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US Nuclear Power Industry Poised For a Comeback
ThousandStars sends us to The Wall Street Journal for a report that momentum for nuclear energy is waxing in the US. "For the first time in decades, popular opinion is on the industry's side. A majority of Americans thinks nuclear power, which emits virtually no carbon dioxide, is a safe and effective way to battle climate change, according to recent polls. At the same time, legislators are showing renewed interest in nuclear as they hunt for ways to slash greenhouse-gas emissions. The industry is seizing this chance to move out of the shadow of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and show that it has solved the three big problems that have long dogged it: cost, safety and waste."
I really hate the comparisons of Three Mile Island to Chernobyl. Three Mile Island was an example of a failure at a nuclear facility that was solved correctly. Chernobyl was an example of a failure that was caused by extraordinary stupidity and handled as badly as you could handle such an incident.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
This needs all the political momentum it can get. Nuclear power is one of the areas I have strong disagreements with the current administration. Considering how much Uranium (and thorium, but lets not get into that) we have available domestically, this is such a fundamental and simple (albeit expensive) steps we can take to reduce emissions (I'm looking at you, coal) while decreasing our energy dependency. It has been so long since we have built a new reactor in this country that the safety of the newest designs, particularly the pebble bed reactor makes the still operating relics of the 60s and 70's look like potential Chernobyls (Of course, they're not, but I'm speaking relatively and the safety aspects have come quite a ways since then)
Nukes are awesome. Let's put bunch of them OVER THERE. No, no, no, not over here, OVER THERE.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
It's about time they get the, money grabbing, global warming train. This is much better plan than hybrids, wind mills and CFLs.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
I think it's tragic that a plant from that era has come to symbolize nuclear power for the entire nation when the technology has advanced so considerably. If we applied that line of reasoning to automobiles, we'd close all the freeways because the Corvair was unsafe.
I am an enthusiastic supporter of nuclear power for many reasons (the least of which is not its potential capability to move mankind into the space). However, no matter how excited and supportive the government or the populace become of nuclear energy there is one huge barrier that it faces. Due to the terror of nuclear energy generated in past decades, there are miles of legal hurdles, red tape, and bureaucratic BS festivals to go through before anything nuclear can be approved and implemented. Unless both federal and state litigators are willing to ease up some of the legal garbage surrounding nuclear facilities, it will remain an incredibly expensive (and unnecessarily so) solution to energy problems.
I hope the folks planning to establish new nuclear facilities hire a damn good group of lawyers. They are probably going to need it.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
The simple truth is that nuclear power is good technology that solves a variety of sticky problems. Anti-nuclear propaganda films irrationally scared the public in to rejecting a highly beneficial and useful method of power generation. With the passage of years, the public has come to the realization that the sky isn't falling and that a modern, safe nuclear power system is good economics and good social policy. We should celebrate this return to sanity: it's reason triumphing over irrational fear.
"Man is nothing without the works of man" -- Helvetius
One must take into account the amount of CO2 emitted during nuclear fuel production. Has anybody done the math?
You don't need to "do the math". Apply some common sense. Common sense tells you that it doesn't take thousands of megawatts to dig ore out of the ground and refine it. Have you ever seen the trainloads of coal that arrive at your local coal power plant on a routine basis? Do you think it takes anywhere near that amount of energy to dig ore out of the ground and process it?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Nope, it will increase the need to build more feeder-breeder reactors to use up the 99% fuel content remaining in that so called "nuclear waste".
Why not just drill a large hole into a subduction zone and drop it off in there.
Let the earth recycle it.
Then again I also never understood why if nuclear waste is still putting off energy, why not just use the waste as an energy source? Storing the waste in pools that have to be constantly chilled just seems so backasswards.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Hardly at all. Modern Pebble Bed reactors recycle their own waste until there is almost no radiation left and only a lump of lead where the uranium should be. There's almost no waste at all in a modern reactor, and the whole thing can be shielded so well that it's virtually impossible to have a melt down from one even if things do go wrong.
