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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."
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
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
He's still just a nigger in a white man's suit.
More power to ya!
Cause that's how long it will take them to get through all the red tape.
I know the rules of grammar have gone by the wayside lately, but come ON!
The word "US" is an object, and everybody knows you can't begin a sentence with an object!
The headline should read: "WE To Build Nuclear Power Plants"
Is it that hard, people?
If I had a nickel for every time I had a nickel, I'd be richcursive!
And we still need power so... not much choices left.
Dear
nuclear wessels?
(come on, it had to be said)
But where are we going to store the waste? I'm all for nuclear power. It's clean and not nearly as dangerous as a lot of people think, but the waste is a big political deal. No one wants the storage facilities in their back yard.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
What a great thing -- lots of reliably generated power that is greener than burning fossil fuels. The only bad thing about this is that it has taken 30 years for more people to realize that safe nuclear power generation is possible.
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. Wind/solar are not as reliable as nuclear because you only have wind when the wind blows, and solar when the sun is shining.
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.
I've been hearing about this for the past few days, but I have yet to see what kind of nuclear plant they're talking about building.
I'm really hoping we take a cue from France (yeah yeah, cheese eating surrender monkeys and all that... Fact is, they've been doing nuclear power a lot, and doing it much more recently than us), and standardize a reactor design or three to hopefully avoid some of that red tape.
They don't have electricity in Georgia.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I'm not an Obama fan, but when he does something right he deserves credit for it, so good job Mr. President. I just hope this doesn't get bogged down in too much bureaucracy and lawsuits by "environmentalists." Note how "environmentalists" is in quotes because anyone rational who claims to care about air pollution, global warming, deforestation, etc. etc. should love the idea of new, very safe nuclear power plants. A back of the napkin calculation means a 1.1 Gigawatt reactor can put out the peak energy of 110 of the big 10 Megawatt wind turbine... and the wind turbine can't output at peak energy all the time. Take into account the fact that the land footprint for a nuclear power plant is tiny compared to wind or solar and you have a solution that is a very good thing for the environment.
As for nuclear waste, it's a political problem not a technological problem. Despite the fear-mongering you hear about "10,000 years of waste" the truly nasty stuff actually has a much shorter half-life, and the stuff that is radioactive for 10,000 years is dangerous... but not any more dangerous than the chemicals that get spewed from Coal-fired plants or the chemicals that are used in manufacturing photo-voltaic solar panels. One other thing.. if reprocessing were actually used in the US the amount of this nasty waste would be much much lower to boot. Once again, politics trumps technology in preventing solutions to problems from actually being implemented.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
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
This is a pragmatic solution to the problems of global warming and foreign energy dependence. There's nothing magically evil about nuclear power. Environmentalists should applaud this move.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Can I also tag this story "what-could-possibly-go-wrong" ?
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
No one will say nuclear is without serious drawbacks, but modern reactor design has pretty much reduced those to a single large "what do we do with the waste?" issue. I would rather have a comparatively small amount of containable waste and eons of time to figure out how to make it "go away"(TM) then have much larger environmental impacts which aren't so simple. It's reasonable to expect the human race to come up with a way to render a few hundred tons of radioactive waste inert in the semi-near future. It's much less reasonable to expect us to figure out how to scrub (billions/trillions/quadrillions?) tons of CO2 and other nasties out of the atmosphere, and deal with the other larger scale issues coal/oil/gas produce.
The South Texas Project is building two new units at its existing facilities near Matagorda Bay.
-l
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... 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.")
It's about time some common sense was applied to the issue.
Does anyone realize that you and I will each produce about a coke-can worth of nuclear waste in our lifetime (a TED speaker mentioned this, can't find the source atm)? I think that's pretty easy to store. At least compared to the thousands of tonnes of coal that would have to be burned in its place.
You say the air is polluted and we have to stop burning coal; but you helped keep that industry alive because you protested nuclear energy into the dark ages for the past thirty years. Our modern lives don't exist without electricity and generating it is no easy task. There are trade-offs. I think we would have been better off if nuclear energy development had continued: we'd have thirty years more experience building, developing, and maintaining it.
Good on this Obama guy for having a little common sense.
that was hilarious
Nuclear waste isn't a problem, it's an opportunity. That nuclear waste, is in fact, valuable fuel in some types of reactor designs. Notably, the Integral Fast Reactor-style of design (and, I believe there are some other design concepts being researched along similar lines). I've heard estimates (though I don't really know if they are true or not, but I've no current knowledge to contradict it) that the current 'reserves' of nuclear waste could power reactors for something like 500 years or 1000 years without mining any 'new' uranium.
