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Another Crumbling Reactor Springs a Tritium Leak
mdsolar writes "The decrepit nuclear reactor Vermont Yankee has sprung a radioactive leak similar to those at other poorly run reactors in Illinois (Braidwood, Byron and Dresden), Arizona (Palo Verde), and New York (Indian Point). Greenpeace noted 3 years ago that radioactive tritium leaks even threaten Champagne from France. Tritium and its decay product helium 3 are incredibly valuable and there is currently a shortage of helium 3. What, besides shutting down leaky old nuclear plants, could be done to better control release of tritium into the environment?"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duct_tape
D' oh!
Can someone please explain how I can leverage this situation to develop superpowers?
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
Is this the fucking Greenpeace sight?
Can't we keep the Luddites from being /. editors?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It's all coming down.
MikeHolmes
The state legislature is currently debating the proposed extension of the operating license of this facility. Given the track record of shoddy inspection processes, cost-cutting measures at the expense of safety, and not properly contributing to the decommissioning funds needed to safely close the plant, Entergy should not be allowed to continue the farce of safety for another 20 years. The linked article shows not only a disregard for the safety and long-term survival of the facility by not exploring a possible leak for months, but it also shows how little regard safety warnings are. Ignoring a low oil warning in a car would make me cringe - but not fixing a warning system and "closely monitoring the pump" instead in an facility that can cause mass destruction and death if failure occurs smacks of disregard for safety and human life to get things back to making money again.
And having labor unions pushing to keep this facility open, and bending all their political influence on this? They should be ashamed of themselves. Who will be hired to clean up once the facility is being closed? Union labor. And all for a few bucks while Vermont burns in a nuclear fire due to neglect and mismanagement.
Please contact your legislator and tell them to vote NO to the operating license renewal.
is my beer in danger? That's what I would like to know!
Build new nuclear reactors, specifically of the design that, either, doesn't use tritium or is melt down proof. Why are the same people that bitch about the safety of nuclear reactors all at once the people whole also hold it back from being a, somewhat, excellent energy source? Uncool green peace, uncool.
Eat sleep die
We're talking about *tritium* here, not plutonium. It's just not all that dangerous as far as radioactive materials go. You might well be *WEARING* some right now if you have a watch that glows in the dark. Unless they're releasing hundreds of pounds of it at a time here (they aren't, there's ~165lbs of the stuff in the US right now) , any farm even a kilometer away is not a real health hazard. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium
Pebble Bed Reactor
Nuclear power has had lots of subsidies, such as heavy governmental involvement in research, that I think would go a ways to offset whatever costs fossil fuels can externalize.
SSC
We may be a bit short of helium, but I don't think the bit that's produced from tritium decay is going to do much to fix anything.
The linked article says that the tritium levels are only half what must be reported to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And let's think about what 17,000 parts per liter is. A liter of water contains 3.34192092 * 1025 molecules. So those 17,000 atoms mean that, assuming one tritum atom per molecule, 0.00000000000000000005% of the water is contaminated with tritium. At 3.3ppb the concentration of uranium in seawater is several orders of magnitude higher. This is not to say that the leak shouldn't be found and fixed, but the notion that this demonstrates that our nuclear power plants are unsafe is absurd.
...or you could bring the cost of nuclear down through cutting red tape for building new ones and funding research into more efficient ones and not punish the consumers who will be stuck with coal in the meantime.
I guess that doesn't fatten the right purses though, does it?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Those eco-terrorists?
http://www.highnorth.no/Library/Movements/Greenpeace/gr-ac-pr.htm
The same who are extorting companies like Apple for a "green" reading?
Posted via Tor and AC for obvious reasons.
Wait, What? Coal Power is too cheap, so we should tax it heavily? Says who? You? Who gives you that right to decide what power is more "pure" than another?
If our elected representatives no longer represent us, do we still live in a Democracy?
What, besides shutting down leaky old nuclear plants, could be done to better control release of tritium into the environment?"
Well maybe if somebody, HINT HINT, would let us build new, safer, and more efficient ones, instead of having to rely on the older ones.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
"What, besides shutting down leaky old nuclear plants, could be done to better control release of tritium into the environment?"
Maintain the plants and keep them in operation. Really, they won't hurt you; and the electricity they produce is cheap and clean.
You aren't familiar with the concept of an "externality" are you?
The power.... of SCIENCE! *bum bum BUM*
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
You can relax. Nothing gives him the right to decide anything that affects you -- I think it's just an opinion. It's probably based on the knowledge that burning coal leads to smog and greenhouse gas emissions. If the economic cost of these pollutants aren't reflected in the cost of their consumption, then we're using too much of them. It's an externality. It's not based on the relative purity of one or another way of generating power. It's based on the absolute cost of an economic activity.
It's not immediately clear that nuclear power doesn't have its own externalities or that the externalities can be approximated for either alternative, but that doesn't really make what he's saying any more or less of an opinion.
Why don't we try throwing toilet water on it?
Tritium is just an isotope of Hydrogen. Being that it is too light the Earth to hold onto it gravitationally so doesn't it all just end up wisping away into space?
My entire family died from tritium poisoning during the Australian-American war, you insensitive clod!
Good grief, could this /. article possibly be more biased? Who the hell does Slashdot think it is, the MSM? I thought the Internet was supposed to be an improvement.
Lets just agree with the idiots at Greenpeace.... on one condition, that if we agree the current plants are operating far beyond their original design life they agree with us that the solution is to replace them with modern safer reactors.
Democrat delenda est
as grond noted, the actual amount is trivial beyond belief.
However, there is another problem to this; the atual amount of radioactive material stored at plants, in total, is quite large; in the even of, say, a terrorist inspired meltdown, we would be looking at a lot of long lived alphas getting into the environment.
the other issue is the relation between civilian nukes an atomic weapons. To build an atomic bomb, one needs a fairly serious and complex industrial infrastructure; take, say just monitoring workers - you have to have a reason for buying test equipment and so forth. If you have civilian nukes, you have a justification for building up tht infrastructure, eg, the specilized skills and equipment needed to transport highly radioactive material (fuel or weapons grade U)
Thus this article is bad for two reasons, (a) hysteria about a trivial leak, and (b) it defocuses us from the real problems
Careful! You need to use the correct product for this problem.
Allow the construction of new plants. Newer designs are cheaper and safer. If new plants were allowed, they would gradually replace the aging designs.
I have about 30 miles
I sat down to write a new sig tonight and all I did was make the chair warm.
Tritium is the common name for hydrogen-3 (3H), which is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen. Like ordinary hydrogen (1H or hydrogen-1, called protium) and deuterium (2H or hydrogen-2), tritium has a single proton in its nucleus. Unlike ordinary hydrogen, deuterium and tritium have neutrons in their nucleus. Deuterium has one neutron in its nucleus and is stable, while tritium's nucleus contains two neutrons and is unstable. Tritium decays spontaneously to helium-3 (3He) through ejection of a beta particle (essentially a high-energy electron). The half-life of tritium is about 12.32 years. Since the number of protons determines chemical bonding, tritium behaves like ordinary hydrogen and can replace ordinary hydrogen in water molecules. Thus, tritium readily cycles through the hydrologic and biologic components of the environment. Tritium has three times the mass of ordinary hydrogen due to the two extra neutrons. Because of this extra mass, water containing tritium evaporates at a slightly slower rate than water containing only hydrogen-1.
The unit of measure of tritium in water is the tritium unit (TU). One tritium unit equals 1 tritium atom in 1018 hydrogen atoms. In SI units, one tritium unit is about 0.118 bequerels per liter (Bq/L), where the bequerel is one decay per second. In picocuries per liter, 1 TU is approximately 3.19 pCi/L. Tritium occurs in very small quantities naturally, being produced in the upper atmosphere by cosmic rays. Natural (pre-nuclear age) levels of tritium in precipitation are on the order of 1 to 5 TU. Nuclear-weapons testing during the 1950s and 1960s created relatively large amounts of tritium in the atmosphere that can be detected in ground water that was recharged during this period. Greatly elevated levels of tritium can be present in ground water contaminated with radioactive wastes.
It hasn't been until recently that the detection of the very miniscule ammounts of Tritium leakage through several feet of rebar, concrete, steel, and lead have been detectible as the units of measure are so minute to be nearly indetectable. As such, they don't pose much of a threat to humans, or other creatures in general. The half-life of Tritium in the typicaly human is roughly ten days, and is of such a low yield of energy to be about as harmful as living in Colorado being bombarded with a multiple increase of Cosmic rays versus people who live closer to sea level. In fact, when measuring the radioactive levels of Tritium you will notice that the K+ ions in bananas are radioactive as well.
Basically, all of this overreacting to 'radioactive' stuff should result in EVERYTHING being banned that's radioactive. If they were so concerned with such low level contamination, they should do away with Limestone rock on the walls of schools (radioactive), granite countertops (radioactive), bananas (radioactive), and all manner of other things that emit EM and positron/neutron radiation on such low levels.
The irony of all the craziness over 'radioactivity' is that on average, people who work near nuclear reactors, or have 'any' exposure on an ongoing basis at a very low level are typically healthier than the crazy people scared of all this radiation floating around.
If you take all the TLD (thermo-luminescent devices) worn by all Department of Energy employees and Nuclear Sub/Carrier personnel to measure very accurately the radiation exposure over a year, and add up every TLD in the DOE and Navy, it is still less radiation than 1 person receives by living in Denver Colorado for a year.
Thus, by this non-sensical IT'S RADIOACTIVE IT MUST BE BAD FOR US logic, we should quarantine Colorado, because obviously it's going to end up becoming a mutated Zombieland where only those highly paranoid, and well adept at using all manner of sharp, blunt, and dangerous instruments for maiming Zombies will survive.
Convince people it's a baldness cure, old Hogan's Heroes episode. Then just start lining coffins with lead. Problem solved and you get a fresh new cash flow for the nuclear industry selling a fake baldness cure.
You are too stupid.
No! It's clean, I tell you! Clean! It's the cleanest one of all! Clean! Clean! Clean!
Aaaaaaaaargh.....
[fades out into oblivion]
send in homer Simpson to fix it and also let him run sector 7G
> To the advocates of nuclear power, Chernobyl isn't a demonstration of the danger of nuclear power...
I'm interested in hearing a contrary opinion, but really. It was a demonstration of something we all know, that if you try really hard to screw something up you usually succeed.
Chernobyl was a poorly designed Russian reactor that would have never been issued a permit anywhere in the Western world but that wasn't why it failed. We still don't know all of the details of what they were researching but the assholes had intentionally turned off what safety features it did have. It is really hard to design something so idiot proof that it can withstand a determined effort by trained engineers to subvert the safety cutoffs.
Democrat delenda est
You've got to love the innumeracy of the reporter on this article:
by Wednesday, the contamination had jumped to 17,000 parts per liter.
Ah yes, parts per liter. One of those quaint old-fashioned units of concentration, I guess, like horsepower per cubit. I wish someone could remind me how we convert to a more familiar unit like grams per liter, moles per liter, parts per million.
Question: What weighs more a kilogram of U-238 or a kilogram of Co-60?
Answer: Wait long enough and the correct answer is Co-60...
Sorry, couldn't resist. Just an alpha versus beta and gamma particle thing...
In reality though, the bio-half life of tritium of a week or two combined with it being a weak beta emitter means it really isn't all that dangerous in even close to the quantities discussed here... This is just a non-story.
If it's safe, why should the leak be found and fixed?
I didn't say it was safe, just that it did not demonstrate that the plants are unsafe. If one car randomly explodes, does that prove that all cars are inherently unsafe? Neither did I say the leak was safe forever: obviously if the plant is leaking then something is going wrong. It may be safe now but problems left unattended tend to get worse over time.
Let's be honest here. To the advocates of nuclear power, Chernobyl isn't a demonstration of the danger of nuclear power, so why should any lesser event be considered such?
Well, no Chernobyl-style plants are operated in the US, so why should it demonstrate anything about powerplants in the US?
In any case, the comparison you give is, at best, misleading, and at worst, deliberately so. For the comparison to be meaningful, we'd need to know the mix of uranium isotopes in order to compare their decay modes, energies, and products.
Well, the mix of uranium isotopes in sea water is known, so why don't you pull it up and prove that the comparison wasn't meaningful instead of just assuming that it isn't. I'd say it actually goes in my favor: uranium is toxic whereas tritium isn't, uranium decays into toxic lead (via various radioactive and toxic intermediaries), whereas tritium decays into helium, which isn't toxic or radioactive, and uranium has a decay energy orders of magnitude greater than tritium. Tritium also has a short biological half-life and is readily removed from the body. Uranium, on the other hand, though not readily absorbed by the body tends to bioaccumulate and can stay in the body for years.
Either you haven't the foggiest notion what you're talking about...or you're an energy industry shill
That's a false dichotomy. I both have some idea what I'm talking about and have no connection to the energy industry.