In fact, places like Yucca Mountain and Hanford, if Pebble Bed reactors take off- could become MINES.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
They haven't solved the environmental issues. They might have better safety, but what about the fact that they use massive amounts of water, and heat it up about a degree before returning it to the river that the plant is inevitably next to? How about the waste? They still haven't solved that one; all our old waste is still sitting on site at current plants.
Palo Verde. 3 units, no river.
The waste is sitting there because politicians refuse to deal with the issue; not because it is unsolvable. Personally, I think we should rethink breeder reactors.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Closing? It was never open. Most spent fuel is (has been and will be) kept on-site, the rest is usually only ever moved a relatively short distance. Besides, fuel reprocessing would be better. And gen-4 plants (which would burn more than the 2% of the uranium we currently burn before calling the fuel "spent") would be even better.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
Modern Pebble Bed Reactors recycle their water, just like they recycle their uranium.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I think most energy experts consider it the "bridging" option. If coal is unacceptable, geothermal too difficult in many areas, hydroelectric already all but maxed out in much of North America (and not exactly without substantial environmental repercussions of its own), and wind, tidal and solar technologies still some ways until maturation, then we're left with nuclear power. Maybe by the end of the century other technologies (in particular better capacitors which make alternative technologies much more sensible) will see reactors phased out, but at the end of the day, nuclear power is the only way we can generate large amounts of electricity with a minimum of environmental and climate impact. If we wait around for the alternative technologies to mature, we're probably going to spend another twenty or thirty years puking CO2, enriching states that would just as soon send suicide bombers to knock out Western office towers and train stations, and generally making the ultimate transition away from fossil fuels all the more difficult.
The environmentalists are just going to have to suck it up, and that's all there is to it. The world is going to need a lot more nuclear reactors over the next half century, and if every industrialized state out there is going to throw money out the window in the hopes of restarting the economy, then it would make sense that using those dollars to kick start nuclear power is just about the best thing one could do.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Oh they don't like wind generators either. Apparently they kill some incompetent, slow bird once in a while.
As far as solar power is concerned, its just a matter of time till some environmentalist will oppose it on the basis of toxic substances produced during manufacture.
Agrarian society here we come...
For decades, the typical American has exhibited an abysmal understanding of basic physics.
France and Japan will profit immensely when their companies build plants in the USA for the science-challenged Americans.
Stereotype much?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
"You can't recycle the fuel indefinitely, eventually you will have waste. And eventually it needs to be dealt with."
But that waste you eventually have to deal with is almost completely different stuff. Instead of being a highly radioactive mess for a hundred thousand years, it's a much less radioactive mess for a thousand years (and during that last 500 years, it's pretty 'cool' anyhow). I don't know about you, but I suspect we *probably* have the engineering know how and materials science to contain stuff safely for 500-1000 years. I don't think anyone really thinks we currently have the knowledge to solve the problem of containing waste safely for 100,000 years.
I'd much rather try to solve the problem of containing waste safely for 1000 years than 100 times that.
Even without further technological advance, nuclear power will suffice for several millennia. It produces zero emissions (except a little hot water) and produces a tiny volume of solid waste that doesn't escape into the environment. It runs silently all day and all night. If you were handed a datasheet for a nuclear power plant with the source of power blacked out, you'd jump at the chance to build the thing.
Nuclear power produces long-lived, dangerous waste, doesn't it? Dangerous and long-lived are mutually exclusive when it comes to nuclear materials. That's just the way the science of radioactive decay works. After being taken out of the reactor, the waste that remains can be reprocessed into more fuel. But if it isn't, then you can leave it in a cooling pond for a few years, and after that point, it's safe enough to handle, store, and bury. There are far worse industrial outputs than cooled-down nuclear waste.
But it's still dangerous and we have no place to store the waste! What's wrong with a cave in the middle of the desert? There's no water table. The area is seismically stable, and there's no life where we want to store the waste. And by itself, nuclear waste will do nothing. It won't make your children glow in the middle of the night. It won't contaminate your crops. It won't do anything because it's inert.