However, I think the Obama administration is making a bit of a mistake. It's my understanding that the reactor designs they are getting built are still based upon the once-through concept, which will need 'new' uranium to be mined and enriched, and produce more 'waste'. Seems to me we should really be pushing to the 'recycling' types of reactor designs, and maybe put a moratorium on importing any more uranium into the country. We should be trying to phase out the old style, once-through reactors.
The apparent cost of the project is $7/Watt http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2010/02/17/17climatewire-doe-delivers-its-first-long-awaited-nuclear-71731.html with Japan providing other loan guarantees. Since Japan has been escalating pricing for the South Texas project, we can guess the same will happen in this case. I'd guess that $14/Watt is about where this will end up, completely uneconomical. The loans will default and the taxpayers will pay.
All the anti-nuke people make claims of thousands of years of nuclear waste storage blah blah. 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? Or hell, even 200 years if you want to take a pessimistic view of tech growth. Even if it was 1000 years I'd be pretty happy to have nuclear power than nasty coal that is actively poisoning things.
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.
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/ff_new_nukes/ Thorium.
Hopefully these are not the plants foretold of in Idiocracy...
He did not give details on how Southern planned to divide its 30 percent share between debt and equity but said his company was not looking for financial backing from Japan. Toshiba of Japan is majority owner of Westinghouse, whose AP1000 reactor has been selected for the Vogtle plant's expansion and is under review by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Okay. That's just pathetic.
You know the U.S. is a fading empire when they need to turn to Japan to build their own infrastructure. What's next? The automotive industry?
-FL
100000 year half life? You're assuming uranium. There are others, books are a good thing. Thorium is your friend
Oh... wait...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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.
Look at where all of the new reactors are going. ONLY to existing reactor sites. NIMBY is enshrined into regulations...
In 1974 I had a geophysics professor walk me through the analysis of distance from existing fault lines for any nuclear
power plant site. We have seismic data to get an estimate of fault density throughout the North American continent,
and we have the required distances from known or suspected faults, and their probability of activity over tens of thousands
of years. Computing the probability that any given site in the US could possibly meet regulations for acceptable seismic
risk shows that the odds are hundreds of millions to one against.
ONLY grandfathered/existing nuclear power plant sites will ever be allowed for new construction.
The lawyers have spoken.
"The Managing Director of the first Nuclear Power Plant in the state of Georgia has already been handed his assignment by Southern Company CEO David Ratcliffe. Little is known on the knowledge or prior industrial experience of the man, other than his name, one Montgomery Burns."
It's because China is building 22. lol, USA is afraid of China.
"The thorium fuel cycle creates Uranium-233, which can be used for making nuclear weapons - and since there are no neutrons from spontaneous fission of U-233, U-233 can be used easily in a simple gun-type nuclear bomb design"
Please help metamoderate.
Errr...there are tons of natural gas tankers. There was talk of building a whole new terminal for them to dock on the long island sound. And the mayor of Boston was just throwing a hissy fit over one from Qatar being allowed into Boston harbor when when the imminent threat of terror within 6 months was still in the news.
You've obviously never heard of cobalt thorium G.
Cobalt thorium G has a radioactive halflife of ninety three years. If you take, say, fifty H-bombs in the hundred megaton range and jacket them with cobalt thorium G, when they are exploded they will produce a doomsday shroud. A lethal cloud of radioactivity which will encircle the earth for ninety three years!
Of course this could be a load of commie bull
Humor from a Genetically Molested Mind
Yay!! Obama is going to loan someone else even more of my money! First, give billions of dollars to the auto manufacturers, out of my pocket, now lets loan another industry money that will never be paid back!!! WOOHOO!!!!
I don't know about all you guys, but I LOOOOOOOOOOOVE THE THOUGHT OF HIGHER TAXES!
We can still shoot it to orbit!
...are tremendously ignorant, are there any engineers in here? any mathematicians?
"TOTAL COST OF A NUCLEAR PLANT WILL NEVER EVER BE CHEAPER THAN ANY ALTERNATIVE"
Just try and clean up after a decommisioned nuclearplant and tell me exactly how cheap that is. And don't bother with the waste options yet because we don't even need these in the tally to make it unprofitable to anyone but the power companies.
Fission powered plants are practically stoneage tech, as is any large scale centralized powerplant.