Wow, awesome deduction there, Sherlock.
I blame (INSERT YOUR LEAST FAVORITE PRESIDENT) !
Since (INSERT YOUR LEAST FAVORITE PRESIDENT) has\had the power to fix this; since the President of course runs everything and it to blame for everything and is responsible to fix everything. During (INSERT LEAST FAVORITE PRESIDENT) term(s) he's did nothing to fix this!
IMPEACH (INSERT LEAST FAVORITE PRESIDENT)!!!
3 things kill a discussion quicker then:
A: Comparing anything to Nazis. They are over used and there were plenty of other groups in centuries past that made them look tame. More importantly, unlike some groups in history... they lost so comparing anything to them implies eventual failure so the argument falls apart all the quicker.
B: Blaming a President for problems that take decades to fester and manifest. Same for giving credit.
C: Blaming every other congressman\woman\it but your own.
Now that we have that out of the way....
We know that nuclear power has been suppressed for the last 30 years for better or worse. Does this really come as a surprise?
We know that funding towards the expansion of the nuclear energy program has been frozen, cut, and reduced at varying degrees for over 30 years. No new plants to handle existing demand means no ability to decommission older ones.
There is some irony at a group that hated nuclear energy complains after decades of condemning nuclear energy find time to complain that it isn't getting enough support and maintenance... I won't even get into the green debate that has driven Greenpeace into a morass of identity crisis.
Lastly the reality and fantasy of nuclear energy are so disparate that the media tends to run with fantasy and science tends to side on over confidence leaving the public conflicted. Nuclear isn't free energy. You still have to mine, enrich, store, process, protect, and manage the fuel. How much energy does it take measured at the end of a fuel's life-cycle from start to finish is the real efficiency. It's like those crappy CFLs. Same carbon footprint as a conventional bulb once you factor in shipping from overseas for most of them, the mining and processing for Mercury and the manufacturing of the ballasts, etc.
Special interest groups on both sides are so intent on propaganda that reason, compromise, and sanity are not allowed. Digital Mind Think in an Analog world...
We need to develop nuclear energy solutions that are safe. Beaming energy down from space is not an option as it is too vulnerable to attack and we already have so much shit up there it's nearing the point that would make the Rift's scenario likely (the orbit was intentionally filled with micro-debris to shred everything coming in and going out...)
We need a comprehensive solution that stitches ALL the sources together allowing basic economics to dictate the most cost effective solutions over time.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This isn't an isolated incident. Vermont Yankee has been plagued by problems like this, though generally less critical. There's been a photo circulating around of an incident a few years back, where one of the cooling structures fell apart. (Really... fell apart - the photo looks pretty sick, and you wonder what neglect gets it to that point.) I seem to remember that a few years back that lost some spent fuel rods, too. I don't remember how that turned out - I think it was a bookkeeping problem, and they were in the cooling pond all along.
Entergy took the plant over a few years ago, and people here weren't too happy about control going to some out of our region (Texas) firm. Plus I'm under the impression that there was supposed to be some sort of decommissioning fund being built up during operating years, so they could properly take care of the plant at end-of-life. Now there's something about no money to take care of shutdown costs, etc. (Sounds to me like raiding a pension fund, but that's probably unfair.)
Now with a rather checkered safety and maintenance record, they're trying to get an operating license extension. In addition, they're putting in for a rather hefty rate increase at the same time. People here aren't too happy.
Others have suggested building *safe* plants. Personally I blame the US Navy. I once heard that basically we have landlubbing ship/submarine reactors for our domestic electric power plants for the sake of the US Navy. The type of reactors we use in the US are great for power density, not so great for safety by-design, not so great for cleanup, etc. But the Navy gets the benefit of a "nuclear industry" that practices their kind of reactors. Nuclear training in the US is essentially all for Navy reactors. Unfortunately, this contributed to the death of the nuclear industry in the US. Had we gone with one of the inherently safe, inherently cleaner designs, or had we taken the French standardization-based approach instead of a whole pile of similar one-offs, we might still have a nuclear industry, cleaner air, cheaper power, etc.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There ain't no safe, clean way to generate power in the amounts we need.
A little over a year ago, the TVA Kingston Ash Spill had everybody up in arms about coal plants.
We get most of our electrical power from coal plants. Nuclear is second. I doubt this is likely to change in my lifetime unless there's some stunning breakthru in physics.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
> To the advocates of nuclear power, Chernobyl isn't a demonstration of the danger of nuclear power...