What about the risk of nuclear meltdown? Won't that destroy cities? Well, what about steam boiler explosions? What about refinery disasters? What about train disasters? Do those keep your up at night? They all killed people regularly back in their early days. But we don't worry about them now because improved safety technology has reduced the risk to an acceptable level. The same principle applies to nuclear power: another disaster like Chernobyl could never happen to even a 1970s-era American reactor, much less the far-improved versions we have today. The risk of being injured by a nuclear meltdown today is on par with being injured by lightning.
Wait -- won't we run out of fuel? Don't we only have reserves for a hundred years? You don't understand how much energy is contained in nuclear fuel. You need so little of it that the fuel is dirt cheap. The price of uranium could increase a thousandfold without affecting a nuclear plant's bottom line. And because uranium is so cheap, there's been very little prospecting. The reason our proven reserves are relatively small is that nobody has been looking very hard, because uranium is dirt cheap. In fact, for the past few decades, the nuclear power industry has been running on decommissioned nuclear warheads. That's how little fuel you really need for nuclear power.
Sure, nuclear might be okay, but wind power! It's decentralized, and therefore better! And it appeals to my philosophical sensibilities because it's not a big evil industry!Wind power can't provide baseload power. Plus, it's limited by the number of sites with good winds. You can, on the other hand, build as many nuclear plants as necessary without severe geographic constraints. As for nuclear being centralized, big, and therefore evil: big isn't necessarily bad. Properly regulated, a huge nuclear plant can provide inexpensive power to millions far more efficiently than many small ones, or thousands of turbines, coal-fired power stations, and natural gas generators. Furthermore, there's no particular reason nuclear stations need to be private per se: consider the Tennessee Valley Authority model.
If nuclear power is so great, why does it take two decades to build one, and why does the government have to subsidize the insurance?In terms of physical build time, it only takes a few years to erect a power plant. The delays come from hysterical opponents using every possible legal avenue to block new nuclear plants. The complaints have no basis in fact, but the courts have to hear them just the same. Often, legal delays are so severe that projects are abandoned altogether (which is, of course, what op
Or we could use the technology that we know works instead of investing in your ideas that have no existing economic infrastructure or history of successful deployment.
Seriously, build batteries? That's your bright idea? Why don't you stop and think about the environmental impact of building enough batteries to store millions of megawatt hours worth of electricty. Even if we invent a better battery chemistry that results in a massive increase of energy density there's no way that will scale in an environmentally friendly manner.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
It costs that much because of the Anti-Nuke crowds hysteria requiring accounting and maintenance practices which would make the gordian knot look like a half-winchester. This is similar to the logic that it costs less to give a mass murderer life then death. Ask the Chinese if it costs more to keep someone in a cage or execute them behind the courthouse.
Throw in enough adjudication and bureaucratic nonsense and just about any activity can be rendered economically unsound.
It goes something like this:
In reality, X produces far less overall pollution than Y.
I've seen this argument used to oppose:
All of these are great technologies. If we're ever to make any progress, we have to learn to think past the environmentalist's fallacy.
Seven-in-ten scientists favor building more nuclear power plants to generate electricity, while 27% are opposed.
That's the thing though. From your data over a quarter of the people who are supposedly the best informed on the subject think it is a bad idea. That is NOWHERE near a scientific consensus. Scientists, as a general rule, are not dogmatic about policy and will change their mind if the evidence supports an opposing viewpoint. The fact that 1 out of 4 educated and ostensibly well informed people who are willing to change their mind when the facts dictate doing so means that the "facts" are not clear and there is no scientific consensus.
Of course just saying "scientists" is actually kind of meaningless because my wife is a scientist of a sort (medical) but knows little to nothing about nuclear power. WHICH alleged scientists were polled in this survey? Maybe they polled a bunch of computer scientists instead of nuclear engineers.
I work for the largest producer of solar and wind energy in North America. Despite that distinction they still rely most heavily on Natural Gas and Nuclear and are looking to build more Nuclear plants in the future. If you don't know anything about modern nuclear power facilities you might want to brush up. They are nowhere near as dangerous as the fear-mongers want you to believe and the waste as I understand it is now reused.
