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Obama Budget To Triple Nuclear Power Loan Guarantees
Hugh Pickens writes "When President Obama said in his State of the Union address on Wednesday that the country should build 'a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants,' it was one of the few times he got bipartisan applause. Now the NY Times reports that administration officials have confirmed their 2011 federal budget request next week will raise potential loan guarantees for nuclear projects to more than $54 billion, from $18.5 billion, and a new Energy Department panel will examine a vastly expanded list of options for nuclear waste, including a new kind of nuclear reactor that would use some of it. The Energy Department appears to be getting close to offering its first nuclear loan guarantee. Earlier this week, Southern Co. Chief Executive David Ratcliffe said the company expects to finalize an application for a loan guarantee 'within the next couple months,' while Scana Corp., which has also applied, is 'a couple months behind Southern' and is hopeful of receiving a conditional award 'sometime in the next months.'"
It is mostly completed, perfectly safe repository (assuming they stay with the stupid and illogical position that the fuel shouldn't be reprocessed) and according the the president, "we're done with Yucca and we need to be about looking for alternatives".
Then he sets up a "commission" to figure it out and out of 15 members, only one has any academic background in nuclear energy and another has a physics background. The rest are political hacks. A particularly stupid appointment is Mark Ayers: president of the Building and Construction Trades Department at AFL-CIO.
It's all a load of crap.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
This is incorrect. Nuclear is actually cheaper than coal. The problem is that NO ONE will loan billions upon billions to build said nuclear power plant and mortgage that power plant on a *Fixed* 4% amortization for 50 years.
Secondly, banks cannot really foreclose on a nuclear power plant. Where do they sell it? Flea-market?
This is exactly the point of the loan guarantees. And I'm certain you all realize "loan guarantee" is not the same as a "subsidy"?
In this context, the spellings are: guaranty, guaranties, guarantied.
Actually, most US Navy vessels are not nuclear-powered. The carriers & submarines are, but almost none of the remaining fleet are. They experimented with nuclear cruisers in the 60s but retired those ships & didn't venture back into that area.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_navy#Other_nuclear-powered_vessels
Because a nuclear plant has high initial costs. You need an investment of billions of dollars and then you need to wait years for construction before the thing can power itself on and start generating energy. That doesn't mean that nuclear is nonviable - it's very cheap once the plant is built - but it does provide a very high barrier to entry that, without loans, only the rich oil companies (who really don't care for competition) are capable of crossing.
I wouldn't say 80 reactors over 20 years is tiny; but it certainly isn't huge compared to the existing and expanding coal infrastructure. The have about 40GW of Nuclear under construction at this time.
Rod Taylor
Nuclear power is almost the same price as coal, under optimal conditions.
But, the cost of nuclear power all occurs up-front in the form of a multi-billion dollar construction project, and the return is gradual, over 40+ years of low cost operation.
If the construction project is delayed, canceled, or has cost overruns, the investors will lose their multi-billion dollar initial investment. A two year construction delay makes the difference between huge profits and a huge boondoggle.
And there are many things that can cause construction to be delayed, canceled, or overrun: Bad design, changing standards, inability to get approvals, pitchfork wielding mobs, etc.
The modern nuclear power industry claims they have worked out the many snags that troubled 70s-era projects. But the only way to find out is to build one and see.
http://xkcd.com/756//
Google it before you assume it is just like the nuclear reactors that have caused all the nuclear waste problems.
They are a "new" technology that has been proven for decades. They are smaller, safer, and tons more efficient than the currently used technology. They don't produce nuclear waste, they consume it. We could take all of what we currently consider "waste" and use it as fuel for hundreds of years. The current technology only uses less than 5% of the energy that is actually in the fuel. Fast Breeder Reactors use almost all of it. They keep recycling the fuel until there is almost no radioactivity left. They can also use plutonium as fuel so the can be used to actually reduce the weapons stockpiles.
I also think the thorium reactors might be cool too. However there are some concerns as to what extracting all that thorium out of seawater might do to the environment. Not that the oceans need the thorium, but the processing might not be so kind to everything living in the seawater. On the other hand, the processing could also be done in a way that cleans up the garbage patch at the same time.