I'm interested in hearing a contrary opinion, but really. It was a demonstration of something we all know, that if you try really hard to screw something up you usually succeed.
Chernobyl was a poorly designed Russian reactor that would have never been issued a permit anywhere in the Western world but that wasn't why it failed. We still don't know all of the details of what they were researching but the assholes had intentionally turned off what safety features it did have. It is really hard to design something so idiot proof that it can withstand a determined effort by trained engineers to subvert the safety cutoffs.
Actually, the cause of failure is well known, just read the Wiki article. They were testing emergency shutoff procedures, specifically the ability of the steam turbines to continue operating the cooling water pumps using their rotational inertia, like a flywheel. They stuffed up the test procedure. Operators with little understanding of the complex interactions of the nuclear poisons created during low power operation put the reactor into a dangerous configuration.
nah, what we need here is an inanimate carbon rod.
Although your criticism that differing radio active isotopes is valid, it would seem that your stipulation that Cobalt-60 is more dangerous than Uranium-238 is incorrect. According to www.ead.anl.gov the lifetime cancer mortality per unit intake for ingestion of Uranium-238 is 7.5 * 10^-11. For Cobalt-60, it is 1.4 * 10^ -11. From this, it appears that Cobalt-60 is less dangerous, and hence the GP was correct in making the comparison.
>>>> What, besides shutting down leaky old nuclear plants, could be done to better control release of tritium into the environment?"
Two solutions:
1. Blame George Bush, shut down all nukes and dump trillions into "sustainable", "green" jobs like ACORN voter registration
2. Rebuild/replace with Thorium reactors
neutron taxes
...or you could bring the cost of nuclear down through cutting red tape for building new ones and funding research into more efficient ones and not punish the consumers who will be stuck with coal in the meantime.
I guess that doesn't fatten the right purses though, does it?
Bullshit. All I ask is that you insure nuclear plants to the extent of the damage a serious accident could produce.
As it is, there's a miindlessly low cap on damages set by the government so that an insurance consortium would cover it at all.
The cap is lower than actual possible damage by several orders of magnitude.
It's fucking simple -- if you can't insure it, you can't operate it.
File under "OSPD" ("operation successful, patient died").
Eric Baird
In case there is any doubt regarding Triated water's effect on living beings the following information may help. Tritium is biologically mutagenic *because* it's a low energy emitter. This characteristic makes readily absorbed by surrounding cells. The available evidence from studies conducted journal a list of effects, so I'll just quote from those works;
Tritium can be inhaled, ingested, or absorbed through skin. Eating food containing 3H can be even more damaging than drinking 3H bound in water. Consequently, an estimated radiation dose based only on ingestion of tritiated water may underestimate the health effects if the person has also consumed food contaminated with tritium. (Komatsu)
Studies indicate that lower doses of tritium can cause more cell death (Dobson, 1976), mutations (Ito) and chromosome damage (Hori) per dose than higher tritium doses. Tritium can impart damage which is two or more times greater per dose than either x-rays or gamma rays.
(Straume) (Dobson, 1976) There is no evidence of a threshold for damage from 3H exposure; even the smallest amount of tritium can have negative health impacts. (Dobson, 1974) Organically bound tritium (tritium bound in animal or plant tissue) can stay in the body for 10 years or more. For those who think "of all the elements in nuclear waste tritium is one of the more harmless ones"
Tritium can cause mutations, tumors and cell death. (Rytomaa) Tritiated water is associated with significantly decreased weight of brain and genital tract organs in mice (Torok) and can cause irreversible loss of female germ cells in both mice and monkeys even at low concentrations. (Dobson, 1979) (Laskey) Tritium from tritiated water can become incorporated into DNA, the molecular basis of heredity for living organisms. DNA is especially sensitive to radiation. (Hori) A cell's exposure to tritium bound in DNA can be even more toxic than its exposure to tritium in water. (Straume)(Carr)
First, as an isotope of hydrogen (the cell's most ubiquitous element), tritium can be incorporated into essentially all portions of the living machinery; and it is not innocuous -- deaths have occurred in industry from occupational overexposure. R. Lowry Dobson, MD, PhD. (1979)
References;
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Except, of course, that even our oldest nuclear plants are orders of magnitude more safe than any coal plant.
"What, besides shutting down leaky old nuclear plants, could be done to better control release of tritium into the environment?"
Educate the public about radiation, and, to offset the potential exposure from this minuscule amount of tritium, ask them to eat one less banana per year?
Civilian Nuclear Power is observed "in the wild".
This is exactly why nuclear plants in the hands of profit motivated companies is utterly stupid.
I have said it before and I will say it again, when nuclear reactors to generate power are built to U.S. Naval Warship standards, manned and maintained to US Naval Warship standards they can build one in my backyard, literally, until then fuck off!
Yes the china syndrome was a movie, but the main "bad act" was the falsification of weld radiography to shave money off the construction costs. Running Vermont Yankee for the last 38 years, cutting corners on maintenance, cooling tower partial collapse do to lack of maintenance and inspection , all those problems are why a profit motivated civilian nuclear program is just completely insane.
You want nuclear power, I am all for it but it MUST be run by a not for profit entity and hang the costs, the power goes out subsidized.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
Will their stock dip on this news?
In Soviet Russia, you leak into reactor.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
We've discussed Vermont Yankee before and it is a particularly sad case. http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/07/09/08/2036240/New-Legislation-Proposed-For-Nuclear-Safety
Greenpeace does propose solar as an alternative. You can get amorphous silicon panels for $0.98/Watt http://www.ecobusinesslinks.com/solar_panels.htm These should last over 50 years since they are less affected by cosmic rays than crystalline panels. That comes to about a penny a kWh in a typical US location. Sounds like about the most cost effective new power available. Hum, it's even less expensive than existing power (i.e. hydro electric, coal, nuclear) so maybe they are on to something.
Is it well run if it is leaking radioactive waste into the ground water? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byron_Nuclear_Generating_Station#Groundwater_contamination Maybe that is part of their mission statement?
You are quite wrong. First, not all safety features were turned off, but only those which were safe to turn off according to the reactor user manual. Second, a SCRAM function must never lead to an explosion. Never ever. Third, the design was actually so bad that RBMK in its older version was never conform even to the Soviet safety laws.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
I oppose nuclear energy.
Why?
Because nuclear energy is pretty much completely safe when properly used.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
It's more commercial opinion than public opinion. If the old nuclear designs were as good as advertised you wouldn't need a government to build them, so consider what the private sector thinks of the idea. "You want to build something that costs that much and won't be running for years with electricity that costs more than the market rate? Hahahaha, dream on".
There are some that have sucumbed to the "too cheap to meter" PR that will dispute the above problem and I can only suggest to them that they get some figures for an actual real single plant - not some rubbery agregate of numbers where the actual source data is unavailable (like the usual reply I get when I ask this). In the process of looking for this information you will see exactly what I mean, the reality doesn't match the PR.
The near future however holds out the prospect of smaller reactors that don't take anywhere near as long to build or cost anywhere near as much with a possibility of savings via mass production. If the Hyperion stuff is as good as advertised that will be one example, and the Chinese may also get there with pebble bed in the next few years now that they have a prototype.
Yes, cheap it is if you don't calculate the follow up costs which probably account for the vast majority of the total costs.
Where do you leave the garbage for the next few thousand years? Who pays for that?
You Americans are funny. On the one hand you turn al pale if someone just mentions the word "socialism" but on the other hand stuff like that has to be handled by the society. Or do you seriously expect ANY company to be able to guarantee the safe disposal of nuclear waste for thousands of years? No company will even exist long enough.
Try to find any insurance company that is willing to insure a nuclear power plant! They can calculate and know that this would be a risk that could run anyone out of business in an instant. So they don't insure nuclear power plant accidents. But the government does, it has to. So whenever something blows up it's the tax payer that has to cough up the money to fix whatever is left to be fixed.
Already forgotten Chernobyl? Yes, I know it was a faulty russian power plant and personell made mistakes. Gladly the American nuclear power plants run flawlessly and Americans never make mistakes ... You guys were just lucky so far!
Clean? What happens if one of those things blows up? It's not exactly unlikely that a terrorist snatches an air plane and this time maybe decides that "landing" on a reactor near New York might be a good idea. What then? suddenly it's not all that clean anymore but the most dirty way to produce energy. Yes, I know, nuclear power plants are shielded against air plane crashes. Ever tested that? What happens of one of the huge Airbus 380 crash into it? Is the shielding prepared for that too? Forgotten 9/11 as well? I doubt that anyone expected those towers to collapse either - still it happened.
It could be funny if it wouldn't be so sad. On the one hand especially the U.S. is turning crazy on the airport security and running all kind of possible and more or less useful checks but in other sectors a blind eye is all that watches.
There ain't no safe, clean way to generate power in the amounts we consume.
Sorry to bust your bubble there but it did win an international safety award some time before the accident. There were of course many reactors that were far worse in the USA and France but they were shut down because they were risks (and uneconomic to upgrade).
All this revisionism is counterproductive. Pretending (as most do on this subject) that only stupid Russians can make mistakes and good clean living Americans can't is really what this idiocy comes down to. The real message should be that if you do stupid stuff with dangerous things people can die. The answer of course is not to do the stupid stuff - sometimes the dangerous things are very useful when used appropriately.
According to our understanding of quantum theory, there's a non-zero chance that the next time you fart a black hole may pop out of your ass and swallow the earth. I therefore demand that you immediately obtain enough insurance to cover the cost of rebuilding the earth, or immediately depart our planet. Thank you.
Is obvious. Stop being religious about nuclear technology.
Yes, it has its dangers. But unless you are totally insane, you have to agree that a modern reactor is a lot better than the decade old ones we're running on right now. The absolute worst case scenario - and it is happening in many first-world countries right now, is that there's a ban on the construction of new reactors, while the permissions to run the old ones are extended again and again, well beyond their lifetimes.
Allow the building of new reactors again. Make it a condition that for each new one built, an old one has to be dismantled. In other words: Give the whole lot a refreshment. That doesn't make things worse, and even if you'd like to see them all shut down you'll have to agree that 10 new and modern ones are a whole lot better than 10 old and leaky ones.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The solution to this is to build more nuclear power plants. Nuclear is the cleanest and safest energy we have available, and people freaking out and trying to ban nuclear power is just misguided. We need to take advantage of new technology and build newer more up to date plants that won't have these problems.
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
Huh?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
that alone is enough to prevent me from reading the article.
Now, where does most of the release of mercury, radon, and soot come from? Ah. The mining and burning of fossil fuels (plus faulted granite in places like Cornwall and Scotland.)
Yup. Working with tritium made me very safety conscious. It made me a strong supporter of nuclear power as a replacement for all those nasty polluting technologies.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
For many years the UK Government claimed that it was safest to discharge tritium as tritiated water. That's because they were dumping loads of it in the North Sea and wanted to justify themselves. But in fact we argued that our plant was capable of discharging the (small amount of)waste as cold tritium gas mixed with nitrogen and argon, and the best thing to do was to blast it straight up a stack and let it diffuse away. Unofficially we were right, officially we were contrary to Government policy, and in this country (as under Bush) being right but contrary to policy gets you sacked.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Tritium is biologically a problem. It's electrically hydrogen, but it's three times heavier.
That means it gets used in, say, H2O in the body because it's electrically right. But it's the wrong shape because the H's are too heavy.
They are also radioactive, leaving an O+ hanging around and some high energy photons.
They are also used in metabolic processes because we use Hydrogen there too.
This has the same problem.
Just like there's more to animal locomotion of the Kangaroo than how high it jumps and how much energy it needs to get there, there's more to tritium's biological problems than just it being radioactive.
Vermont Yankee has been riddled with problems for the last several years. Entergy is horrible and this reactor is being run and maintained terribly.
Truth, Just Us, And Hatred For All Mankind!
You mean cheap for the operators. Not cheap to the taxpayers because they have to pay for the clean up and the insurance. Nuke power plants have been refused to be built unless the taxpayer (Government) underwrite the expenses and guarantee a profit, even if the power stations, when they come on line, no longer break even.
If nuclear power were cheap, they wouldn't ask for $7Bn a year in handouts, would they?
I pass by Indian Point everyday in my commute, which I have been doing for almost 15 years. My neighbor actually works there. Old? yes. Poorly run? many, many years ago, yes, but well run for over two decades. Decrepit? no. If you ever try to bring your boat anywhere near Indian Point (it's on the Hudson river), you will be greeted by a security boat and escorted away. Hardly indicative of poorly run.
That's not the only way. USE LESS POWER. Why *must* "more nuclear" be the answer?
Nobody's managed to do so without just saying "it has to".
"Sitting in your lap" isn't the same as ingesting.
1 kg of cobalt-60 is over a million curies. Getting anywhere near a point source like that would kill you very quickly.