How come the average slashdotter is reasonably up to par on computertechnology but extremely untalented when it comes to questions of energyproduction and distribution?
Cloud computing is new good tech when we are talking in here, but when it comes to energy everybody runs for monolithic structures to save them.
Yes go on, you deserve a nuclear plant in your backyard dumbasses. And a larger electricity bill to boot.
http://articles.sfgate.com/2003-03-03/news/17483619_1_grid-operators-power-plants-california-energy-crisis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield
oh yes sure it's safe, tell that to the british, or have you all forgot three mile island or chernobyl?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_mile_island#Accident
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).
err - nobody will build a LNG tanker?
-- Intelligence is soluble in alcohol
Not a single anti-nuclear power point of view has been modded up. What a fucked-up place Slashdot has become.
Why bury co2 so we can have sparkling spring water? c02 is a trace element, not a pollutant, the plants need to breathe too.
I got a graduate degree in Health Physics (Nuclear Janitor - a relative of Unclear Physics) back in the early 90's - and ended up in IT because there were NO jobs. So does that mean I can actually work in the field for which I was trained?
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.
"Ok, I want you to go there and take two pictures, one of the atom before, and one after it has split."
We seriously need to look into liquid thorium plants.
less waste, more fuel available, easy to manage, almost no proliferation risk.
http://www.slideshare.net/guestcee6b0/liquid-fluoride-reactors-a-new-beginning-for-an-old-idea
Aren't thorium fueled reactors considered "green nuclear"? http://www.thoriumenergy.com/ and http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com/
Everyone knows it's spelled nucular. Don't you ever watch the news? Sheesh.
The thing that bugs me here, is that aside from the government loan guarantees, what has changed? As far as I can tell (and I may have missed something important somewhere), nothing serious. That means that people are building with government backed loans, projects that they couldn't have built some other way. After all, if nuclear plants were that great a deal, then they could have borrowed the money some time ago like in 2007 when capital was plentiful and cheap.
So my suspicion here is that government is funding a bunch of failures and that most of these loans will end up defaulting a little while after the capital is consumed (which might not even leave the plants in a usable state). After all, there's a lot of good money in spending a billion dollars of taxpayer money to create five hundred million dollars worth of nuclear power plant. Just make sure you're not liable for the loans when they default.
oh, I dunno, how about Texas?!!!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Now It is important to point out that tidal, wave, solar and wind power requires virtually no preliminary energy to harness, unlike coal, oil, gas, biomass, hydrogen and all the others.
In combination, these four mediums alone, if efficiently harnessed through technology, could power the world forever.
That being said, there happens to be another form of clean, renewable energy, which trumps them all- Geothermal Power.
Geothermal energy utilizes what is called heat mining, which, though a simple process using water, is able to generate massive amounts of clean energy. In 2006, an MIT report on geothermal energy found that 13,000 zettajoules of power are currently available in the earth, with the possibility of 2000 zj being easily tap-able with improved technology. The total energy consumption of all the countries on the planet is about half of a zettajoule a year. This means about 4000 years of planetary power could be harnessed in this medium alone. And when we understand that the earth's heat generation is constantly renewed, this energy is really limitless and could be used forever. These energy sources are only a few of the clean, renewable mediums available, and as time goes on, we will find more.
http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/transcript_add.htm
That realization was never lacking. The problem all along has been $/KWH.
The onerous regulations and protests and Jane Fondas simply added to the $/KWH. Government loan guarantees lower the $/KWH back down by increasing the plants' bond ratings (which lowers their cost of financing).
It would've been better to just reduce the regulatory burden, rather than cripple the industry with regulations and then prop it back up with subsidies... but such is the democratic method of inculcating dependence on the State.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
This seems alot liek that show 24 i think it was 2nd season that and the african president and the terrorists attacked the nuclear power plants. i dont remember the correct season for sure but it happened and regardless im calling Jack Bauer.
Don’t get me wrong: Nuclear power plants still are way better than coal/oil/gas plants.
But Uranium also is something that will be used up soon. And even ignoring that, there is a much better argument:
You have tons of hot and sunny places in the US, don’t you?
Well, put a couple of these in your deserts: http://images.google.com/images?q=brightsource&oe=utf-8&rls=org.gentoo:en-US:unofficial&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi
They are extremely easy and cheap to build, even with only renewable materials, and give you completely free and clean energy. Attach some high-voltage direct current lines to them. And some form of energy storage if wanted. And you’re good.
But then again, that would not make the energy bribers/criminals (aka lobby“) happy, would it?
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
For all you Wendell Berry fans, "One possibility is just to tag along with the fantasists in government and industry who would have us believe that we can pursue our ideals of affluence, comfort, mobility, and leisure indefinitely. This curious faith is predicated on the notion that we will soon develop unlimited new sources of energy: domestic oil fields, shale oil, gasified coal, NUCLEAR POWER, solar energy, and so on. This is fantastical because the basic cause of the energy crisis is not scarcity; it is moral ignorance and weakness of character. We don't know how to use energy, or what to use it for. And we cannot restrain ourselves. Our time is characterized as much by the abuse and waste of human power as it is by the abuse and waste of fossil fuel energy. Nuclear power, if we are to believe its advocates, is presumably going to be well used in the same mentality that has egregiously devalued and misapplied man- and womanpower. If we had an unlimited supply of solar or wind power, we would use that destructively, too, for the same reasons. Just a little philosophy to go along with this lovely news
Some Hot No Nukes Porn.
http://hansv.com/trojan_implosion/index.html
In GOD we trust, all others we monitor.
This is something that will depend strongly on location, but I can say that in the UK, most of the planned wind farm projects will actually be more reliable than our crappy old aging gas/coal burners. I was surprised to find this out. It's because they are spread out over such a wide area that there's just a very low probability of there being no wind at all. With a well designed turbine fleet, the rate of an outage due to poor wind conditions is actually lower than the breakdown rate of fossil fuel powerplants. Wind turbines are apparently cheap enough to run that you can just build vastly more than you need for use on low wind days.
Conversely, nuclear isn't an attractive option over here because it's too reliable. You can't shut it down easily to stop generating overnight, and unless somebody is buying power from it, it's losing money. This is why France has so many reactors but Britain has only a few, they have land borders to export power over at night and we don't, so our nuke plants just cover base load.
This is an excellent political move on behalf of the administration. They can take this step to appear in favor of clean, safe, nuclear power, with very little risk of being responsible for the creation of a new nuclear power plant. It removes none of the real obstacles to actually building and bringing a plant on-line. It almost doesn't matter what the funding sources are or how secure they are, attempts to build a plant will still take place in an environment that is very highly regulated, with regulations that frequently shift, and numerous avenues of legal delay available to people who wish to block the effort.
Certainly, encouraging the building of new, practical, energy production is a good thing. However, the reasons many previous plans have defaulted, and the plants they were to fund never brought on-line, are not resolved. Addressing the obstacles created by our legal and regulatory environment would have done far more to actually create a new, producing, plant.
In other words, there are reasons people aren't willing to risk their own money to build these plants. While loan guarantees do encourage people to loan money, it's easy to convince people to risk someone else's money and does nothing to correct the reasons they weren't willing to risk their own funds.
Moderation : -1 Conservative Viewpoint
I'm for building nuclear plants. People think that all nuclear plants are chernobyl, and that before they inevitably explode they will leak radiation to the surrounding countryside. This isnt true. People have a fear of radiation because it is a powerful force they cannot see. Realistically, the coal power plants these will replace would do you a LOT more harm with all the so2 emissions. As for storing the depleted uranium/plutonium- what is the big deal? So we have to put a couple of truck sized boxes somewhere. No big deal. It isnt as if we're lacking for square footage on planet earth.
If our laws allow all forms of energy generation, ...
the method should be determined by economics.
Economics would account for externalities: pollution from coal, long-term storage from nuclear, noise from windmills,
No matter what your political affiliation,
you probably must stretch reason to conclude that
government should subsidize nuclear power plants
or any power plants.
Build any power plants, fine;
but why must taxpayers fund their creation?
The response: because the risks are high.
Hmmm. High risks for capitalists
are also high risks for government.
If the risks are so high that capitalists would rather fund wind energy generation or coal energy generation,
why would government build nuclear power plants?
Can't government say "yea, nuclear power plants",
rather than
"yea, nuclear power plants, and here's $6 billion".
When government pays for (guarantees loans on) 90% of a nuclear power plant, any of us would gladly put up a negligible 10%.
This is not private enterprise, this is government enterprise.
Any of us would gladly run a company funded by government dollars -- what a deal.
I guess the optimistic side of me thinks of it another way, though. In the last 30 years, we've learned a lot about how to safely and efficiently build nuclear reactors. Hopefully one that starts out being built today will be magnitudes better than ones we'd have in operation now, if we were in a rush to build them earlier.