Bottom line. Don't assume everything you think you know about nuclear power is everything there is to know.
You put the waste into a fast-breeder reactor. BTW, do you know how much coal (and therefore radioactive emissions) Germany uses to generate electricity?
My point is that nuclear is cheap in the long run. It's still fairly cheap in the long run if you add the costs of the plant. I'll cite a source. It's environmentally friendly too (scroll down to the External Costs section).
It's pronounced nuc-u-lar.
Mox, refinement, secondary uses, etc. US reactors are inefficient.
Om, nomnomnom...
I for one would prefer to see a single nuclear plant on the horizon
I guess you don't live near a nuclear power plant. The exhaust plume of a cooling tower is gigantic.
I for one would
I choose windpower.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
That being said, his bit about loans is only a half measure, if he was really serious he'd rescind Carter's dumbass executive order and get us down the path of recycling to deal with the "nuclear waste" issue.
Minor correction, President Reagan lifted the ban in 1981.
As for wind, it's nice but wind farms are ugly and have environmental impacts of their own; such as bird strikes.
The real issue is how do we produce energy to run a modern economy? There is no one solution.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
You put the waste into a fast-breeder reactor.
And after that, you have to enrich the output from the fast-breeder reactor in a reprocessing plant before it is usable again in a regular nuclear power plant. Unfortunately, these reprocessing plants dump large amounts of low-radioactive waste in the environment both via water and air. As a result the childhood leukaemia cases around La Hague and Sellafield are much higher than in other places in Europe.
Donate free food here
When all costs are included, nuclear is not financially cheaper than coal. Those costs include regulatory, security, and yes, financial -- both loans and insurance. Coal plants are similar to nuclear plants in that they have long lifetimes, and tough to sell. Yet IOUs and IPPs manage to get loans to build coal and natural gas power plants, even massive ones, all the time. Banks are tight on lending to nuclear because of all of the additional risks (ranging from NIMBY to regulatory to terrorism), and to guarantee the loan is an actual subsidy, by definition. The subsidy serves to pay some of the cost (risk) of the loan, because if there is a problem the US gov't eats the loss instead of a bank. There's an entire industry build around pricing risk (the insurance industry), and so anytime a government reduces risk to others through a guarantee, they are subsidizing.
P.S. Of course a bank can foreclose on a nuclear power plant -- they could sell it to any other IOU or even an IPP. They could also structure the loan to seize some other asset instead -- a fossil fuel power plant or two, or any other asset.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Shut the fuck up, idiot. Stop spreading FUD. Here's one way the Europeans store their waste:
"Vitrification:
Long-term storage of radioactive waste requires the stabilization of the waste into a form which will not react, nor degrade, for extended periods of time. One way to do this is through vitrification.[26] Currently at Sellafield the high-level waste (PUREX first cycle raffinate) is mixed with sugar and then calcined. Calcination involves passing the waste through a heated, rotating tube. The purposes of calcination are to evaporate the water from the waste, and de-nitrate the fission products to assist the stability of the glass produced.[27]
The 'calcine' generated is fed continuously into an induction heated furnace with fragmented glass[28]. The resulting glass is a new substance in which the waste products are bonded into the glass matrix when it solidifies. This product, as a molten fluid, is poured into stainless steel cylindrical containers ("cylinders") in a batch process. When cooled, the fluid solidifies ("vitrifies") into the glass. Such glass, after being formed, is very highly resistant to water. [29]
After filling a cylinder, a seal is welded onto the cylinder. The cylinder is then washed. After being inspected for external contamination, the steel cylinder is stored, usually in an underground repository. In this form, the waste products are expected to be immobilized for a very long period of time (many thousands of years).[30]
The glass inside a cylinder is usually a black glossy substance. All this work (in the United Kingdom) is done using hot cell systems. The sugar is added to control the ruthenium chemistry and to stop the formation of the volatile RuO4 containing radio ruthenium. In the west, the glass is normally a borosilicate glass (similar to Pyrex), while in the former Soviet bloc it is normal to use a phosphate glass. The amount of fission products in the glass must be limited because some (palladium, the other Pt group metals, and tellurium) tend to form metallic phases which separate from the glass. Bulk vitrification uses electrodes to melt soil and wastes, which are then buried underground.[31] In Germany a vitrification plant is in use; this is treating the waste from a small demonstration reprocessing plant which has since been closed down." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_waste#Management_of_waste
Well according to Wikipedia they reprocess it, and the waste of several other countries too.
