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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"?
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.
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?
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.
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
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
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.