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US To Build Nuclear Power Plants
An anonymous reader writes "President Barack Obama has announced more than $8bn in federal loan guarantees to begin building the first US nuclear power stations in 30 years. Two new plants are to be constructed in the state of Georgia by US electricity firm Southern Company."
And we still need power so... not much choices left.
Dear
2/Having to store waste for over 100000 years is not what someone with any common sense would call 'green'.
Well, a report from CNN covers something Bill Gates promoted at TED about a new technology that essentially 'recycles' used uranium. The new strategy basically creates 'hyper-fast nuclear reactions able to eat away at the dangerous nuclear waste.'
If what they say is true, it looks promising:
The Uranium isotope that's food for the new nuclear reactors doesn't have to be enriched, which means it's less likely to be used in atomic weapons.
The fission reaction in the new process burns through the nuclear waste slowly, which makes the process safer. One supply of spent uranium could burn for 60 years.
The process creates a large amount of energy from relatively small amounts of uranium, which is important as global supplies run short.
The process generates uranium that can be burned again to create "effectively an infinite fuel supply."
Sounds promising, let's see what preliminary trials bring. I'm excited to have a local 'energy portfolio' of many options such as hydro electric, wind, solar and even advanced nuclear energy.
My work here is dung.
Where is all the waste going? The political horse trading by the Obama administration promised to shut down Yucca Mountain, toileting over $9 billion.
Is anyone doing the math??
Kriston
some facts about nuclear energy.
1/Nuclear energy does not make economic sense. http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=50308 (translation: it is expensive)
2/Having to store waste for over 100000 years is not what someone with any common sense would call 'green'.
3/limited liability. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act
4/fuel-dependency
Storing spent nuclear plant fuel (byproducts) is a headache, but:
a) do you prefer to pump it into the atmosphere, like coal plants do? Oh yeah, because you might want to know that coal plants pump into the atmosphere way more radioactive materials ALONG WITH OTHER NASTY SUBSTANCES, than nuclear plants.
b) we could re-use those byproducts, or drastically reduce their amount, if we built breeder reactors.
Sadly, Obama didn't mention either of these. Vision's too limited, I guess?
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
you are correct.
I wish to remind everyone that all power source have their effect. Coal puts out radiation, mercury, co2 and other emissions.
there is NO clean energy, zero zip. none.
Coal destroys mountains in West Virginia,
Oil is dirty and the spills enourmous ugly.
Natural gas, is heavy, and a large leak would cause a huge explosion. ( that is why nobody is willing to build a tanker to transport
Liquified natural gas).
The US has to have this power
... that we aren't pumping money into thorium reactors. Their advantages are enormous. Waste storage time is reduced and you can use one to "burn" old nuclear waste. They cannot suffer from China Syndrome, since they need a sustained beam of neutrons to keep the reaction at critical. And in terms of proliferation, they don't lend themselves easily to building nuclear weapons, whereas conventional uranium reactor technology isn't too hard to adapt to building of simple atomic weapons ("enrich more and build a donut and plug bomb.")
Ever hear of CO2 scrubbers? Burying CO2 is a hell of a lot more green than burying radioactive waste in containers that will eventually leak. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_capture_and_storage
There are already working plants using this method. That's why they are building new coal fired plants in Europe, which is a lot more environmentally conscious than we are. That's as here, now and possible as building nuclear plants.
These new plants being built prove we are behind the times. I'd rather have my kids deal with inert minerals containing CO2 than radioactive crap that will probably be our undoing.
"Finally, the produced carbonates are unarguably stable and thus re-release of CO2 into the atmosphere is not an issue. "
Ok now couple this development with a complete shutdown of the nuclear waste storage program at Yucca Mountain.
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/0201/Nuclear-waste-storage-in-limbo-as-Obama-axes-Yucca-Mountain-funds
This administration amazes more every day with it's shortsightedness. This spending bill is a big fat FAIL. Cut spending on nuclear waste storage and use the money to create more nuclear waste. Brilliant!
I agree that you get more bang for the buck out of nuclear energy, but until the waste storage problem is handled, it's not a sustainable option. We can get by on coal until solar and wind is ready for prime time.