1 kg of U-238 is about 330 microcuries, which is relatively harmless as long as you don't ingest it.
Design it so the switches to disable the safety features are inside the reactor vessel?
"What, besides shutting down leaky old nuclear plants, could be done to better control release of tritium into the environment?""
You don't. You run a long-ass hose to the closest Tokamak or equivalent fusion project you can find.
Is in the air, for you and me.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
under p/n 76155A29
Almost $20 for a 60 yard roll of 2" wide tape. Those traceable nuclear certs don't come cheap.
BTW, "nuclear grade" doesn't imply that it is any stronger or more durable than standard duct tape. Just that it doesn't contain certain chemical elements that can cause problems with a nuclear reactor. Mostly free chlorides/flourides, boron and cadmium, IIRC.
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Also, I suspect that their unit is a curie, not a kg.
I grew up in a town with a big government nuclear research facility (Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Laboratory), and then I moved directly to the Hippie/Commie Vortex in south Bezerkley. Once people cross a certain threshold of parroting verbatim the propaganda from their side's P.O.V., I can tell that no amount of discussion will perturb their faith. I try to sustain my skepticism, and not always believe everything I think. I do tend to lean towards a cautious approach, however, when it comes to irrevocably destroying the life-sustaining features of our home planet. Warp-drive research still has a long way to go, and some of us may wish to continue living here for a while.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Give Tritium to all democrats, socialists, communists, radical islamists, anarchists, man made global warming supporters, gays, lesbians, etc.
That solves MANY problems!
No, it's not hate. It is a practical solution!
Cars cause orders of magnitude more death than Nuclear power plants. Coal fed power plants need coal that is mined. Coal mining kills dozens of miners each year, many more than uranium mines (you need much more coal then uranium ore). Thus coal power plants kill many more people than nuclear power plants. Next factor in modern reactor designs that use reprocessed fuel, breeder reactors or Thorium based reactors, and that count goes down even further. As for waste: as widely cited, coal releases more radioactive waste, on top of the global warming agent CO2. You could capture these ashes and gasses, but most plants don't yet. Just as the waste problem for nuclear power plants has not been solved yet. An increase in nuclear waste requires just some land area, the CO2 problem from coal power warms up the whole world.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
It was still daylight, yes? So there were plenty of photons coming down, yes? You know that solar power uses the photons not the heat to generate energy, yes?
Or no?
...burning coal leads to smog and greenhouse gas emissions...
And radioactive emissions in the amount far surpassing nuclear power plants (yes, that includes Chernobyl). There is a lot of radioactive materials in thousands of tonnes of coal used per day, per one power plant. They were safely stored, but coal power plants simply release them to biosphere...
One that hath name thou can not otter
There don't seem to be other proposed solutions aside from shutting down old plants. Those who want to build new plants would just be creating future old plants that will leak in turn. Nuclear waste just does not seem to have any solutions except to stop making it even for stuff that is as short lived as tritium. One would think that the financial incentive would keep tritium bottled up but in the UK they just vent it, probably in contravention of the London Dumping Convention. The ground water leaks in the US probably face this issue as well if the ground water mixes with surface water. This will probably happen in Vermont. The links on effects of tritium poisoning are interesting. Those who discuss its safety and use outside the body are ignoring that the tritium in entering ground water which will be ingested.
if you try really hard to screw something up you usually succeed.
See also: "You are spectacularly fucking bad at this."
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Regardless, the price of coal generated power needs to be pegged at a higher rate than the alternatives. "Punishing" the consumers who are "stuck" with coal is the only way to get them to switch to something more responsible.
The NRC has sent the projects section chief to Vermont Yankee in response to the toxic radioactive spill: http://www.rutlandherald.com/article/20100112/NEWS04/1120359/1003/NEWS02 Also, the plant spokesman is clueless about former violations.
as the greenies have recently stepped up efforts to shut the plant, the major source of energy in Vermont. There is nothing to replace it. Oh wait. Somebody wanted to put windmills on top of some of the Green mtns. Nope, sorry! Ruins the view and the naturalness of it all. Hmm.. Solar? Small problem with being a) north and b) only about 60 "sunny" days a year. Not aware of any natural gas pipelines in the state so guess that means coal baby! Heck we already use a ton of wood for heat.. oops! I wasn't suppose to tell you that.
That could have ended much worth with a little less luck:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
That's 30 years ago but those types of nuclear power plants are still running.
Grab a bucket - i'll meet you over there...