The not reusable stuff gets sent back to the originating countries, the domestic stuff will go to underground storage when it is completed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COGEMA_La_Hague_site
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Fuel_cycle
(Or if you believe some crazy solar energy maniacs, all the waste is shipped to the US and stored in South Carolina...)
We both said a lot of things that you are going to regret.
Wind mills need a bunch of maintenance after they are built, they still use a good deal of oil for lubrication, etc.
As does every other method of electrical generation.
Not to mention the sheer amount of land space they occupy for relatively little power is pathetic.
That depends on the amount of land space available. I live in Iowa and we have a LOT of space available. It also doesn't take up much of a corn field since you can farm almost directly under the towers. I have a 100 tower wind farm less than 10 miles form my house, and I've driven by it, and even stopped to walk around, and the corn is less than 50 feet from the tower itself. The cables are run underground, so the farmers don't even worry about overhead powerlines when driving their machinery. Oh, and corn doesn't care about pieces of tower falling off - it's a plant.
There is no way wind power can supply enough power for a big city area.
Sure, you have to account for calm days, but for overall generation capacity you can. Iowa gets almost 20% of its electricity from wind - and adoption is only slowed down by how fast they can get the parts for the tower. However, with new manufacturing plants opening in Iowa, the speed wind farms can be built should rise dramatically.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
You do not necessarily need to reprocess fuel in large plants if you use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor for example.
So there are alternatives, and pretty safe ones.
I may be wrong, but from what I've read about pebble bed reactors they tend to be quite small. I recall reading in (I think) Popular Science that pebble beds were idea for places like Africa where one pebble bed reactor could be placed at a central point to power a few dozen villages.
For us, though, the economy of scale and whatnot... it just makes more sense to build larger size reactors. We wouldn't have as much problem stowing away all the nuclear waste and whatnot.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
You do not necessarily need to reprocess fuel in large plants if you use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor for example.
So there are alternatives, and pretty safe ones.
Given that apparently no such reactor has been actually used for power production, at best it might be a safe alternative. In case you forgot, they also claimed that reprocessing plants were safe (and for many years denied that the leukaemia cases had anything to do with the plants).
TFA also says that there were concerns about the safety and quality of research done (in the "history" section near the end. Regardless of the veracity of these claims, the conflicts of interests that are described there seem pretty clear cut.
And of course there's still waste afterwards. It's less than with traditional plants and it's "only" highly radioactive for 200 - 400 years (as opposed to 10,000), but that's still a long time and even low-grade radioactive waste is dangerous (again, see e.g. La Hague & Sellafield).
Donate free food here
Windpower is a relatively new technology, so it deserves some time to catch up. Or would you like to retroactively add the cost of the initial nuclear power plants ? Even so, the number indicate NOTHING about the free insurance they receive.
http://timeforchange.org/cost-advantage-of-nuclear-energy-pros-cons
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
"Ever since Jimmy Carter's dunderheaded executive order (in which he said the US will not reprocess spent nuclear fuel back into usable fuel ... "
Credit where it's due: the initial President directive (a specific variety of Executive order) regarding suspension of reprocessing was issued by President Gerald Ford:
"In October 1976, fear of nuclear weapons proliferation (especially after India demonstrated nuclear weapons capabilities using reprocessing technology) led President Gerald Ford to issue a Presidential directive to indefinitely suspend the commercial reprocessing and recycling of plutonium in the U.S. On April 7, 1977, President Jimmy Carter banned the reprocessing of commercial reactor spent nuclear fuel." - Source
-kgj
Its my understanding that the bird strike issue NEVER existed and that it was completely fabricated by environmentalist.
No, there were legitimate issues with older windmill designs. They used scaffolding-style towers which encouraged birds to nest, and had much smaller blades with commensurately higher RPMs. Also, they didn't used to do any kind of research into bird migration paths to see if they were putting the farm right in the middle of one.
These issue all came together in Altamont Pass, which you may have heard of since it's pretty much the deadliest windfarm for birds ever (though often the person bringing it up often neglects to mention that fact). Though lets be clear: this deadliest of wind farms killed fewer birds in a year than the office building that would accompany any such power plant, though the deaths were concentrated in raptors so the effect was probably a little greater than an office building.
Now these issues have all been resolved. They now use single-pole towers with rounded tops that make nesting impossible. As you note, the economics themselves dictate using the largest blades possible. And now as a basic step in preparing to build a farm they check ornithological records to see if migrations are a problem.
So yes, there were actual issues that were subsequently resolved.
On a different note, the impression I always got was that the magnitude of the issue was played up by NIMBYs and anti-environmentalists who were finding their previous arguments of "but they're ugly" and "but I'm invested in the status quo" to be unpersuasive. They used the bird thing to try to drag environmentalists along with them, and it worked to an extent, but not for very long.
At the end of the day, unless you want to be eating grass and nuts out of your fecal/grass adobe hut, just ignore the crackpots and those who would ignorantly repeat their crack-pottery.
Well there are crackpots who want us to end up there, and there are crackpots who would have us end up there regardless as an unintentional consequence of trying to avoid it.
And yes, I do tend to ignore them, at least when I can't inform them. For example on the bird issue -- so far I've met very few environmentalists who continue to be anti-wind once they're informed that bird deaths were played up by focusing on one worst-case scenario and that everything has been fixed.
The enemies of Democracy are
It's OK to admit your contention was wrong, no harm no foul. Most consider it a sign of maturity and a critical, logical mind.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Like any geologic formation, Yucca Mountain is criss-crossed by cracks and fissures. Some of these cracks extend from the planned storage area all the way to the water table 1000 feet below. It is feared by some that these cracks may provide a route for radioactive waste a...
http://www.knowledgerush.com/kr/encyclopedia/Yucca_Mountain/
Two items:
1) The fact that it is not commonly done does not mean it is not the correct solution.
2) I don't know how France does it, but not only do they recycle their own waste, but other countries send their waste to them for recycling. And the US has purchased and used recycled materials for use in plants. So the system to do this is in place.
Actually, the track record of nuclear is excellent. In the West, a single accident nearly 40 years ago (TMI) with no victims. In fact, if all the other energy-producing methods were held to the standards of nuclear, you could never afford anything else...
Wind and solar will always only provide for peak demand, through massive overcapacity, because even occasional blackouts are unacceptable. You need a base supply, and if you cannot get hydro, the only clean alternative is nuclear.
Biogas is not something I am overly fond of. For heating from waste, it is a good option. For energy generation, not so much. And if you grow crops for that, I think it is really bad.
Just researching La Hague, looks like a non-issue. They found an increase, but it was not statistically significant.
http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0952-4746/21/3/603
That is where breeder reactors come into play. If you burn the nasty stuff as fuel again you: 1) get a lot more energy from the material you already have at your disposal. 2) reduce the radioactivity of the byproducts. The more you burn your waste as full, the longer the average halflife of the waste becomes.
Longer halflife == safer to handle, contray to popular belief.
Actually you have point 2 backwards, the longer you "burn" the fuel/waste the shorter the average half-life becomes, the more intense and hazardous the radiation from it become, but it returns to safe levels much more quickly.
The Canadian CANDU design is a very elegant design has a good safety record, can use natural uranium, spent LWR fuel rods, plutonium such as MOX made from decommissioned nuclear weapons and even thorium.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
What about the Chinese pebble bed reactors. Too small? Well, let's have half a dozen on the same site, run from the same control room, plugged together as modules.