We are sitting on one of the biggest coal reserves in the world. We need to use it.
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
>> 1/Nuclear energy does not make economic sense. http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=50308sp?idnews=50308 [ipsnews.net] (translation: it is expensive)
It makes PERFECT economic sense when you consider that we will be transferring our transportation grid to electricity. It is a more difficult sell when you are simply replace coal power with nuclear power. We have plenty of coal, but dolling out billions of dollars a month in foreign oil doesn't make economic sense.
>> 2/Having to store waste for over 100000 years is not what someone with any common sense would call 'green'.
We have no idea how long we will need to store the spent fuel. With 2010 technology (ie: put it in a box and wait), it is ~100000 years. But what new technologies will we have in the year 2050, 2100 or 2200.
>> 3/limited liability. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act [wikipedia.org]
Without limited liability, insurance companies could not offer insurance to the companies building/maintaining the systems.
>> 4/fuel-dependency
Fuel dependency? Errr, I don't follow you. We, as a country, should try to be as fuel independent as possible. This isn't a macho "GO USA!!!" kind of rant. Being fuel independent is key to the national security of any country. We are currently over extended in the worst possible way. Nuclear is ONE way to get us where we need to go. Ideally, we would use wind, solar, etc. etc. but as others have said, until that day, nuclear is a great option. I like the idea of (literally) sitting on our coal reserves... "just in case."
is it breeder reactor? liquid thorium blanket? what generation reactor? the article say nothing on that. i'd like to see some progress in reactor tech being implemented by the US.
Seems to me we should really be pushing to the 'recycling' types of reactor designs
Hmm. The purpose of a politician is to use the public's resources, to get money from special interests, to lie to and bribe voters.
Given that background, lets consider two plans here:
Non-recycled: New U costs about $25/lb long term, and the USA mined almost 17 kilotons in the peak year. That would be a bit less than a billion dollars. That'll buy a lot of votes, plus you can skim off a thousandth or so for re-election campaigns/bribes. Then you get to spend nine billion and counting on a waste facility that'll probably never be used, which will buy a lot of support and votes. Spending tax money is a loss to taxpayers, but a gain to politicians, and guess whom is in charge of how much to spend?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_in_the_United_States
Recycled: No one in a position of power benefits either thru bribes, jobs, or control. Back in the cold war era, processors basically ignored all EPA and common sense rules, with threats of "security" etc. I'm sure the security theater and scare mongering would be more intense now, so the environmental devastation would be worse. So the general public also does not benefit.
Hmm. I wonder which solution our politicians will choose?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
There's a critical shortage of nuclear engineers. Very few engineers have joined the industry in recent decades, and those who joined during the industry's heyday are retiring.
Schools including MIT are spinning up their programs, but however talented the students, they'll be inexperienced. These fine young men and women may know how to optimize a reaction, but will they know that valve X in location Y needs to be easily replaceable because it tends to corrode after 5 years? Do you want the plant in your town to be designed by a recent grad? Likewise, even the experienced engineers have been maintaining old plants, not designing new ones using the latest technology.
Add in time for siting battles and regulatory approvals, and I wouldn't expect to see too many new plants open until 10-20 years from now.
Bury. It. In. A. Hole.
Or just eat it:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1553308&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=nested&cid=31168840
1. Economies of scale matter, and we are developing cheaper and more efficient plants. A lot of expense is also in unnecessary red tape.
2. Where did you get that from? Greenpeace? While there is some long lived waste, it is relatively easy to store and process, especially with new techniques. With the right combination of reactor types we can actually use quite a lot of what would be waste as fuel. Even with the HE waste, the overall radioactivity release per plant is *much* less than a coal plant - burning coal releases a huge amount of radioactivity into the atmosphere.
3. While the act itself is problematic, it is a feature of the "red tape" I mentioned earlier. Groups like Greenpeace criticise if for "not doing enough" but this is the same group that run on a platform of "no more chernobyls" as a campaign (analogous to an anti-airline group running with "no more hindenburgs!" when protesting against modern aviation). While the government might be on the hook for insurance for the next 15 years, or however long is left on the renewal, I do not see that as a major issue. Nuclear power is not the highly unstable, likely to explode and make people glow green, demon that the protestors like to make out that it is. It is clean, mature and well understood technology with a very good safety record (minus things like Chernobyl, which for several reasons can't be used as a yardstick for nuclear safety in the same way that Dick Cheney is not the poster boy for why you shouldn't go hunting with your buddies because they *will* shoot you in the face because they think you are a tame bird).
