% government-owned). You can't even get private insurance for the things (and I wouldn't trust private insurers to pay out in the event of a major incident, anyhow).
Even in France, EDF isn't in great financial shape. They don't have enough money to support their pension obligations and all decommissioning expenses, although presumably the French government has made enough money off EDF over the years they could pick up some of that tab and still ultimately leave taxpayers in the black.
The reality is, fission power never has and never will make much financial sense. When France went nuclear in the post WWII era there weren't any viable alternatives for them, but clearly that's no longer the case today for many nations, the United States included.
With the current administration and its very obvious ties to the environmentalist and alternative energy lobbies, I am very surprised it took 6 months for scare mongering about nuclear power plants to begin. Nuclear power has already proven to be the safest means of producing large quantities of energy, even if you include the most EXTREME and exaggerated outcomes of all nuclear catastrophes combined (lets even throw in Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Of course, you'd have to include all the people who die in the production of coal or oil over the course of the centuries, but nuclear comes out the winner. We are just unfortunate enough to live in a time where the people in power grew up under the shadow of nuclear annihilation. This child hood trauma has caused the lefty environmentalists to forsake the cleanest possible energy alternative available that allows us to maintain our standards of living. Sure, alternative energy supplies will help increase supply and lower prices eventually, but nuclear is the only way to ween our dependence off of fossil fuels in the short term (20-50 years). I mean, what about global warming?!?! I mean, Climate Change. Look, even if you are a global warming / climate change / or you dont believe in global warming / climate change , or just a skeptic either way, the benefits of nuclear are undeniable. Oh, and I'd be more than happy to have one of those plants in my backyard. Lots of high paying jobs, and a cool landmark on the horizon. Probably cheap electricity as a payoff to locals to boot.
20th century Marxism is not progress...
"There are no solutions, only trade-offs." - Thomas Sowell
Nothing is perfectly safe; everything involves risk and negative outcomes. There are plenty of negative consequences of using pure solar energy, not the least of which is the impact of manufacturing the tools to harness it.
"It has less change of a meltdown, but if that meltdown occurs, and it will, it's no difference from chernobyle, except this one wil be bigger"
Evidence? Support? Simply saying something is true doesn't make it so.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
Owners of 19 nuclear plants have won approval to idle their reactors for as long as 60 years, presumably enough time to allow investments to recover and eventually pay for dismantling the plants and removing radioactive material.
What a ridiculous assertion of motive. That might be what is in the press releases, but the important part is that it is long enough for the current executives and boards of directors to not be adversely affected. With any luck, they'll get big bonuses for successfully kicking the can down the road.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
As the article says, nuclear power plants keep dedicated funds for decomissioning those plants. These funds are in the stock market.
The stock market took a beating.
Greenpeace and other anti-nuke wackos found an opportunity to say idiotic things like:
It's like a sitting time bomb. The notion that you can just walk away from these sites and everything will be hunky-dory is just not true."
Speaking as someone who works at a nuclear power plant, uh, yeah, for various definitions of 'walk away', you can do just that.
If by walk away you mean:
1) Defuel the reactor, offload all fuel into the spent fuel pool.
2) Drain all primary systems of water and process it (A daily occurance at any plant anyway)
3) Maintain enough staffing to secure the facility and watch the THREE relatively small pumps and TWO heat exchangers required to keep the fuel safe until it can be safely stored in a dry cask.
4) Store the dry casks on site until Yucca opens, or they can be re-processed.
(While they will be guarded, these dry casks are not a significant security risk. Terrorists aren't running around with the heavy rigging equipment required to handle these casks, and they most certainly will never control any facility for the hours required to get any nuclear material.)
That's the nuclear definition of 'walk away.' We take our jobs much more seriously than Greenpeace clowns take anything. They're a professional agitation group who currently only exists to generate enough attention to collect enough funds to continue to exist.
You might have to keep some fans running in contaminated areas until they're cleaned up, but compared to actually operating a nuclear power plant, the safe long term shutdown of a plant requires minimal resources.
I love this part too:
Last week, British officials reported on a 2007 leak in a cooling tank at the decommissioned Sizewell-A nuclear plant. If the leak had not been promptly discovered, officials said, nuclear fuel rods could have caught fire and sent airborne radioactive waste along the English coast, harming plant operators or the public.
The job of the people there is to promptly discover these sorts of things. There are loud alarms available to help them with just that. It's not a lucky happenstance that the leak was promptly discovered.
What else?
Sixteen more are being reviewed, and the commission expects to receive 21 more applications in the next several years. To date, the NRC hasn't turned down any license extensions.
In case anyone was wondering, the reason the NRC hasn't turned down any license extension applications is two fold:
1) The standards the plants have to meet are published, and not a secret.
2) The NRC bills maybe $250 a man-hour for the thousands of hours required to review these applications.
No utility is going to pay the NRC millions of dollars to review their application unless they're sure they meet the published NRC standards.
and one more:
Plant operators appear to benefit from NRC rules that don't require them to set aside money to store old nuclear fuel...
because nuclear power plants pay ongoing fees to the federal government to dispose of spent nuclear fuel. $25 billion dollars have been paid so far pursuant to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 and the federal government only has the Yucca Mountain debacle to show for it.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
I recommend AIG, they will not poorly manage your insurance policy or tie it to any high risk financial activity.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I currently work for a company that is under contract to decommission the Hanford Site KE Reactor by Sept. 31st, 2011. The money DOE is paying us with? The $1B Obama set aside in the ARRA specifically for this problem. If our company is successful/safe in the decommissioning of this first reactor, we will get contracts for a minimum of 9 more.
The author has an agenda.
Besides, it was in the DESIGN PLAN for the rectors to idle for 75 years after they are shut down, this is so the unspent plutonium has a chance to decay into something more stable. The only reason decommissioning is all of the sudden become a big deal is because of the change in perception of security that has come this decade.
Oh no, another smug armchair nuclear idiot that thinks we are still living in the 1970s before the French put in the work that showed fast breeders are a very expensive and difficult dead end.
I suggest instead looking at the Gen IV reactors - it will take a lot of work instead of just sitting back and being smug but we'll end up with something that actually does the job we want it to do.
Always remember: Nuclear energy generation is the cleanest and least polluting energy source, so this is a non-issue! Ask anyone here on Slashdot, they'll be more than happy to enlighten you. For example, just put the entire site into a breeder reactor and voila!. Not only is it cleaned up and recycled but it generates even more clean nuclear fuel to generate even more energy! Lather, rinse, repeat! Forever!
The government should be running the nuclear plants. It would eliminate problems like this one which are born of the corporate need to 'enhance shareholder value', and keep the people running the plant focused on performance and safety.
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Not really, since burying the radioactive "waste" is a huge waste; more than 99% of the energy has yet to be extracted from it. (Which is also why it is so dangerous and long lived.) This "waste" can be burned in fast reactors though, and there is enough to supply them for hundreds of years before any further mining is necessary.
All that needs to be done is build the reactors. General Electric even has a design ready for a commercial reactor, called the S-PRISM. This is modeled after the Integral Fast Reactor, a modern design which addresses all of the concerns about nuclear power.
It has less polution, but the polution is still radioactive.
I have shocking news for you: Your granite counter top is radioactive! OH NOES.
It has less change of a meltdown, but if that meltdown occurs, and it will, it's no difference from chernobyle, except this one wil be bigger.
Yeah. Because it's not like the Chernobyl disaster had anything to do with the design of the reactor (ignoring that even with that horrible design it took ridiculous amounts of human stupidity to make it happen since I'm assuming that's what you're assuming will always happen). It's not like you can design a reactor so that it can't meltdown, or can't meltdown in such a way that it explodes and blows its containment. It's not like the next and only other major nuclear accident was far smaller than Chernobyl. And it's not like we learned anything from that with regards to reactor design... For example self-regulating designs where the reactor getting too hot means the reaction will slow down. Nope, that doesn't exist.
No, no matter what, meltdowns are inevitable, and will be bigger than previous ones, because... why, again?
We really are not ready for this kind of power as mankind. Once we find a solution for the radioactive waste we will be.
Solution: Re-use it until it is no longer useful as a radioactive fuel of any kind, meaning it is no longer particularly radioactive and thus not a particular danger. Then stick it in the ground without having to worry about security or stability since it's neither useful nor particularly dangerous. Yes the half-life will be really long, but half-life is inversely proportional to radioactivity which is entirely the point.
So, I guess we're ready! Bring on the nuclear reactors!
Till that time... there is always the sun.
Yeah we're a long way from producing all our energy from the sun (directly anyway). I'm all for more of it, including solar-powered microwave satellites. Oh but wait, surely there's no way to design one such that it doesn't fry people on the ground in a swatch of destruction!
Still a shame someone flagged me as flamebait instead of discussing our different views. Cause flamebait i Was not.
Indeed that was an unfair mod, and they were almost certainly using it as a surrogate for "-1, uninformed paranoia" which doesn't exist for good reason.
The enemies of Democracy are
Capitalism is like any other tool in that in the hands of idiots it can be deadly.
When I read articles like this SlashDot entry - or just look around me at America - I can only conclude that our corporate culture's reliance upon "networking" and "interpersonal skills" (i.e., office politics) to select leaders is flawed in that it yields an overabundance of idiots.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
OMG breeder reactor! Yes, yes of course! Breeder reactors make nuclear waste a GOOD THING by using it for fuel, and producing LESS but MORE DEADLY waste! And when the breeder reactor's owners don't have the money to clean it up after its usefulness has run its course, well... lemmie read that wiki again... yes! yes of course! MORE breeder reactors will fix even that!
/fukusarcasm
I am sick to death of nuclear proponents throwing breeder reactors around like they are the Second Coming or something. At some point it'd be nice if someone just said "hey... we're using too much power... we need to find ways to cut back on that" instead of "full speed ahead! Breeder reactors!"
1) they are not clean, because
2) the waste they produce is even deadlier than regular nuclear waste, and
3) they're not a solution for the current problem of what to do with the current waste as that waste is stored all over, and can't safely be transported
wtf is perpetuating this obsessive love affair with fission? The trillions of dollars the US government has spent on its R&D to make it affordable? a power bill that is omg 40% less? Is that all? Because if you could remove that R&D our gov't so generously gave (our money) for the rest of the world (while figuring out the best way to make fuel for bombs), then nuclear power ends up COSTING MUCH MORE than, say, solar, wind or any other 'nice' energy generation. Further, if we gave the clean alternative energies a fair chance, they'd end up producing cheaper energy than fission in a very short time, a decade, two at most.
Bite the bullet. pay a little more for power now, and poison our children, their children, their children times 100, a little less. kthx
The Admin and the Engineer
Wow! Your first link makes the "Breeder Reactor" sound just so wonderful.
Unfortunately you omitted to mention that it still produces a waste that is beyond lethal for 25,000 years.
If you care to bring the facts to bear about nuclear energy, mainly what do we now do with the waste as well as the spent facility when all's said and done with ... for the next 25,000 years! The only answer anyone can give, a stupid blank look and shrug, will only indicate complete incompetence and a lack of thinking this one through, so don't bother.
Worse, now the companies that own and operate theses plants are going belly up and walking away from the retired facilities and leaving them for the states, counties and towns to deal with.
Sounds criminal to me. Sure the power was cheep. But the leftovers pose too many new problems that will have to be dealt with for thousands of generations to come. I've never been a fan of nuclear technology. Now my reservations are verified by the incompetence of the corporations, lobbyists, and politicians involved in producing this resulting product.
I remain unconvinced that nuclear technology is worth the trouble, expense, and/or effort.
I have a much better idea, lets invest some effort in harnessing the power of the sun and call it a day.
Instead of this exercise in stupidity.
"Suppose you were an idiot...and suppose you were a member of Congress...but I repeat myself." Mark Twain
How can the "investments recover" on a project that currently has, and will continue to have, negative revenue? Who is investing in it?
Or do they mean that nuclear plant money is invested in other stocks (which would be irresponsible as hell)?
and the problem will clean itself up
i just hope US citizens don't mind picking up the tab for 10,000 years its not as if they have choice (other than die from radiation poisoning or become a nation of horribly disfigured humans....lets hope obesity isn't a sign)
I found an interesting document from the IAEA. Now, I'm not a big fan of UN run organizations (most are socialist leaning), but this is report is fairly unbiased and presents good arguments on both sides.
http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/te_1123_prn.pdf
This report talks about making nuclear plants profitable compared to other energy sources and gives a bit of analysis surrounding the energy debate. A good read.
20th century Marxism is not progress...
Every melt down isn't a Chernobyl. Some are just Three Mile Islands. And if you think TMI is an argument against nuclear power's safety, you really need to do more reading and less watching of movies titled, "the china syndrome."
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
The biggest problem with the reactor at Chernobyl is that the design did not include a concrete vault capable of containing the clouds of debris ejected from the event site. I haven't been keeping up, but last I heard the vault they built after the fact was falling apart and kicking up clouds of radioactive dust.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Well, I have one finger extended, and it's not pointing at you.
Why don't you lead the charge, get rid of your energy hungry computer and internet connection, and go drink down a room temperature cup of STFU?
I say this as someone who has cut his electrical usage by almost 50% without sacrificing "standard of living" or buying into the whole green-energy-solar-wind bullshit or goes around expecting a medal. I don't demand that other people do it and I could give two rats asses about the planet; I am a greedy fuck who enjoys sending $500+ LESS to the POCO each year. But that's just me.
In short, "fuck you".
I was ok with ignoring the irrational hysteria in the rest of your rant, but I cant let this blatant lie pass unchallenged. Please provide your sources for this claim, or retract it.
Hey, I have this machine that boils water for free, and makes money.
If I turn it on.
Which I'm not going to do - instead, I'm determined to dismantle it, but it costs too much to do so. ...
Anyone else not see how fucked up the idea of dismantling nuclear plants is?
When coal is such a no-no that our president has said he wants to "necessarily" bankrupt them with red tape and taxes, why would we de-com any nuclear power plants?
I don't have to tell most of the audience here that it's carbon-free (as if that mattered) and that the waste trail has been cleaned up significantly, as well as being just about the cheapest form of electricity we can find.
And there is ****19**** of them shut down now?
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
Having grown in in Richland, WA, attended Richland High School (home of the Bombers), and worked in the nuclear fuel production industry, I find it alarming that so many people are hilariously ignorant about nuclear power. As a child I actually got to tour the Columbia Generating Station and put my hand in the secondary loop water as it fell down the cooling tower. Nuclear power generation is far safer than any of you have been lead to believe.
For those that choose to use the Hanford nuclear reservation as a point of argument against nuclear waste, well, you're half right. Almost all of the unfathomably dangerous substances located there are from nuclear WEAPON production.
For the energy needs of the current and future world, our two forseeable tools are nuclear power and hydro-electric. Nobody likes nuclear because of NIMBY syndrome. Nobody likes hydro-electric because it makes entire ecosystems disappear. Yeah, Eastern Washington has one of the largest dams in the nation as well. Coal, natural gas, and oil are only kept alive because economic powers far greater than you or I want to exhaust the supplies before they start splitting atoms.
Could it be that some of those older plants are based upon very early designs, which aren't as economically competitive with other sources of energy, and in particular, other nuclear plants? Maybe those plants had design flaws which didn't necessarily make them *dangerous*, but made them unprofitable? I don't know if that's the case, but my *very basic understanding of economics* says that any business which is making money keeps running, and any business which has been shut down was not making money. Or, maybe they had become too risky in terms of nearing the point of failure? Nothing lasts forever, not even nuclear plants. Nuclear plants which are 50 or 60 years old may be just reaching their natural end-of-life and need to be decommissioned, before they *do* become dangerous?
"It has less change of a meltdown, but if that meltdown occurs, and it will, it's no difference from chernobyle, except this one wil be bigger"
Evidence? Support? Simply saying something is true doesn't make it so.
I think he is referring to when the Sun explodes a few billion years from now...
Personally, I don't want to wait that long without electricity however
I don't understand why we *allow* Nuclear power operators to get into such a situation? If anyone wants a license to build a new plant (and this should have been instituted decades ago), why don't we estimate the decomissioning costs, demand like 40 percent up-front as part of the investment to even *get started*, and then every year it's in operation, have part of the revenue go to the 'clean-up fund'? That way, if the company goes under after 30 or 40 years, we've *already got the money* (or at least, a significant part of it). If the plant changes ownership, the obligation 'travels' with the title, so that the new owners keep paying into the fund?
The only potential problems I see with this idea are 1) Estimates are notoriously wrong, usually on the *low* side; you could try to allow for that by 'padding' the estimate, and if there ends up being any surplus left over, it goes back to the owners (that might even give the owners incentives to find ways to keep the decommissioning costs down, if that is at all possible - not sure if they have any control over it, probably not) 2) Much higher than expected inflation causes the clean-up costs in absolute dollar amounts to skyrocket (might be able to offset such costs by, I dunno, storing the money as 'gold' or other precious metals?), 3) The plant has to be decommsioned early, before enough revenue has been generated, maybe because of design flaws or something - but if that happens, the engineering firm that designed and manufactured it (G.E., Honeywell, etc) and was responsible for the flaw should probably be liable (although then we have to deal with the situation where they can't pay or are no longer around; maybe they have to put monies up-front into the pot, into some kind of, I dunno, insurance fund - that is, if nothing goes wrong with the design, they get most of the money back [minus fees by the fund manager, of course])?
The last few years alone have shown great strides in truly clean energy production (not to be confused with the often mistaken for clean clean-now-hide-the-dirt-til-later energy production, like nuclear).
You mean like solar? No I guess that's more of a hide-the-mercury-chromium-PVC-silicon tetrachloride-waste-post-production-"now-it's-clean"-hide-the-disposal-of-EOL-panels-til-later kind of clean energy. Or are you talking about those practically-useless-residential-wind turbines? OR maybe the hugely-devastating-to-the-aquatic-ecosystem-hydroelectric-plants?
There are dozens, if not hundreds, of new ways to get to this clean energy... smart people keep mixing it up and it really is quite amazing.
Really? Name one form of "clean" energy. The problem is more like stupid people keep believing marketing BS about what "clean" energy is. There was a time when nuclear actually had a similar vibe as solar does now. Then over time the truth came out about the storage life of the waste and the possible dangers. Now it's become the pariah of clean energy. There are some seriously underplayed issues with solar panel production and disposal. If you think there are no issues with the byproducts from the composites that are used for wind-turbines then you are fooling yourself.
Its only a matter of time, and time calculated in decades (not the nuclear standard of calculating time in millennia), before one, or my guess, many new clean energy alternatives become not only viable but very profitable. Nuclear energy is just too expensive (when you add up the cost of the R&D, the educations required, and especially 4000-40000 years of waste storage, and last, not least, the whatif disasters like a chernobyl-scale (not chernobyl-like) disaster).
So you predict that magic pixie dust power generation is only decades away? Cool!
Seriously though, I'm not against solar, nuclear, wind, or even fossil fuel energy production. As far as I can tell, all forms of energy production cause some sort of harmful waste or environmental issue in one way or another. Perhaps geothermal being the one with the least problems, however it's not terribly practical other than in Iceland and a few other areas. I think a better approach is to try to maximize the efficiency and lower the toxic byproducts of what is possible while we work on something better and start to get away from the non-renewables. But that's just what I think.
Whose agenda? And how the hell is implementing a breeder program going to solve the problem of decommissioning the existing 103 reactors around America?.
A breeder program would still have the same inevitable problems at the end of it's 40 year life span. It's not physics issues we are dealing with, but the engineering issues and material sciences issues. Have no doubt, I do believe that the inevitability of a burner reactor program that converts transuranics to fissile ash should be supported by a proper research program to develop the technology - it just not practical to implement breeders with today's technology. Any breeder program has to be supported by a reactor design that has a similar lifespan to the half-lives of the fissile ash created or you have exactly the same issues at the end of the breeders life.
Your reasoning is completely flawed as the issue at hand is dealing with the *reactor cores* not spent fuel.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
TIPS, Treasury Inflation Protected Securities. They are US government securities tied to inflation. As such their purchasing power remains the same. If inflation is high, they pay out more, if there is deflation they actually lose numeric value. Now, you make almost nothing on them, all they really do is protect your funds against inflation, but they do that.
The only risk would be should the US government default on payment. However, the US government has never defaulted on the payment of securities, and they have a hell of a history. Their bonds are considered the safest in the world. Also, in the case the government imploded to the extent of not paying out their obligations, it is probable that they wouldn't care about your reactor either.
There are financial instruments that are extremely secure in terms of holding value. The tradeoff is that they don't tend to gain hardly any value. They just insure that you get money such that it has the same purchasing power of the money you bought them with.
I answered the question posed to me. That's all.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Something to remember is that an ever increasing number of navy ships are 100% nuclear powered. They have one or more reactors and those do everything for the ship. They drive the propellers, they run the generators, etc. This isn't going to decrease, either. The navy likes their nuclear boats because, despite the startup cost, they are cheaper to operate. There is no refueling while under way and indeed on some craft, no refueling ever. The nuclear stockpile in the reactor is sufficient for the operational lifetime of the vessel
Normally I would not be so blunt but quite frankly you started this one:
a)It is clear you don't understand how the energy produced in a nuclear reactor correlates to the quantity of fission products produced.
b)It is clear you have no idea about what properties breeder reactor waste have and how it compares to regular nuclear waste.
c)It is clear you don't understand how breeder reactors work or what impact the destruction of the transuranics would have on repository capacity and requirements.
For your ( and other's ) information this is how it works:
Nuclear reactors produce energy by splitting nuclei. If they split relatively safe Uranium or the much more toxic and dangerous alpha emitters ( such as neptunium and plutonium ) does not really matter in energy terms since the energy produced in each fission is about the same. As it happens the elements that make nuclear waste storage problematic are all very heavy transuranics that are alpha emitters since these decay with a halflife of a few thousand years. The problem is that even thousands of years from now they produce enough heat to potentially melt the fuel rods if you don't allow sufficient separation between them. It is this heat that limits how much radioactive waste you can store in a given space.
Thus if instead of splitting uranium you recycle and split these heavy transuranics you only end up with comparatively short lived fission products. It is true that the fission products initially has a higher radioativity than the transuranics, but the amount of fission products you get is exactly the same as if you ahd been splitting uranium. Thus by splitting the troublesome transuranics rather than uranium you end up with the same amount of fission products ( for a given amount of energy ), but you don't get any transuranics. I'll repeat that to make sure you got it:
Regardless of reactor design the quantity of fission products is the same for a given quantity of energy. The energy produced is directly proportional to the number of fissions that occur (and consequentially the amount of fission products in the waste. However, while regular reactors produce long lived transuranics that need to be safely stored for thousands of years, breeders only produce the fission products ( the same quantity as regular reactors would produce for the same energy ) and thus their waste reaches the same levels of radioactivity as uranium-ore within approximately 300 years.
Your assertion that the waste becomes more dangerous after recycled in a breeder reactor presumably refers to the fact that the radioactivity of the fission products is higher than that of the actinides. However as I mentioned above the quantity of fission products is no greater than it would have been for uranium. Also many of the fission products are so radioactive that they very rapidly decay to stable compounds that are not troublesome. Some of them have half-lives of minutes or even seconds, and after just a short period of storage they are less radioactive than what the actinides would have been. More importantly however is that the overall heat generation decreases rapidly and since you keep recycling the uranium you reduce the waste volume by almost a factor of 100. Because of these reductions in heat generation and volume, storing all the waste a power plant would produce within the 300 years it takes for breeder waste to decay is quite feasible to do on-site. Or in other words:
A breeder reactor produces so small quantities of waste that it would take much longer to fill the plant's storage facilities than it would take for the waste to decay to safe
that is called externalities and is not limited to nuclear. A lot of chemical site are simply "left" buried or uncleaned for the next tenant. Which is why in such case the free market sucks. The free market dictate that all (chemical and nuclear plant) should not bother a fink to clean up. Only if the governement steps in and FORCE the aforementioned to either spare money for the clean up, or force all shareholder to cough up afterward (good luck with that if the firm disappear). Basically I am not surprised.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
"During the past two years, estimates of dismantling costs have soared by more than $4.6 billion because rising energy and labor costs, while the investment funds that are supposed to pay for shutting plants down have lost $4.4 billion in the battered stock market."
Labor costs have risen in the last two years? Really? I thought we were in a recession with nearly 10% unemployment?
Energy costs? Oil is now back down to 2005 levels. Natural gas hasn't been this cheap since 2002.
If those are really their excuses, they should be jumping on the opportunity to decommission NOW, before prices go back up!
And as to them losing money in the stock market - boo hoo. They could have put the funds into inflation protected treasury notes, but they wanted the extra profits to reduce how much they had to pay out. They gambled, they lost, they should have to pay up. If they can't - we have bankruptcy laws just for them (which we should have immediately applied to the banking mess too). Or they could take out a nice fat loan - interest rates are pretty low, I hear.