Red to red, black to black. Switch it on, but stand well back.
Care to explain that? A longer half-life means the material is radioactive LONGER.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
It's the same situation in the US. We have trouble with the waste, there are so many regulations on moving the waste or accepting that waste that power plants are just holding years worth of waste on site. And even if a central place is found to store the waste, we laugh because it is still extremely difficult to move the waste to that location. Here politicans talk about moving it all to Nevada, but how practical is it to ship tons of waste from the East coast to Nevada?
If the waste is really so highly radioactive then it seems that it could eventually be used as fuel. And already some of the waste products of 30 years ago are now usable as fuel in the right type of reactor. And other waste that is mostly dangerous because of its chemistry, can be put into the right kind of reactor for transmutation. That technology already exists, and while it is not currently very efficient, it might be more efficient than sealing it up into a pit for 20,000 years.
I think this is a technology problem, but for the past 25 years we've been approaching it as a political problem (where to store the waste). I believe politicians should simply point to the scientists and tell them they need to step forward with proposals to build reactors that can burn or transmute these waste products. And also that in the future reactors should be built that minimize the amount of waste products they need to store or export.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The concept is that an individual pebble bed module is small, thus allowing standardised manufacturing and economies of scale. Multiple modules would be assembled to produce large power plants as needed
Radiation has to come from somewhere, like when an atom breaks apart. Elements with the shortest half lives are breaking apart fastest, so they give off the most radiation.
For a simple analogy, think of a battery. If you use more electricity from it, it will run out faster. Conversely, if you barely use any, it will last for a long time.
Care to explain that? A longer half-life means the material is radioactive LONGER.
Ok, one last time. If something has a long half live then that means at any given moment there is a low probability that said material will emit radiation. Eg. If you have a molar mass of U235(half life of 700 million years) and a molar mass of C14 (half life of 5,700 yrs). Then after one year you will have had 1/700 million emissions of radiation from the U235 and 1/5700 emissions from the C14. Which one do you thing is putting out more radiation at a given moment. This of course presumes that both materials decay using the sample particle.(They don't U235 emits alpha and C14 emits beta particles) Now alpha emitters are not a problem so long as you don't ingest the material or have the dust collect in your lungs since alpha particles can't penetrate the dead outer layer of skin.
When the loans go south, the politicians who pushed for them are no longer in office. That makes this kind of thing easy compared to bank bailouts which get you party kicked out of office.
I agree that the subsidies for current nuclear power are very high but every single one of these loans will face default so we are looking at a 100% subsidy for any new nuclear power. There is just no way that any utilities are going to keep paying for the power since in will be so much more expensive than anything else. http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/E09-01_NuclearPowerClimateFixOrFolly
Most people would consider it to be a curve, because EVERYTHING is radioactive for a long time. We label things "radioactive" that are radioactive for a time, relative to everything else, that is extremely short, even if it is 10000 years.
In the case of nuclear byproducts, yes, something that is deadly for 50 years with minimal exposure and then is essentially as inert as the background is better in many ways than something that is toxic with sufficiently high exposure for thousands of years, because we can handle it within a lifetime. But the long half-life material is still what you'd rather be locked in a room with.
Discussed on shashdot here: http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/11/27/1330213/NRC-Relicensing-Old-Zombie-Nuclear-Plants
Actually, the track record of nuclear is excellent. In the West, a single accident nearly 40 years ago (TMI) with no victims. In fact, if all the other energy-producing methods were held to the standards of nuclear, you could never afford anything else...
Only one accident in the US in 40 years? HAHA!!! Here's a list of nuclear accidents in the US. Even France has had spills. Wiki has another list of nuclear and radiation accidents.
Ask the Navajo, Sioux, and all the others where uranium is mined if it's held to high standards.
Wind and solar will always only provide for peak demand, through massive overcapacity, because even occasional blackouts are unacceptable. You need a base supply, and if you cannot get hydro, the only clean alternative is nuclear.