4. What do you mean "fuel dependency" - reactors don't just run on Uranium, even though there is plenty of that around, in the ground and in weapons. They can also run on Thorium with is about 4 times more abundant than Uranium and also on various other elements. We can also use "supply chain" style reactors that use the spent waste fuel from other reactors. Sort of like triple expansion steam engines, just... less steam-punky.
Subduction zones have the inconvenient that they are potentially like shredders that may crunch your waste and spread it over. A better alternative is to bury it at the bottom of abyssal plains, some of which have been stable for a billion years or more.
Waste enclosed in a glass or ceramic cylinder buried a hundred meters deep in mud that's under 5000 meters of water is as safe as it can get.
Fixing standby mode devices is fixing a problem that's almost an order of magnitude smaller than the real one.
Fixing standby mode is fixing a problem that's at least two orders of magnitude smaller than the real one.
Most power usage in this country is not from things that can even have a standby mode. Most home use, for example, is from heating and cooling. Most than half of power usage is commercial, and they probably aren't watching TV. (And while they are using computers, the problem is that they aren't turning them off or having them standby at all.)
That said, of course companies shouldn't be allowed to sell us something that wasted $4 a year in energy to save $0.20 in materials. We do need reasonable assurances that things that are 'off' are off, or close to it. Of course, a lot of this has been done already, this isn't 1998.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
While I agree with most of your points:
Where is the harm in covering area with windmills?
Does anyone take into account the speed at which science accelerates? Isn't it likely that in 20-50 years we'll have tech that can just deal with the waste?
We already have the tech to deal with this issue. It can be handled in two ways. One is to reprocess it into new fuel rods which can then be used in the reactor from which it came. Two, it can be used as is in fast breeder-type reactor where it becomes enriched and then consumed as fuel. The combination means, rather than attempting to dispose of rods which contain 90%-97% usable fuel (aka, huge waste), something like 3% winds up needing disposal and much of that has a very short half life compared to what would have otherwise been thrown out.
Sadly, US law forbids reprocessing of fuel on US soil. So option one is out. Option two is not possible as I'm not aware of any certified fast breeder reactors. Certification alone, thanks to the massive red tape forced on us all by loony environmentalist, costs billions of dollars. As a result, perfectly safe designs are simply not certifiable because no one has the years to spend billions of dollars with yet another decade of more red tape and construction before they can even hope to reclaim their investment.
Its a really great example of why laws need to be changed and environmentalist need to be shot. Buses and cliffs are also an acceptable substitute; though it may be difficult to find room because of the large number of lawyers already in line.
First of all, I, for one, object to seeing propellers everywhere I look.
You have to do so much construction everywhere. You have to build them where the wind is, spread out over a large area, which means building roads and transporting construction materials all over the place. This also means dismantling and recycling the units after their useful lifetime, something much easier to do if you power plant is concentrated at one site.
Windmills have to be built with a much higher power handling capacity than other power plants, because wind power is so intermittent. This means a lot more materials are used to build a windmill than a plant to generate the same average power by other means. More copper, more aluminum, more steel is needed.
The generators, being at the top of a tall column in a high wind stress area, need to be made smaller and lighter than usual, so they use rare materials, such as neodymium for the magnets. This means more waste is created in producing the materials needed to make a wind generator than for other types of generators.
A typical wind farm generates 50% of it power during 15% of the time. Even in Denmark, which has almost ideal conditions for wind power, wind generators are idle at least 20% of the time. This means that you still need to build power plants with the largest total capacity you will ever need, a wind plant does not bring any savings in system capacity, only in fuel use.
All in all, although wind power is certainly greener than fossil fuels, it's not the magic solution to all our problems and they are certainly very far from being harmless to the environment.
Uranium was too cheap since the Soviet Union collapsed and they started diluting their nuclear weapons material to make reactor fuel. That was what killed IFR. If uranium was more expensive, it would have been pursued.
Yes, indeed, and by the time the waste makes it into the glass form, it contains isotopes with very long half lives and well known decay chains.
The most potent of the high energy stuff, by nature of it being highly radioactive is very useful to us as fuel, but it it really must be disposed of, the bulk of it decays over a relatively short timespan. It's not like it just comes out of the reactor and goes right into the ground.
Radon, which is in the decay chain of uranium, has several isotopes, most of which are very short lived (hours to days), one of which is extremely long lived (half life of 4 billion-ish years, so less radioactive than the carbon in your own body), Radium is another of the highly radioactive gasses (there are not many) that have relatively short half lives (although the longest lived isotope is about 1500 years, with 5 years being the next longest) A ton of natural uranium ore gives off approximately 0.15 grams of Rn. The natural release of Radon and Radium from the ground is a far greater concern than anything from a storage facility, especially in the low amounts.
And what is going to melt the glass exactly? Natural decay? While spontaneous fission and radioactive decay do create heat, the cans and the environment have been designed with this in mind. Not to mention that the really heavy heat and decay occurs in the cooling ponds before the stuff is shipped off for processing.
These issues have all been in careful consideration for a long time. It's not like they just came up with something on the back of an envelope.
Either way, I'll take the extensive study I have done on this topic from numerous sources over some AC on /. saying "wrong", if you don't mind.
I think there were also unfounded proliferation fears. Something like a politician automatically assumed reprocessing -> proliferation, even though in the case of the IFR, any of the reprocessing byproducts would be worthless for weapons use. (Again, this is if I recall the literature correctly, it has been a while!)
I think still, availability of fuel is not nearly as big of a problem as spent fuel, and won't be for a long time. The IFR basically solved both problems.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I think a lot of the time people are talking more about the bureaucracy rather than safe reactor designs.
I've heard some lovely stories about leaking taps in the canteens at nuclear facilities that never get fixed because of how much paperwork has to be done to do a trivial piece of work.
It can also be about standardising the design of plants so that rather than building every plant as a one off and spending billions checking and rechecking the design every time you come up with 1 design which you check really well and then rubber stamp any plans that match that design perfectly.
There was another interesting case I read about where there was a worldwide shortage of medical radioisotopes a few years back because a reactor which was designed to produce them. one which literally could not melt down because it didn't have the required material was shut down because some regulations designed for large power generating reactors were pushed through that required safety systems for dealing with failures in things the medical isotope reactor didn't even have and so they had to add all these pointless and expensive backups for backups for backup systems for things the reactor didn't need to do. because it came under the heading of a "reactor".
I'll try to find the details.
I'm all for sensible regulations but any old system builds up regulations which serve no purpose.
You can be sure there's things like regulations requiring that reports be submitted typed in black ink on such and such quality paper which made sense back in the day but don't any more.
This is one step closer towards reducing the amount of our dollars that go to the middle east while also stimulating the US economy. This also moves us closer to our goal of having electric vehicles that really are green.
I'm not entirely sure that nuclear power generation will reduce imports from the Middle East, primarily because nuclear power doesn't replace the oil we use with regards to our current energy consumption habits. On the other hand, you are right that it is power that is generated more "greenly" than burning coal and hopefully with the advent of nuclear power we will see, as you say, electric vehicles that really are green.
Nuclear power plants use water because dry cooling would take up a much larger area. Solar already has a large area so dry cooling is not a problem. The scale of nuclear power is limited by the flow in the river. Already they disrupt the river ecology and have to be shut down from time to time. Nuclear power can't increase scale by becoming more efficient either because the fuel is fragile. So, it can not scale up any further. You were mistaken in saying that solar faces the same constraints as nuclear. It does not.
When nuclear power is admired for its scale, there is an error. It is non-dispatchable low quality power that is more an more frequently subject to unscheduled disruption with accompanying long delays in coming back on line, unreliability that can cause safety issues as in the Florida blackout. The only advantage of scale is cost but nuclear is not competitive http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/E09-01_NuclearPowerClimateFixOrFolly so there is no advantage. Wanting scale for scale's sake is a mistake.