I'd love to say I can't believe they're getting away with this - but given recent history of forgiving the villains and putting the burden on the taxpayers and individual investors, I just can't muster disbelief any more.
High level waste isn't the real problem. Well over 99% of the radioactive waste in a decommissioned plant is useless in fast reactors. Sure you can deal with the old fuel, but what about all the rest of the junk radioactive waste?
and producing LESS but MORE DEADLY waste!
To be more precise, the waste would have a shorter half life. What does that mean? More dangerous in the first year, much less dangerous in the 20th, radiation wise.
Something with a half life of 100 years vs one with a halflife of 10.
Radiation Year 1: 1 vs 10, Year 100: .5 vs .01
I am sick to death of nuclear proponents throwing breeder reactors around like they are the Second Coming or something. At some point it'd be nice if someone just said "hey... we're using too much power... we need to find ways to cut back on that" instead of "full speed ahead! Breeder reactors!"
Conservation GOOD. However, look at some of our proposed conservation efforts - plug-in hybrids and electric cars rather than gasoline engines. Heat pumps vs traditional hydrocarbon fired furnaces.
Notice a trend? We can cut our actual energy usage by an order of magnitude, but because we're concentrating on eliminating hyrdocarbons such as oil and coal we actually INCREASE our usage of electricity.
Look at energy star - my appliances generally use a fraction of the equivalents my parents used when I was a kid. I buy energy star. BUT, populations are still rising, we still need power, we have populations in China and India who are moving away from lifestyles not unknown in the 12th century towards 1st world living standards and the accompanying energy usage.
Every American and European could use an order of magnitude less energy and the world would STILL use more energy if the rest of the world simply caught up with our new, lower, energy usage level.
So we still need power. Us nuclear proponents by and large see that there's plenty of support for wind, solar, tidal is unproven, etc... Thus we support nuclear power. We still need a mix of power, after all. There's studies out there that say that the power grid can't handle more than 30% renewables.
My power mix:
1. Nuclear - Baseload, charging electric vehicles at night
2. Wind - Baseload again, put a number of users such as hybrid drivers, electric water heaters, some heating/cooling systems on a 'off-peak' system that, instead of shutting off during high demand(peak), also shut off during low supply due to low winds.
3. Solar - AC systems during the day and such.
4. Hydro - capable of providing moderating ability, but you'll probably still end up running some nuclear plants in a load following mode.
5. Other - probably less than 10% of the mix, consisting of geothermal, natural gas standby, cogeneration plants, etc...
1) they are not clean, because
2) the waste they produce is even deadlier than regular nuclear waste, and
3) they're not a solution for the current problem of what to do with the current waste as that waste is stored all over, and can't safely be transported
3. It can be safely transported, but we don't have a politically acceptable spot to put it yet, so why move it? Besides, the difficulties in moving the stuff is mostly political as well. It's also a problem that reduces itself by just waiting. Arsenic, mercury, etc... Won't go away with time.
2. More dangerous for a shorter period of time. Isn't most of the complaints about nuclear waste that it remains dangerous for thousands of years? Breeder waste starts out more radioactive, but that doesn't even last a single human generation. After that, it's LESS radioactive. Don't forget that we'd be generating 1/10th or less of the stuff per GWh produced.
1. It's clean because the stuff isn't released. Compared to coal plants that spew a LOT of their waste into the atmosphere.
Further, if we gave the clean alternative energies a fair chance, they'd end up producing cheaper energy than fission in a very short time, a decade, two at most.
People have been saying that for decades. I'm not holding my breath, but if yo
I don't read AC A human right
Sure you can deal with the old fuel, but what about all the rest of the junk radioactive waste?
What about it? There's two things to remember. Most of it is low level radioactive waste and most of the radiation goes away in a few decades.
We really are not ready for this kind of power as mankind. Once we find a solution for the radioactive waste we will be.
Two solutions have already been mentioned. Breeder reactors and Yucca Mountain. And of course, we're ready for this kind of power.
That's exactly what I said the other day (and got slammed for) in the "first new nuke plant in US" story that was so widely cheered here.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1310417&cid=28775389
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Whenever I see figures like +99% used to describe an engineering solution, I assume the source is full of shit.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Just let the decades go by until the next dark ages, the things crumble, and they create incomprehensible magic death zones?
The biggest problem with the reactor at Chernobyl is that the design did not include a concrete vault capable of containing the clouds of debris ejected from the event site.
Yeah, exactly. With the simple expedience of a concrete dome, the Chernobyl disaster would have been substantially smaller, like Three Mile Island was, where nobody died in the immediate aftermath. Three Mile Island, which was the worst-case failure scenario -- coolant failure and all control rods locked out of the core. So the core got too hot and melted and fell into the graphite bed beneath, slowing the reaction and ending the threat. Combined with the containment shell, very little contamination was released into the environment. It was a disaster to be sure, but a small one in the grand scheme of industrial accidents. It was a design that took failure into a account and thus minimized the impact. And designs have only gotten better since then.
Honestly, people act like they still think nuclear reactors can blow up like atom bombs. "Oh my god, humanity is not ready for this power!" Yeah, nuclear weapons maybe we weren't ready for, I think fission reactors to light up our homes are within our acceptable risk level given every other human endeavor ever.
The enemies of Democracy are
"It has less change of a meltdown, but if that meltdown occurs, and it will, it's no difference from Chernobyl, except this one will be bigger."
I'm guessing that you haven't read up on it or talked to anyone who has worked in the field. Safety is always the primary concern. Even the lowest technicians spend literally thousands of hours studying old accidents and preparing for possible new ones. More recently built reactors are designed specifically to avoid past mistakes that were in retrospect utterly boneheaded, clumsy and even arrogant. Also, those who work in this field know that the consequences of screwing up can cost them their lives and the lives of others and they have no greater incentive to do the right thing.
The problems with Chernobyl go way past that. Here are a few:
1. Positive void coefficient of reactivity. Once bubbles started forming in the reactor coolant, it sped up the reaction, causing a positive feedback loop. This is, of course, not the case with light water reactors.