AP1000 is a 1000 megawatt plant (hence the name; actually, it makes a bit more than 1000), that's 1,000,000 kilowatts; $0.10/KWH*1,000,000*24hrs/day=$2.4million/day worth of electricity sold. And the businesses taking out these loans can get a damn sight better than 8% annual interest. But yes, the plant is expensive. But the fuel is surprisingly cheap; not by the pound, for sure, but by the watt (since you need so little mass to generate each watt), it's a helluva lot cheaper than coal.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
Yeah, because we can't drill here in our yard (CA, AK) , we have to go to places that have petty dictators to get oil. NIMBYs are the problem, not the solution.
If you don't like the two wars, then let us drill here, drill now, And Create American Jobs. Otherwise you're part of the same problem I mentioned above.
If I were President, I'd tax the crap out of imported oil, and open up Anwar and California. I'd also start damming the rivers and building Nuke Plants to go along with Bio Fuels, Solar.
I'm just as sick about the two wars as the next guy, and don't like funding Jihadist governments. So, lets take a BIG BRIGHT LOOK at the SOLUTION we have available and go with it. You might not like everything about it, but sitting complaining about EVERY SOLUTION presented is NOT an option any longer.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
If nukes are not economically feasible, why does France get ~80% of their power from them?
Because they made a policy decision to do so based on their particular economic situation and resources. I give them kudos for doing it but like any policy decision it has it's upside and downside. France has been trying to privatize their energy sector recently but the primary energy company EDF is still 70% owned by the French government. Were it private to the degree the US energy sector is, the liability costs would be more difficult to justify.
Countries have to use what they have. The US, Russia and China are INCREDIBLY rich in coal deposits. The US is to coal what Saudi Arabia is to oil. The US has about 27% of the known deposits. This makes energy derived from coal cheap in the US compared to France which has virtually no coal of its own. Hence US policy is going to favor coal more than French policy and nuclear in the US becomes less attractive thanks to the economies of scale coal has achieved in the US.
There are actually quite a few successful deployments of power-storing technology -- ones that aren't even batteries. After all, batteries are really only useful for certain applications. Capacitors are nice, but not always appropriate. On the other hand, expending unused power on a reversible, bulk physical process -- like pumping water from a low-altitude body of water to a higher-altitude one -- and then generating power from the reverse process is fairly straightforward.
I'm still not a fan of Nuclear power, however, I do understand it's current appeal. Yes, at the site of the plant, virtually no carbon is emitted. But this doesn't take into account mining and processing activities.
/. is populated by lots of engineers who love nothing better than to undertake new technological challenges, however, a million years is too long of a timescale. This puts you in the realm of unforeseen earthquakes and meteor strikes and a host of 1 in 1 000 000 year events. Frankly, I find it unconscionable that we are willing dump such a tremendous problem in the laps of our children, especially when there is no guarantee that they will be in any position to actually fix any problems that might occur. Then there is that whole can of worms known as reprocessing, with the associated geopolitical implications.
Safety
I fully understand that, like most accidents in the world, the majority of nuclear accidents were caused by human error. Unfortunately, humans aren't going to be cut out of the picture anytime soon. While extremely unlikely, the cost of failure at a nuclear facility is simply too high, and with every new reactor that is in operation the risk, however small, grows.
Waste
As much as government and industry wish to whitewash this issue, it remains unresolved. The fact remains that the world has a growing stockpile of material which requires careful storage and monitoring for hundreds of thousands of years. Most of the material is currently at temporary facilities and will have to be handled and moved at minimum to a permanent facility. I find that in most discussions of Nuclear power, almost nobody wants to talk about the ongoing cost of maintaining and storing the byproducts and anybody who expects industry to pick up that tab indefinitely is out of their mind. None of this cost is calculated into the cost of price of electricity generated. No, it will be dumped on government in the form of cleanups and public debt. Anyone who doubts this simply has to look at amount of cleanup the government is currently responsible for from industry long since moved on. Who's paying to build the current long term site? Which brings us to the concept of a permanent facility. I know
unanswered questions
Finally, there remains one great unanswered question: Why do we need more nuclear power? I know why industry wants it. I know why government wants it. But why do we need it? I can see some limited small scale usage for medicine and perhaps deep space probes, but for our everyday needs Solar and wind ARE sufficient to take care of our energy needs, and when you consider that they are just at the beginning stages of their development they will only get better. Imagine how much better they would be if renewables actually had the same level of investment that the nuclear industry has been (and still is gifted with)? When you throw in geothermal, hydro, biomass, and some limited conventional generation it becomes very difficult to justify the risks and burdens of large scale nuclear deployment.