Nuclear power is NOT clean. Geothermal however is relatively clean and can be used as a baseload energy source.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Geothermal can be that baseload.
nuclear waste is a problem for later, and will be solved by breeders, which reduce dramatically the volume of waste. It is easy and safe to burrow the final products from these reactors, the only problem being NIMBY
NIMBYs have also stopped wind farms, especially offshore from Maine to Cape Hatteras. For instance before he died Ted Kennedy opposed wind turbines in Cape Cod. Obama may be able to get one built.
As for the "real" price of nuclear, it is a bit like the US medical system, a larger part of the price comes from terrible legislation and political opposition, not from the intrinsic cost.
Ah, how far wrong can a person be? Forget the US, Neither China, France, India, nor Russia has found nuclear power profitable. In those countries politicians not the market says what gets built. Check out the "Forbes" article Hooked on Subsidies reprinted by the Freemarket CATO Institute. Especially notice where is says "How do France (and India, China and Russia) build cost-effective nuclear power plants? They don't. Governmental officials in those countries, not private investors, decide what is built. Nuclear power appeals to state planners, not market actors."
The French government owned company Areva has had large cost overruns building the Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant as well as thousands of defects and deficiencies in Finland.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
They are accidents. The first link even has the title "U.S. Nuclear Accidents", that's my my title. Twisting definitions don't change the facts.
If you think nuclear energy should be banned because of the excessive risk caused by such, I sure hope that you also want all cars banned. And swimming pools, and planes.
No I don't. Cars will not harm hundreds, thousands, or millions with one accident. One nuclear accident can. Planes don't harm many people all at once either. The attack on the WTC and Pentagon took 4 planes, and how many were killed? 3000? That's less than 1000 per plane. It was also a once in a lifetime event. If hijackers tried it today the passengers would not meekly go along, heck the passengers in the plane that crashed in Penn revolted once they knew what happened to the other planes. Swimming pools are not mass killers either.
I even have an excuse to ban vehicles, I was disabled because I was hit by a vehicle while riding my bike. While I was in a coma the docs even told my family it would be a miracle if I lived, do I consider it one? Not just no, but HELL NO!!! I don't consider it a miracle, my life has been a living hell. Am I calling for cars to be banned? No I'm not. I do call for people to be responsible, and if they won't exercise it then the law should hold them responsible. Even though the person who hit me had a record of causing accidents, and an arrest warrant was issued in his name, I wouldn't wish my life on him. I'm not that sadistic.
The Bopal disaster should have put the lid on chemical factories.
I'm not against chemical factories or their owners, I do support holding them responsible. That includes oil companies. Has the Alaskan fishermen been compensated for Exxon Valdez? More than 20 years later Exxon still has not paid them. Were the Navajo compensated? No. In the US the government even protects the nuclear industry from lawsuits and paying damages.
Countless deaths due to coal should have made this energy source a big no-no.
I agree. Of course that's not realistic right now. But I would end the subsidies coal gets, yes coal gets subsidies too. Here's a video where Chevron agrees to lobby with Sierra Club to end coal subsidies. Then there was TVA's Kingston Fossil Plant coal fly ash slurry spill. That wasn't the first one or the last one either. What's even worse is Mountaintop removal and some containment ponds are above where people live. I's also end passing on the external costs. Polluters would have to clean up and pay for damages, all not just coal plants. The same with alternative/renewable energy sources.
Do you think mining for the rare earths required by solar panels is "clean"?
And nuclear does not require mining or that mining is clean? Sure it does and it is dirty, however unlike nuclear solar can easily and cheaply be recycled as can wind turbines. Heck there are still solar panels from the '70s being used. There are also Jacobs wind turbines made in the 1930s still being used. Also with ongoing research, for which I also oppose subsides, efficiencies are improving and non-rare earth minerals and compounds are being investigated.
By the standards of energy generation, yes, nuclear is clean. By any standard, it is safe.
How many accidents has solar energy and wind turbines been involved in? Of those how many lives were put in danger, or how many were killed? And how much have they been given in subsidies? To answer that myself I googled alternative energy subsidies and found this:
Should there be a Law?