2. The SCRAM rods actually sped up the reaction because of their graphite tips. There's a pretty crazy design defect.
3. It was physically possible for those morons to disable the safety systems.
Compare this with a truly modern design like China's HTR-DB modular pebble bed reactors, and the difference is striking. The HTR-DB has a strong negative temperature coefficient of reactivity, so all the feedback loops are very negative. They can actually shut off the cooling systems and the reactor will simply shut off because it's not able to sustain a reaction without active cooling. Overheating inherently kills the reaction. Nice, isn't it?
"IF the nuclear accident will happen. Its a matter of WHEN it will AGAIN"
[citation needed]
Do you know anything about modern reactor designs? Humans aren't terribly reliable, but the laws of physics ARE. So reactors have been designed so that if anything goes wrong, the reactor -- by itself -- will wind up in a safe state. The pebble bed reactor is one type like this, but there are others.
Even if all of the safety mechanisms fail, a pebble bed reactor is going to heat up and sit there, without any serious incident.
I've worked as an Operator at a US Power Reactor ( North Anna Power Station in Virginia ) a long time ago. It is a Westinghouse pressurized water reactor and it's a completely different design than Chernobyl. The containment dome is of sufficient volume to maintain integrity during a complete meltdown. It's one of the biggest expenses. ( A description of the construction can be found in the license application in section 2.4.1 page 2-97 ).
The Unit 1 and Unit 2 Containments are Seismic Class I structures that house the reactor and other Nuclear Steam Supply System (NSSS) components for the respective unit. Each Containment consists of a reinforced concrete cylinder with a hemispherical dome and a flat, 10-foot-thick reinforced concrete mat foundation. A waterproof membrane is located below the Containment's structural mat and extends up the Containment wall to ground level.
In fact, it's such a large expense that this particular design keeps the interior of the containment dome at about 9 psia to allow for the expansion of Reactor Coolant during a meltdown in a smaller volume. Meaning a smaller containment dome. It also has the advantage that if there are any leaks, it leaks in, not out. If an accident did happen, the containment dome would probably been sealed and filled with concrete.
So why have nuclear plants? Why all the expense?
When I worked at that plant. Dominion Power ( Then Virginia Power ) had 4 reactors and about 17 coal fired plants and I think 2 natural gas plants. Those 4 reactors could at times supply about 40% of the power for the company's power grid covering almost all of Virginia and the northern part of North Carolina. This was usually at night when energy consumption dropped.
The coal plants also didn't operate at 100% all the time. They altered their power output increasing output during peak demand during the day and late evening and decreasing output as demand dropped during late night and early morning.
I hope you have noticed like I have that the standard operating procedure of the coal fired plants closely mirror what you would expect to see from a solar & battery power plant.
Also, I know how much coal ash is produced in a single day from a coal fired plant. I also know, for the nuclear plant I worked at, only one third of the fuel rods were replaced every 18 months. So, given the choice of fields covered in tons of low level waste or only a few tons of concentrated nastiness, I'd opt for the later because it is far easier to maintain stricter and safer control of it.
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
Unfortunately you omitted to mention that it still produces a waste that is beyond lethal for 25,000 years.
But not that much. All the high-level nuclear waste ever produced would barely cover up a football field.
On the other hand, we have a global CO2 problem...
Bite the bullet. pay a little more for power now, and poison our children, their children, their children times 100, a little less. kthx
You should consider not letting you kids play inside Yucca Mountain, Centre de la Manche, or Centre de l'Aube!
The coal plants also didn't operate at 100% all the time. They altered their power output increasing output during peak demand during the day and late evening and decreasing output as demand dropped during late night and early morning.
But isn't it true that you can't simply throttle a nuclear fission plant up and down because of the creation of core poisons and associated instability? (Why you have to totally shut down a nuclear fission plant for days in case of a large blackout, while the chemical plants just throttle back)
There is nothing inherently unprofitable about nuclear power. I don't know how the situation with regulation, taxes etc on it is in the US (where I presume you are from) which might make it unprofitable there. Do you have any good sources for this information?
I work in nuclear power in Sweden, and the power companies here drool at the prospect of building a new reactor. And if and when the government allows such an endeavor, it will not be subsidized by tax payer money in any way. There is even a law that a certain amount of money per kWh has to go to a (public) fund that will be used in the future for final storage and such to handle the waste.
I hear this anti-nuclear argument that it is unprofitable all the time. But the simple fact is, that if the profit-driven power companies are willing to completely fund the construction, running, decommisioning of a reactor as well as the waste handling... there must be profit in it.
True, but nukes only get compared to coal on this basis. I never hear of any accidents involving solar or wind, and certainly no deaths.
Apparently some sheep have to move a few feet when they actually put the turbines up.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
If you think there are no issues with the byproducts from the composites that are used for wind-turbines then you are fooling yourself.
Oh enlightened one, please enlighten us. No I don't think there are any issues with the byproducts from the composites from wind turbines. Turbines have been produced for over a century and no one has yet raised any complaint about "byproducts from composites from wind turbines." Or are you just hand waiving?
Football Odds
Chernobyl didn't happen because the safety mechanisms failed, it happened because some of them were intentionally circumvented.
So, if you want to come up with accident scenarios, think about what will happen if a reckless moron who knows exactly how to bypass the safety mechanisms tries to speed up some procedure by playing fast and loose with regulations and protocol.
For a PBR ... it's graphite-moderated. Graphite burns really well, as Chernobyl demonstrated. Of course, it can't do so in the absence of oxygen, but just remember the moron I mentioned earlier.
Good luck with the insurance policy. As AIG shows, what makes anybody think the insurance company will have the money - or even be around - in 60 years to cover the cost of dismantling a reactor?
The only way you can get nuclear power to pan out financially is if you have the government own and run all the reactors on what amounts to a non-profit basis (as in France, with EDF, which is something like 80% government-owned). You can't even get private insurance for the things (and I wouldn't trust private insurers to pay out in the event of a major incident, anyhow).
Even in France, EDF isn't in great financial shape. They don't have enough money to support their pension obligations and all decommissioning expenses, although presumably the French government has made enough money off EDF over the years they could pick up some of that tab and still ultimately leave taxpayers in the black.
The reality is, fission power never has and never will make much financial sense. When France went nuclear in the post WWII era there weren't any viable alternatives for them, but clearly that's no longer the case today for many nations, the United States included.
Wow, you actually think AIG's customers got screwed over?
Man, you're soooo clueless ...
I don't understand why we *allow* Nuclear power operators to get into such a situation? If anyone wants a license to build a new plant (and this should have been instituted decades ago), why don't we estimate the decomissioning costs, demand like 40 percent up-front as part of the investment to even *get started*, and then every year it's in operation, have part of the revenue go to the 'clean-up fund'? That way, if the company goes under after 30 or 40 years, we've *already got the money* (or at least, a significant part of it). If the plant changes ownership, the obligation 'travels' with the title, so that the new owners keep paying into the fund?
It would probably be a good idea for such a scheme to exist for any power plant, chemical plant, mine, etc.
Wow! Your first link makes the "Breeder Reactor" sound just so wonderful. Unfortunately you omitted to mention that it still produces a waste that is beyond lethal for 25,000 years.
Producing hazardous waste is not unique to nuclear power generation. A more relevent issue is that a breeder reactor is still going to involve neutron irradiation of the reactor structure, which is the most obvious limitation on the life of a reactor.
There may still be alot of good stuff worth selling as well as the land itself, or the facility itself, these plants are humongous...
they should send an evaluator, to list all the stuff, and then put it up for auction...the rods themselves would be the last things needing transportation, and if you were to say ask the US government if they would come take these, and place them in a safe location, cut them down to small pieces instead of big ones, you could actually try to be creative, no?
I am always wondering if the cost of properly doing something, is equal to the cost of cleaning up after something went wrong?
There will always be certain situations where all nations can lend a hand to help in the disposal of such dangerous goods,no?
The key to realize here is that nuclear decommissioning funds are collected from electric ratepayers (i.e., you, me and everyone we know). When the electricity markets were deregulated in the 1990s, there was a real concern that nuclear plants would not be able to cover the costs of decommissioning. Most state public utility commissions imposed a non-bypassable stranded cost adder to your electric bill. A portion of each electric bill is thus deposited directly into the nuclear decommissioning trust fund. In a way, the fund is very much like a pension obligation. Companies are required to pay into the fund at a level specified by the NRC. When they are short, the company either has to step up its contribution or the state public service commission has to approve a greater contribution from ratepayers. Actually, I thought it was a very positive sign that the NRC has been so public and transparent at pointing out this potential problem.
"Honestly, people act like they still think nuclear reactors can blow up like atom bombs. "Oh my god, humanity is not ready for this power!" Yeah, nuclear weapons maybe we weren't ready for, I think fission reactors to light up our homes are within our acceptable risk level given every other human endeavor ever. "
But, they can be blow up.. If one uses a nuclear weapon on them, and the effect would be most devastating.
Radioactive isotopes from 20 or 30 years worth of reactor operation spread across the countryside would kill or cripple most survivors. Far (1000-5000x) worse than the weapon detonated on a average target. The average human lifespan in the widespread fallout areas, (several states contaminated for thousand years), would decrease to twenty years or less.
To me, providing an enemy the perfect target by which they can inflict a knock out blow, boarders upon insanity!
This insanity is furthur compounded by people avocating widescale use of this technology in a world populated with mentally unstable national leaders!!!
But, they can be blow up.. If one uses a nuclear weapon on them, and the effect would be most devastating.
Uh, using a nuclear weapon would be most devastating. What does the nuclear power plant have to do with it? It's a footnote at best. Unless you're talking about multiplying the yield of a suitcase bomb or something. If you can get a rocket-based delivery system, you just go ahead and launch a big nuke.
To me, providing an enemy the perfect target by which they can inflict a knock out blow, boarders upon insanity!
Harrrr, prepare to be boarded!
This insanity is furthur compounded by people avocating widescale use of this technology in a world populated with mentally unstable national leaders!!!
Well, most of us are living in this world, and it's the only one we've got. In the meantime, coal plants are spewing more radioactive material into the atmosphere every year than every nuclear accident and test combined (including Chernobyl) and we're just sucking it up. In the face of this, your objections are laughable at best.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
3. It was physically possible for those morons to disable the safety systems.
The concrete bunker is a safety system that those morons could not disable (Short of the use of explosives.)
Your honor, I rest my case.
Seriously though, I must re-iterate, we might theorize that a plant won't fail in a given situation, but it could, so it's prudent to include the bunker. I only wish it could be made of something other than concrete, a major CO2 contributor. If the bunker had been there, all that other stuff still would have been stupid, but it's likely that nobody outside the plant would have died.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Many, not all, of the problems with nuclear power are the result of regulations, and, occasionally laws.
E.g., the "waste" from nuclear plants is highly radioactive and "hot". Doesn't this scream to you that it's only waste because it isn't being used??? It ought to. There are designs for plants that burn this kind of "waste". Then the waste from those plants is low-level radioactive which is still warm. These could be encased into glass bricks and used for self-heating materials. One would want to avoid anthing that might crush the glass bricks, but even that wouldn't be all that dangerous. (One might want a plastic [hydrocarbon] layer within the glass brick, if any neutrons are emitted.) These could be encased in a steel jacket and used to pre-warm water going into an industrial process. They'd probably be less dangerous than asbestos, but no reason not to be careful. At some point they'd stop being warm enough to pre-heat water, but by that point there wouldn't be much use worrying about them. And until that point it's profitable to use them.
Waste means something you haven't yet found a use for. It doesn't mean there is no use.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Why do you consider the waste that a breeder reactor produces to be an insurmountable problem?
The ores that were fed into the reactor stayed radioactive for billions of years.
Yet the presence of naturally radioactive substances on earth didn't manage to kill us all.
Can we dispose of a small amount of highly radioactive waste in such a way that is unlikely to harm anyone?
It seems likely. There are several promising methods, the debate is what method to use. For example, check out seabed burial of glassified nuclear waste.
We've seen this in Vermont. The plant owners under funded the dismantling fund, invested it in high risk investments and lost even more. I doubt they'll ever pay for it. Instead tax payers will be left to foot the bill, even though we didn't benefit from the electricity where I am. Gee. Thanks.
Great! Not only did we have Bechtel dump barrels of nuclear waste off the California coast several decades back but some other crackpot now wants to improve on the same stupid idea of sticking that stuff in the oceans?
There are absolutely NO real viable options to safely store nuclear waste on planet earth, it cannot be done with 100% certainty, period! Those that desire to profit from the proliferation of nuclear energy should be required to tend the waste in their own backyards until it becomes benign, at their own expense.
I'm sorry but I really don't believe any of the nuclear proponents understand just what spent and/or any nuclear fuel does when it becomes introduced into the environment, food chain, and essentially the chain of life. Suffice it to say that one really good accident, one really good spill, can potentially wipe all life on planet earth. Is this really something you lust after? If all you're after is a really good thrill, play russian roulette. The rest of us will remain safe while you live on the edge.
"Suppose you were an idiot...and suppose you were a member of Congress...but I repeat myself." Mark Twain
Exactly. Ideal operation is at 100% capacity for 18 months. I might have created some confusion by adding that "also". What can I say, I'm a math person, not a language person.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_poison
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
But, they can be blow up.. If one uses a nuclear weapon on them, and the effect would be most devastating.
Radioactive isotopes from 20 or 30 years worth of reactor operation spread across the countryside would kill or cripple most survivors. Far (1000-5000x) worse than the weapon detonated on a average target. The average human lifespan in the widespread fallout areas, (several states contaminated for thousand years), would decrease to twenty years or less.
You're kidding, right? Your biggest concern is having nuclear plants turned into giant 'dirty bombs', in a situation where we're attacked by an enemy willing and capable of hitting us with nuclear bunker-buster ICBMs? You must realize that to get the effect you're talking about you'd have to penetrate all containment structures and underground storage before detonation and have a yield much bigger than some suitcase nuke. And that if lethal fallout is the goal, you can accomplish that with nukes alone. Efficient high-yield devices that don't produce much radioactive fallout are good if you want tactical weapons as they did as the Cold War progressed, but they don't have to be designed that way.
I mean I'm just making sure we're on the same page here -- that we shouldn't build nuclear reactors because in a situation where we're facing nuclear annihilation, those plants might make it somewhat more annihilate-y.
Personally I'd think having the missiles lobbed at us sounds like the bigger problem, and without that the nuclear plant dirty bombs aren't a problem either. So, let's avoid having ICBMs launched at us.
To me, providing an enemy the perfect target by which they can inflict a knock out blow, boarders upon insanity!
Yeah, I think you were already overestimating the damage, but a knock-out blow? Come on. You could hit an extra major population center or two, but you couldn't cripple the country. Especially not its ability to respond militarily (a legacy of the Cold War and why the nuclear weapons became all about strategic targeting).
It helps, btw, if you have vastly less waste that is of a type that is not long-lived, like from breeders.
This insanity is furthur compounded by people avocating widescale use of this technology in a world populated with mentally unstable national leaders!!!
Yes, because you'd have to be mad to bring MAD down upon yourself. Heh, get it? But seriously, there are mentally unstable national leaders, but there are no national leaders who don't want power and don't want to keep it. MAD worked against freaking Stalin, and what did he care if his people died in a nuclear war; what, it's only okay when he kills them by the millions? No, he was unwilling to sacrifice his country and thus his power to ensure that he destroyed ours. Kim Jong Il, that crazy little bastard with delusions of grandeur, he's not going to destroy the only thing that makes him relevant in this universe. That's why he never does anything more than publicity stunts to get aid. The bomb to him means a way to be sure we won't take him out, and even then South Korea or Japan are the implied targets of this saber rattling. Sure he's unstable, but that doesn't mean there's no logic at all behind his actions. The suicide bomber type doesn't usually make it as a leader whether of a brutal dictatorship or terrorist group. MAD still works. We've dealt with his type and worse and we will again.
The enemies of Democracy are
Wow, you actually think AIG's customers got screwed over?
If the government hadn't stepped in with a whopping $150 billion taxpayer dollars to bail AIG out, their customers would be up a creek without insurance, because their insurer would have gone bankrupt. So no, AIG's customers haven't been screwed over (yet!), but the taxpayers sure have.
Nobody knows just how enormous the claims might be in the wake of a major nuclear disaster, but they could easily overwhelm the reserves of a private insurer. Which is why no private insurer will cover a nuclear power plant in the US. Instead, there's a quasi-private pool of about $10 billion to cover all the plants in the country. Once that's exhausted - which might not take long in the wake of a serious incident - the taxpayers will be on the hook for the rest. Which is BS.
If these things can't get private insurance backed by adequate reserves - reserves capable of covering not only the plants themselves but also the waste they generate - they shouldn't be built.
Are you sure appliances use that much less? TVs have probablly got a bit more efficiant but this is balanced by the fact that big screens are becoming a lot more common and widescreens need to be bigger to get the same picture hight (the extra at the sides is generally filled with filler since content producers can't rely on everyone having a widescreen.
Vacum cleaners seem to be advertising ever more powerfull motors to enable them to clean more thouroughly.
I can't imagine cooking/cleaning appliances have got much lower either.
Afaict that really just leaves fridges/freezers (though better insuation) and lighting (if CFLs or LEDs are use) as appliances with significant reductions.
While heat pumps have a higher nameplate efficiancy than direct gas heating the losses in electricity generation and distribution mean that overall system efficiancy is not that much better, probablly only a factor of two at best. So they are really only worthwhile if our electricity comes from a non fossil source.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
What, you don't think that morons can leave the doors open long enough that that mechanism to close them becomes nonfunctional due to the high temperatures inside?
Remember, we're talking about morons here. Not "Oops, I pressed the wrong button by accident.", but "Hey, this is a safety system, but if we take it offline for just a while then we can make our work so much more convenient.".
Are you sure appliances use that much less?
Fridges have the biggest improvements, yes, but combined with modern cleaning agents so you can wash in cold water more often, clothes washers have improved quite a bit, if you're willing to spend the money you can get a heat pump/dehumidifying dryer, my dishwasher uses less juice and my oven is better insulated.
I wasn't worrying so much about the vacuum, though they've improved that in the non-baseline models as well, mostly to make them quieter while retaining efficiency.
Even furnaces have gotten better - going from 70-80% efficient to often over 90%.
Basically, I was trying to say that we've moved into the realm of reducing returns - any further reductions power usage WILL require sacrifice, and people don't generally want to do that.
I don't read AC A human right
It's unsolvable largely because of a poorly worded executive order from a former President that made it impossible to try to recover/recycle used fuel.
And lets ignore the fact that there are designs out there that produce waste that is less dangerous, but got outlawed by by whiny, small brained tree huggers.
The situation IS solvable. If only we were allowed to solve it.