Coal releases every year more radiation into the atmosphere than all the nuke power accidents combined. Lots of greenhouse gases too -and so it will not be a long term feasible solution if we are to solve the global warming problem.
Nuke and solar power will be long term solutions, and probably solar will be the best.
..........FULL STOP.
If I were President, I'd tax the crap out of imported oil, and open up Anwar and California. You might not like everything about it, but sitting complaining about EVERY SOLUTION presented is NOT an option any longer.
ANWR is just a drop in the bucket. It's so not-a-solution to foreign oil that it makes no sense to damage that ecosystem just to immeasurably affect our situation. In fact I'd much rather save that drop until a single drop would affect our situation because we're gagging for any fuel at all, a 'who cares about environmental concerns if we can't deliver groceries' situation. Heaven forbid it comes to that. But even worse is burning up our own reserves, and then having to come begging to the foreign powers we were trying to be free from.
Treating ANWR as a "solution" for today's problems only makes such a situation more likely. We need not-oil to be the solution. All the not-oil solutions you proposed are fine, great even (cept hydro simply because nearly all the best locations are already tapped, so the opportunity here is much less). But more drilling isn't the answer, because we can't drill enough to free ourselves of foreign oil. The only way to end our addiction to foreign oil is to end our addiction to oil.
The enemies of Democracy are
Coal releases every year more radiation into the atmosphere than all the nuke power accidents combined.
True but when you have a quarter of the worlds supply of coal, it's going to be an economic factor whether it hurts the climate or not. Global warming is a huge issue but there is NO economically feasible scenario whereby coal will not be a major part of the US energy supply for the next 30+ years. I don't like it, and I suspect you don't either but coal is here and we'll have to deal with it. There simply is nothing available, not even nuclear, that can scale large enough to take coal's place in the US economy in the next few decades.
Lots of greenhouse gases too -and so it will not be a long term feasible solution if we are to solve the global warming problem.
Not with present or near-term technology, I agree. Good area for research.
Nuke and solar power will be long term solutions, and probably solar will be the best.
The answer is a diversified energy supply (nuclear, solar, wind, hydro, and yes even fossil-fuels) with careful emissions controls on the dirtier technologies. Nuclear and solar are not magic cure-alls but they should have an important part to play in the mix and definitely should be a bigger part of our energy policy. I absolutely agree with you on that.
My friend, radioactive waste will always be dangerous.
Solar and wind are still underexploited resources in this country. Combine them with better use of the energy we currently make and we will be energy independent and cleaner.
Installation of residential solar generation is ideal. It places the generation at the place of its consumption. And the use of geothermal heat-exchange heating and cooling should be mandatory.
Best regards.
So trade CO2 for nuclear waste? Are we not going backwards here just to solve the problem more quickly?
Going backwards? Nuclear waste is much more manageable than CO2, because of its high density and small amount of waste generated per unit of energy extracted. Carbon capture and sequestration is a joke compared to nuclear waste management. For more than thirty years, all nuclear power plants in my country have generated less than 10000 tons of spent fuel, while providing 50% of our electricity. I wouldn't dare thinking of the amount fo CO2 the production of the same amount of power from coal would have generated. It would be millions of tons, and that's a low estimate.
And with reprocessing of the spent fuel, the amount of nuclear waste would go down a lot more (excluding irradiated reactor parts, building materials, etc).
If you don't like the two wars, then let us drill here, drill now
The problem is you're just delaying the inevitable - Oil is a finite resource. Sure, you could drill up Alaska like swiss cheese, but what does it buy you? Another 20 years? We need to move to renewables.