Obviously, you can't just wait around forever with the excuse that "we'll have a better one developed next year" ... but at the same time, our other energy sources have held out for us this long, and it doesn't look like we're going to deplete them within 10 years or less. So perhaps now is a great time to start building one, so it can go online right when it starts really being needed the most?
The boogey man that is "nuclear energy" is really more about the fear that it MIGHT hurt a *lot* of people simultaneously, in ugly ways. All the injuries and deaths from coal mining don't really bother people much, because they're limited to people who volunteered to accept that job. (And we've all long been told that it's a dangerous one.)
A nuclear reactor massively failing conjures up visions of people dying horrible deaths from radiation poisoning and kids being born with 6 fingers, and a food supply that's rendered unsafe for use for decades.... It certainly would be expected to spread to many people beyond just the employees of said power plant.
All that being said, though? I have no problems with nuclear power. I think it's really our future for clean energy, and as others have said -- "nuclear waste" is really just left-over energy we've chosen not to harness and use. Eventually, one would hope they'd address that.
the big problem here is that they most likely did not learn from the earlier go at it. they will once again build super duper massive plants and each one will be uniquely designed. So, not only will they cost massive amounts just for designing and building, but they will also cost massive amounts to upgrade. Each plant will have to go through the painstaking steps required to validate upgrades and changes.
everyone always points to France as an example of how nuclear power can work but they never mention how they standardized on the design and why that might be the reason it worked out so well for them.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
I understand these produce less radioactive waste and are small simpler & etc. Further, I understand that we (that is Admiral Nimitz) pushed the US towards enrcihed uranium reactors alrgely so we would have plenty of nasty stuff to make A Bombs with. (Cold war you know.)
However, I acknowledge little real knowledge.
>but I can say that in the UK, most of the planned wind farm projects will actually be more reliable than our crappy old aging gas/coal burners.
Well, you say planned, but we can check for the existing ones. When I looked, wind output had changed by a factor of 20 in less than a day - and of course that's uncontrollable, unlike a gas turbine.
>You can't shut it down easily to stop generating overnight, and unless somebody is buying power from it, it's losing money.
You don't need to unless your nuclear share above about 50% of average generation, as demand never drops below that. We're at less than 20% at the moment.
I think the US is beginning some sort of uranium enrichment program. This must mean they are thinking of building a nuclear bomb to get political leverage against the western world!
just less concentrated. Interesting SciAm article
Sure, they are going to plan to build a power plant. Sure.
This will get to the "environmental impact statement" level and some public comment. The company contracted to build it will discover it will take five years to get through the multiple environmental impact studies, neighborhood meetings and protests. They will forget about the project at that point.
Unless some comprehensive federal regulations were put in force, I don't see the US building a lot of new power plants any time soon. Are they needed? Sure, we are running out of base capacity. But are the average people convinced they need to have new power plants? No, they aren't. And they are perfectly willing to let environmental activists control the entire process, supposedly in their name.
If the current situation doesn't change, we are going to just have to cut back on electricity usage. So much for the idea of plug-in hybrid cars. Where, exactly are you going to plug them in? Certainly nowhere during the day.
Firstly, these two new reactors are joining two others at Plant Vogtle in Georgia. Southern Company is a co-owner in the project, and their web site is a decent resource for learning about it. These have been in planning for years--several years, in fact. It is interesting that they only gain national attention when the President supports loan guarantees, and the idea for these plants has been around for a long time. (There are currently two nuclear plants in Georgia: Vogtle and Hatch.) Southern Company only is funding/owning about 45% of the plant, whereas Georgia, a co-op, and Ogelthorpe Power own the rest of the project. Despite the excellent gain, I do wish we would build Integral Fast Reactor designs and finally get over pressurized water--then we could stop worrying so much about waste and enriched fuel. (I am a resident of Georgia.)
Perhaps Obama should offer to help build Iran's while he's on.
The nation needs 2000 new nuke plants, not 2.
Lots more people object to seeing nuclear power plants. So?
No one is seriously suggesting that our entire electrical demand be satisfied by wind power alone. You use wind and solar to handle peak loads, and power storage (from the wind & solar) plus nuclear power for the base load.
People need to get over the idea that their preferred means of power generation can or should solve our power problems all by itself. Each of the main types of non-CO2 producing power - solar photoelectric, solar thermal, wind, and nuclear - has its advantages and disadvantages, and the ideal solution is almost certainly going to involve a mix of all four.
Look, I'm all about moving from fossil fuels to nuclear (and solar & wind too), but seriously... reducing the regulatory burden? Are you nuts? Much is made of the fact that nuclear plants are very safe - and they are. The reason they're very safe is because they are quite sensibly regulated to within an inch of their lives. Without these regulations, there'd be nothing stopping the power companies from building Chernobyl-style plants all over the place, and every financial incentive TO do so - because as you say, all that safety stuff is expensive.
Doing more nuclear does make sense. So does drinking a little less of the libertarian kool-aid.
LPN has the problem of being effectively a Fuel Air Bomb without a detonator
FAE munitions are the only ones that can have enough "bang" to reach nuclear levels without being overweight
If a nuclear reactor can recycle its fuel and is designed to fail "safe" (so that the space suit guys* can just yank out the core and reload later) then the problems with the waste are somewhat minimal.
* its protocol to suit up for worst case when you are dealing with this stuff
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
The biggest reason that the nuclear industry in the US essentially came to a standstill wasn't excessive regulation, protests, or anything else (although that's what gets all the press). The real reason is that economically speaking, nuclear plants are very risky - they cost a huge amount of money upfront, and they don't pay off for many, many years. And if there's any fumbles during the design and construction process, costs can really skyrocket. Then the plant owners are left with the fun choices of 1) jacking up electricity rates to obscene levels (and thus really pissing off their customers) or 2) having the plant not pay off at all before the end of its life. Because of that, financing for plants has been all but impossible to get. This loan guarantee program could really make a difference in getting financing for plants going again.
Here is an article on using thorium as the fuel instead of uranium. It claims that thorium is the perfect green nuclear power.
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/ff_new_nukes/all/1
The main reason that uranium reactors were the reactor of choice was because it produced significant amounts of weapons grade plutonium to build us nukes. It is practically impossible to produce a nuclear weapon from thorium power byproducts. On top of that thorium is cheap and plentiful in the US, there is enough to power the us for 100's to 1,000's of years. It's also 50% more efficient than uranium reactors. "It’s only slightly radioactive; you could carry a lump of it in your pocket without harm." "And that waste needs to be stored for only a few hundred years, not a few hundred thousand like other nuclear byproducts."
Uranium and thorium reactors as compared in the article:
*Uranium-Fueled Light-Water Reactor
*Fuel Uranium fuel rods
*Fuel input per gigawatt output 250 tons raw uranium
*Annual fuel cost for 1-GW reactor $50-60 million
*Coolant Water
*Proliferation potential Medium
*Footprint 200,000-300,000 square feet, surrounded by a low-density population zone
*Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor
*Fuel Thorium and uranium fluoride solution
*Fuel input per gigawatt output 1 ton raw thorium
*Annual fuel cost for 1-GW reactor $10,000 (estimated)
*Coolant Self-regulating
*Proliferation potential None
*Footprint 2,000-3,000 square feet, with no need for a buffer zone
I just read 20 posts all saying how great this was.
Mostly I find it interesting that the same group that doesn't trust Evil Corporate America to track their web viewing habits because of the possible misuse of the information will trust the Actual Evil Corporate America not to cut corners wherever possible with something that could physically destroy large chunks of the population if mismanaged to the same degree.
I don't really have anything against this actually, I'm kind of for it, but I'm just fascinated by the mutual love-fest from this particular group.
[...]The estimations and computations show the possibility of making this project a reality in a short period of time (for payloads which can tolerate high g-forces). The launch will be very cheap at a projected cost of $3 - $5 per pound.
If we could send it into the sun, that might quiet the critics who would otherwise say, "but you're polluting space!"
Pi Ran Out
I'm as far away from a "Greenie" as you can be. Still I would have to agree that nuclear makes more sense than coal. It is a good idea. However, Obama is talking out of both sides of his mouth. He says to build more nuclear plants but also closes Yucca mountain. As always, he wants his cake and want to eat it too.
So, the primary concern about nuclear power is what to do with all the waste. Reprocessing will get you pretty far. But the best solution is to destroy the waste. This can be done with a fusion-fission hybrid system.
http://www.utexas.edu/news/2009/01/27/nuclear_hybrid/
In a normal fission reactor, isotopes of heavy elements break apart, producing neutrons which can cause other heavy elements to break apart. But some isotopes are easier to break down than others, and eventually, you break down most of the "easy" isotopes, and there isn't enough density of high energy neutrons to continue a chain reaction with the "hard" isotopes, aka the sludge.
We have the technology to build fusion reactors... the problem is that they currently require more energy to operate than we can harvest from them. This is likely to change soon with NIF breakthroughs and ITER being built, but we cannot yet use pure fusion as a power source.
But we CAN currently use fusion as a powerful neutron source, and these neutrons can be use to fission the sludge from the normal fission reactor. It will cost some energy to produce the neutrons, but it's more than made up for by the energy from the fission reactions.
The best part of this is that the long-lived heavy isotopes are mostly destroyed. You still have fission byproducts and secondary nuclear waste, but this will drastically cut down on the amount of waste to deal with.
Power output of a wind farm is variable, but you take that into account when designing it. You set a minimum power output and an acceptable probability of failing to meet it, then you build however many turbines it takes to match that. For Britain which has so much coastline to play with, it's not usually a very high number.
If the worst problem you have to deal with is occasional power surplus, you're doing well.
But very confusing. Anti-nuke people tend to be liberals who casually assume that Obama's on their side on everything. Pro-nuke people tend to be conservatives who casually assume that Obama's against everything they hold dear. This is yet another case of Obama doing exactly the opposite of what people expect him to do. I think he does it on purpose!
The graph I saw earlier suggests that we're not doing that at all - the output is very variable indeed.
You can't just increase number of turbines as the fluctuations in output aren't independent. Since they're dependent on a common failure (lack of wind), statistics won't help much here.
oh here we go, environmentalists are getting bashed again for being hippie liberals in the way of progress.
the fact of the matter is that there are several technological advances for solar panel that will make it efficient enough to provide the entire planet.
isnt it logical have true renewable power instead of power that relies on finite resources?
Seems a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem? I mean, I'm not proposing we start building hundreds of these things right off the bat. Let's try to get one or two commercially viable designs built, tested, and proven, over the next couple decades. Let's work on proving them safe. Then, let's start a larger 'deployment' phase of building a few dozen of them. Yes, this means it'll be decades before there's enough of them to provide even a 'dent' in our energy supply problems (and in the meantime, we should *also* be building wind, solar, etc).
But let us get *started*, so that we can start dealing with our nuclear waste problem in 2 or 3 decades' time. As another replyer noted, we NEED to do this, to deal with our 'waste problem', even if we're not doing it for the energy - but we might as well get energy from it anyhow, to sort of 'pay for' the nuclear waste disposal. Make dealing with our 'waste problem' at least a 'break-even' endeavor, and maybe, possibly, a profitable business.
Single pass through designs. Then of course the process of making use of the resulting energy itself is only 35% efficient. So really, our nuclear reactors are only around 0.3% efficient.
There are proposed designs which will burn all the waste as well almost eliminating the waste problem and giving up to about 30% efficiency. And if the "waste" heat was pumped into a large district heating network as well, you might even reach 70-80% overall efficiency. 250 times more energy out of the same amount of nuclear fuel. Now that would be world changing.
Deleted
If, by greener, you mean, less polluting, yes, Nuclear is better than Fossil fuels... however, in terms of water usage, Nuclear and Fossil Fuel plants are very thirsty power-generation solutions. Do we have any idea of the water usage of these new plants? As we keep hearing these days, fresh water will be the next scarce resource (one of the primary reasons China needs Tibet).
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
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.
Personally, I subscribe to a slightly modified version of the "Pournelle Method" of nuclear waste disposal, as described in "Yet Another Modest Proposal", by Larry Niven. The process is very simple in principle and execution, and should be at least as effective as any other method yet proposed, but a lot cheaper. Here's how it works:
(1) Find a suitable circular piece of arid desert, 100 miles in radius. That really should be no problem.
(2) In the center of this area, construct a large shallow pit, and line it after the fashion of modern landfills (that last part is my own addition).
(3) Around the perimeter of the area, construct a 12-foot-high chain-link fence. It should be sturdy but not ridiculously so.
(4) At regular intervals around the fence, place large signs that say, in 10 of the world's core languages: "If you pass this fence, you will die."
(5) Place your radioactive waste in the center pit described in (2).
(6) Problem solved.
I understand you can't afford to lag behind on nuclear waste production in the cold war with Iran but i see one good thing in this. This way you Yankees will HAVE to go back to the moon, if only to get rid of the toxic waste. I sincerely hope you're not planning on dumping that shit into our seas. Save the space program, build a nuke ! Nice one Bama...
beware he who denies you access to information for in his mind, he already deems himself to be your master (SMAC-ish)
and you, dipshit, are fucking nuts too for advocating murder - how can you be so stupid as to hate on people simply because they have a desire to save YOUR environment? you fucking retard. ... you prick !
many environmentalists are funded covertly to maintain the petro/coal industry - they mean well - bring them on board, don't alienate them with your ignorance and arrogance - they want quality of life like you claim you do - only they generally don't advocate shooting people to do so
What you have to understand is that in the last election there was a choice between republican-realist and republican-lunatic. There was no democrat candidate.
that isn't really going to help.
Read the sections on wind and how much it could generate assuming we ignore all cost constraints:
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/sewtha.pdf
Wind/solar are not as reliable as nuclear because you only have wind when the wind blows, and solar when the sun is shining.
Is that it? Sounds pretty reliable and reasonable to me. If there's ever an extended period of time where no wind or sun is available, I would say we're screwed anyway. Not being advanced enough to harness all our energy needs from wind and sun is different than saying it's not as reliable as another form of energy.
... there's more to it than the designs. There's safe operations and maintenance too. Without regulations and inspectors, plant operators again have every incentive to skimp on things like repairs, operator training, etc. And developing and enforcing regulations == bureaucracy. You can't have one without the other. To the extent that there are silly and useless regulations out there, yes, that should be changed. But really, most of the regs really are necessary.
Mistake? Are you really so ignorant of large scale solar thermal projects or heat transfer in general that you think air cooling is enough? Remember that convection in a liquid removes heat far more easily than in a gas and that radiation with such a small temperature difference to the fourth power is ignorable. THIS IS HIGH SCHOOL STUFF. I can't imagine that you are that ignorant about a topic you are enthusiastic about so I think you either didn't read it and are lying or are playing some sort of odd game.
Personally I think that if you are going to be arguing about different power sources you should at least put in a single days effort in learning how each major method works, particularly ones in a very closely related area to what you are advocating.
Quick, call these guys and tell them they are stupid: http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/brightsource-energy-offered-nearly-14,1174231.shtml
I suggest you find out how they cool their steam - it really appears that you are really that ignorant but I cannot understand how you stay that way. Find out how they cool their steam and you will dispel some of that ignorance and understand some of what I wrote.
If you are going to advocate these technologies you really should put some effort into learning how they work.
Boy, you have no clue at all do you?
Why isn't anyone pushing the thorium fuel cycle? Thorium is three or time more abundant than uranium and holds the promise of implementations with safety parameters that are actually within the capacity of human beings to control. Of course it can't be used to breed material for nuclear weapons ....
There we go again, the bold hope that bullshit is real and the accusation that reality is "magical thinking". Please at least be decent enough to learn about the subjects you bring up - the basics behind using steam to drive turbines are very simple and apply to solar thermal just as much as to any other heat source. That is what I was writing about above (as you should have worked out from the first response). Go on - make up some more numbers so you can pretend they "have defeated me".
RTFA
I did and it was interesting.
Of course it said nothing about how the steam is condensed so had nothing at all to do with your statement.
You just used the thing as a bluff and for some stupid reason are attempting to portray your ignorance or lies as a virtue.
Do you understand at all what dry cooling means?
Go on then, explain it to me in this situation where you have large turbines and a lot of steam moving them. You will learn something in the process of trying to explain it if you do it properly instead of just making shit up.
Go look it up then.
"Go on then, explain it to me" is what I wrote - because from what I have seen and read you are incorrect and I cannot look up things in your head. Since you profess to know about this you will be able to pass on this information if you are being truthful.
If you are going to attempt to convince a technically literate readership like the majority here you are going to have to do more than some "trust me" crap.
So on your journal I'm a "stalker" now after TWO threads spread out over time?
What kind of person are you to write such things when I'm simply asking you to explain two points that I considered to be incorrect?
Sorry to jump back in the middle of the thread but unfortunately here it appears that you have misunderstood some things about dry cooling. This article describes well what I presume is the sort of air cooled systems you are talking about:
http://beyondzeroemissions.org/media/newswire/dry-cooling-slaking-thirst-concentrated-solar-power-091023
Please note what I presumed should be obvious - you take a performance hit with the trade off that it can be used in areas with less water. It's a solution to a big problem but has nothing to do with with what I wrote about increasing scale.
Since heat is being transferred by convection air cooling is not able to remove as much heat as liquid cooling if all other things are equal.
Why would you WANT to stop generating power? Most countries use power 24/7. You might want to decrease the power generated during times when less power is needed.. with nuclear reactors that can be done automatically by inserting more control rods. 100% reliability with no wasted power.