The fact is that solar is the best option. None of the energy companies want it to be developed though because then they wouldn't be able to extort you for every dime possible. ...Nuclear isn't really an option. No matter how wonderful and safe reactors become, they A) have a fairly large permanent physical foot-print, B) require a local and constant supply of water for cooling, C) they are vastly expensive, and D) they are a limited resource (that is until we all have a homemade mini-fusion plant running each of our houses). Solar is almost everywhere for roughly 12 hours a day. Combining cheap highly-productive solar arrays with large rechargeable batteries and "smart-grid" technologies, and we could keep the globe lit up 24 hours a day for (almost) free!!!!!
As for oil and the drilling for it in CA and AK....It would last about 3 years after production started and then we'd be right back here, save for the loss of several hundred square miles of pristine habitat we had to sacrifice to get to the oil....
-Oz
Another ding on nuclear power is that the private insurance market is not willing to insure them so it requires the government to provide liability insurance for them (at least in the US).
And of course mining coal isn't a hazardous occupation with long-term health effects? Oh, look!
Walrus, various seals and whales are all ocean mammals - and the proposed ANWAR sites are all inland.
As for the Birds and Caribu - I've seen studies that they tend to LIKE pipelines - it provides shelter.
Done right, the drilling won't be a problem.
Personally, I'm for nuclear power - it's harder to replace oil than it is coal.
I don't read AC A human right
Actually, in a modern nuclear plant (pebble-bed designs), when it "goes down" all it does is stop generating power, nothing more.
Your uninformed, hysterical type is the reason we still rely on coal or oil (or even natural gas) for electrical generation at all today.
Reprocessing is really a huge waste of money while there is plenty of high grade uranium ore. Making fuel is stupidly expensive and uses vast amounts of energy, but reprocessing at the moment is even more so. There is no point just doing it becuase it is possible, there has to be an energy or cost advantage. The newer methods which are almost at the pilot plant stage don't even need reprocessing anyway and can use high grade waste mixed with their fuel.
It's all irrelevent unless taxes go up to pay for it. You'll see a few small token installations applying repurposed military technology but since civilian research has been dead for thirty years it would take complete idiots to build expensive Westinghouse junk which is really TMI painted green and won't start generating power until a decade after construction starts.
It's funny seeing people screaming for the most expensive white elephants in power generation NOW before the local nuke lobby gets overrun by local outsiders like Hyperion or imported methods like pebble bed and accelerated thorium. The nuke lobby is really just a welfare addict that has conned a lot of people - give up on them and instead promote ongoing research to solve the problems the nuke lobby refuse to attempt to solve and to develop nuclear technologies that can stand on their own merits. "It's better covering your kiddies in coal dust" is not good enough, everything is better than that so if nuclear is going to be a viable alternative energy they need to put work in (like Hyperion doing the work, but Westinghouse et al just slap a coat of green paint on TMI and call that good enough).
The nuclear lobby needs to be dragged screaming out of the 1970s or get put down.
>Please point to a single working pebble bed reactor.
>Okay, how about this [wikipedia.org] one, based on the "failed" design you mentioned earlier... Details here. [wired.com]
You get your information from Wikipedia and Wired?
FYI: Under the best of circumstances those are less than reliable sources. And the Wikipedia article refers to a 2005 experimental reactor, and "plans" for a bigger startup in 2013.
And no need to put quotes around "failed", it failed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300
The argument is being addressed too discretely. It's not a case of either it's certain death or utterly flawless. The safety of nuclear reactors falls along a 2-d continuum in terms of consequences of failure and likelihood of failure. The question is do modern reactors fall far enough into the safe corner to warrant widespread deployment? Jet liners have the potential to kill hundreds of people if they go wrong, or are willfully misused - but they're ubiquitous, despite being subject to the same classes of pitfalls (human error, willful abuse, design flaws, etc).
As with cars - thousands die in traffic accidents every year but people regard the risk/benefit ratio to be worth the deaths. It's impossible to evaluate this kind of situation without appreciating that the risks/rewards lie on a continuum and that despite it being distasteful to admit some number of deaths are acceptable, since pretty much everything has some way of killing people if deployed widely enough.
If you compare the number of people likely to be killed by reactor malfunctions to the number of people saved by some consequence of the reactors existing does it compare favourably? I have no idea, but with a low enough failure rate it might be a slam dunk.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons