Slashdot Mirror
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."
Cause that's how long it will take them to get through all the red tape.
And we still need power so... not much choices left.
Dear
>> 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
5/If we don't use nuclear we'll be using *coal*, not wind or solar or unicorn farts. Those techs must be, and are being developed but we need power _today_.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
If by facts you mean falsehoods.
The facts:
1. If you only look at the construction of the plant. It makes perfect economic sense if you look out over 50 years, and can even be cheaper than coal.
2. Most of the waste we have could be used as fuel, but we're refusing to do so, partially because of the ban on new plants, partially because several of the methods create a lot of weapons-grade Plutonium. But we are making far more nuclear waste than necessary.
3. Repeal it. Anyway, coal plants have caused more health damage than nuclear, at least in the US.
4. That's not a fact. That's not even an opinion. You just said "fuel dependency."
nuclear wessels?
(come on, it had to be said)
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.
As opposed to dumping waste in the atmosphere, like fossil fuel plants do, yes, it *is* "green". Or as opposed to flooding huge areas of land, like hydroelectric power plants do. Or as opposed to covering huge areas with windmills.
What makes nuclear power "green" is how small a footprint the plants have. In a few hectares of land you can produce as much power as covering the whole state with river dams or windmills.
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.
Given the things you listed above - how come the French seem to make it work for them?
Does the U.S. have native coal and oil supplies that make these other sources more viable?
I'm just curious as to what the big difference is that allows one country to produce almost 75% of it's energy needs but elsewhere it's not possible?
Reprocess it.
Stuff you can't reprocess put at bottom of an oceanic trench. Subduction zones are MomNature's ultimate recycle bin.
--
BMO
I have an acre here in Arkansas, I don't mind storing it in my back yard. Its on a hill, and not really very usable for me anyhow. Where do I sign up?
Learn about Photography Basics.
They don't have electricity in Georgia.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Facts? It would be a surprise to the 67 utilities operating 103 nuclear reactors in the US that nuclear energy isn't economical. Spent nuclear fuel decays. Coal ash is forever. The Price Anderson coverage kicks in after the utilities insurance pool of several hundred million dollars. It's never been used, even after Three Mile Island. Fuel dependency? The US is the Middle East of uranium! We buy it from other countries because it's been cheaper, but it's all over the mid-West and even Virginia.
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.
Ok, everyone complains about nuclear waste storage. But has anyone considered how convenient it is that we actually have the OPTION of storing it-- that it comes prepackaged in nice containers, rather than being spewed into the atmosphere where its a heck of a lot more difficult to get at (as with coal)?
Plus, unlike coal emissions, we can actually USE the waste material and reduce it by reusing it in reactors-- if it is radioactive, that means it is emitting radiation, which can either be used in additional reactors, or worst case in radioisotope thermoelectric generators (not very efficient, but its an option). With smog and CO2 emissions, we can do....what again? Bury it so that it can leak back into the atmosphere after a while?
Seems to me, if youre going to have a fuel source that has a waste product, the BEST thing you can ask for is that it deliver it in a prepackaged, stable, reusable form rather than as a useless aerosol.
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
I hope they let me drive the bulldozer at the ground breaking for the new plants. Because when I drive it over the inevitable protesters, erasing those people will do more good for the country than actually building the power plant will.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
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)
1) Conveniently ignoring the external costs (read: pollution) that traditional fossil fuel plants have. Further their units looks highly questionable: $88 bucks per Mwh isn't far off 8 cents per kwh. That isn't far off the national average over here in the US. That they try to disguise it with strange units makes me suspicious.
2) You don't have to store it, but we would have to man up about the nukes problem. Waste = fuel to a breeder, but that means plutonium.
3) Limited liability can be a good thing. Given that (practically) everyone in the country benefits from having electric power, using the taxpayers as insurance isn't strictly a bad thing. Note that they'd be paying it anyway either in increased pollution from fossil fuels (if no nukes) or in their electric rate (with nukes but no limited liability) then you're paying it anyway.
4) See 2. Also see oil. Really wind and solar too. You may be depending on the Sun, but it isn't truely renewable. It'll go out in a few billion years.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
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.
If it's still radioactive enough to be dangerous. It's still radioactive enough to be used for electricity.
We just have retarded 'recycling laws'. Imagine if the US outlawed Aluminum recycling because at some point in the process you could use it as Thermite. That's how stupid our nuclear rules are.
Read this.
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/sewtha.pdf
Seriously.
Actually read it.
It looks at all the options in a realistic manner.
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.
I think spent nuclear fuel should be stored in the U.S. Capitol.
The South Texas Project is building two new units at its existing facilities near Matagorda Bay.
-l
Help cure AIDS, cancer, and more. Donate your unused computer time to worldcommunitygrid.org. Join Team Slashdot!
There is no ban on building nuclear power plants. Where did you get that?
The problem is companies can't get loans from banks because it costs lots of money to build a nuclear power plant and loans that were provided were defaulted. That's why the US says it will guarantee them.
... 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.
I would be stunned, stunned if every industry with the word "nuclear" in its name, even the nuclear weapons industry(including the crapfest that was the soviet unions nuclear program) has caused more cancers deaths, injuries and poisonings than the worldwide coal industry.
But coal isn't sexy.
Coal isn't scary.
If tomorrow we swapped every coal plant in the world for modern nuclear plants it would do vastly more good for the environment than every single accomplishment of every Greenpeace like organisation the world over combined has ever accomplished.
But no.
Atoms are scary.
All 383 pages of it? Could you summarize it in a post? How about an info-graphic?
The US does in fact have gigantic coal reserves.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_producing_regions
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.
WE???
I know Slashdot is hosted in the US & is developed by US guys, but please, won't you think of the international community reading this website?
Does "WE" mean "submitters", "posters", "US", "North America", "Nerds" ?
Also, why can't "US" be a subject?
*long pause*
Oh! Please don't tell me you read "US" as "us" (as in "us and them") and not "U.S." (as in "United States")
Grammar nazi + dumbass = Epic fail!
>> 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."
I've spent several hundred hours researching this issue. Frankly, you're wron.g
>>1/Nuclear energy does not make economic sense. http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=50308 (translation: it is expensive)
The actual cost of the plants they're building in the south are half this. And a lot of the cost has to do with NIMBYs and (ironically enough) environmentalists, who ought to all be very pro-nuclear. The actual cost of nuclear per KWH is the only source comparable to coal. Dirty coal. CC Coal Plants are 2x to 3x the cost per KWH of dirty coal.
You want to know what doesn't make economic sense? Anything that costs more than double or triple the current cost of energy. Guess what that includes? All green technologies. Solar costs roughly 6x to 150x the cost of coal.
Look up the costs yourself, and become educated. This is a mix of government, industry, and hippie cost estimates:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/electricity.html
http://bravenewclimate.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/eiaenergy2016.png
http://climateprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/nuclear-costs-2009.pdf
http://www.energy.ca.gov/2007publications/CEC-200-2007-011/CEC-200-2007-011-SD.PDF
http://des.nh.gov/organization/divisions/water/wmb/coastal/ocean_policy/documents/te_workshop_cost_compare.pdf
>>2/Having to store waste for over 100000 years is not what someone with any common sense would call 'green'.
The waste problem is a social construct, not a technical one.
>>3/limited liability. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act
It's a good thing. Because of idiot movies like the China Syndrome, people think that nuclear power is dangerous, when nuclear plants are actually quite safe. Even left-wing France produces the lion's share of its power through nuclear, and has done so very safely for the last 30 years. Compare this with the huge numbers of people killed every year in coal mining accidents and indirectly through the radiation released into the atmosphere by coal.
>>4/fuel-dependency
There's plenty.
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.
Credits:
SA Forums user: grover
Has anyone suggested simply eating it? It would unfortunately then collect and concentrate in sewage treatment plants and septic tanks, and so would defeat the purpose, but I'm curious...
12,000 metric tons of high-level waste (mostly spent reactor fuel rods) is produced worldwide each year. If that waste was let age for a few years like fine whiskey, split up into tiny 1.6mg portions encapsulated in glass, and then one fed to every person in the world...
a) Spent nuclear fuel rods, clad or declad, from commercial electricity generating reactors; average radioactivity being more than 2.5 million curies per cubic meter.
b) Semi-liquid sludge from nuclear bomb fabrication waste processing residue - average radioactivity being about 3500 curies per cubic meter.
All this waste contains five shorter lived and longer lived radionuclides of main concern. The shorter lived are strontium-90 whose half life, t1/2, is 28.5 years, and cesium-137 whose half life, t1/2, is 30 years. See Ref. 1 for the half-life values used in this study. The radioactivity of these shorter lived nuclides is approximately 95% of the total radioactivity of the nuclides of concern. Total hazardous life for these shorter lived nuclides is considered to be between 600 years and 1000 years depending upon one's point of view.
The longer lived isotopes are plutonium-239 whose t1/2 is 24,110 years, plutonium-240 whose t1/2 is 6,540 years, and curium-245 whose t1/2 is 8,500 years. Plutonium-238 whose t1/2is 88 years will have essentially disappeared after several thousand years, so in storage terms of the longer lived elements this isotope is not of concern as long as it will have been successfully contained for the next several thousand years. As for the life of these longer lived materials, the NRC considers 10,000 years as the storage time required; however, some people consider a lifetime as long as 100,000 years to 500,000 years as more appropriate.
Sr-90 is a beta emitter, and the radiation won't penetrate the glass capsule.
C-137 is a beta and gamma emitter, with 75% the energy released as beta, and the rest as 33keV and 662keV gamma.
1 cubic meter of waste: 2.5 million curies
% radiation in short-lived Sr-90/C-137 isotopes: appx 95%
% radiation capable of penetrating capsule: appx 13%
World population: 6.70 Billion
Average mass of a human: 70kg
Time for complete digestion: 24hr
1 Ci = 37GBq
1 rad = 0.01J/kg of absorbed radiation
1 rem = rule of thumb is 1 rad, but it's actually a lot more complicated
Q for gamma, external = 1
Q for alpha, external = 0
Q for beta, external = 0
1 Sv = Q x 100rem
1keV = 1.60217646 × 10-16 joules
Density of fuel rods: 11.0g/cc
Volume of fuel per capsule: 1.6mg/11.0g/cc= 0.145nm^2
"Dangerous" radiation emitted from 1m^2: 2.5MCi * .95 * .13 = 308kCi = 1.14*10^16Bq
"Dangerous" radiation emitted from 0.145nm^2: 1.14*10^16Bq/6.7G/3=567kBq/meal
% of gamma rays striking human body absorbed by human body: appx 15%
Radiation absorbed by the body: 85kBq
Energy absorbed: 85kBq X (33keV/Bq+662keV/Bq)/2 * 1.60217646*10^-16 J/keV * 24*60*60s= 41mJ.
Energy absorbed per kg: 41mJ/70kg/0.01J/kg = 0.6mrad
Radiation exposure: 0.6mrem per meal
Radiation exposure: 639mrem per year, or appx 255SWW.
Conclusion: we could quite literally eat all the nuclear waste generated worldwide and barely double our annual exposure to natural radiation. Not that I'd advocate this, but jesus christ, there's nothing wrong with burying it all in a hole in the ground!
Alternately, I could just go around the nation beating people with spent fuel rods until they gain some perspective in the matter.
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.
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
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.
Of course, most people are more concerned with getting a concentrated dose than they are about getting a perfectly distributed dose.
(I think nuclear is a great idea, and it might take until the coal starts to run out, but we will start using it)
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
It was actually the incident at Three Mile Island that began the movement against nuclear energy in the US.
Which caused a massive loss of life?
Apropos of this, I'd summarize one of his points (he has many, all quite insightful) as: if we all do a little, we only accomplish a little.
Standby mode is a complete canard, and fixing it won't even come close to addressing our energy problems. Combine all of your standby mode power, and it would be dwarfed by the power taken up by your A/C, or your computer (how many of us have a 200-300W computer left on all the time?), or your TV. It would take hundreds of devices in standby mode to make up for the power taken up by a comparatively low-power computer that's left on 24/7. Fixing standby mode devices is fixing a problem that's almost an order of magnitude smaller than the real one.
The problem is, telling people to address the real problems involves asking them to use less (use less A/C, turn off your computers, watch less TV, buy a smaller/lower power TV), which is a complete non-starter in today's environment.
Bury. It. In. A. Hole.
Or just eat it:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1553308&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=nested&cid=31168840
Actually, even worse than nuclear and coal is DHMO (dihydrogen monoxide). Thousands of deaths per year and millions if not billions of damage per year (including in developed countries), used in major chemical processes, even by farmers (and not totally removed by rinsing fruits).
Taken from http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html#DANGERS :
What are some uses of Dihydrogen Monoxide?
Despite the known dangers of DHMO, it continues to be used daily by industry, government, and even in private homes across the U.S. and worldwide. Some of the well-known uses of Dihydrogen Monoxide are:
as an industrial solvent and coolant,
in nuclear power plants,
by elite athletes to improve performance,
in biological and chemical weapons manufacture,
in the development of genetically engineering crops and animals,
as a major ingredient in many home-brewed bombs,
as a byproduct of hydrocarbon combustion in furnaces and air conditioning compressor operation,
historically, in Hitler's death camps in Nazi Germany, and in prisons in Turkey, Serbia, Croatia, Libya, Iraq and Iran,
n animal research laboratories, and
in pesticide production and distribution.
Each year, Dihydrogen Monoxide is a known causative component in many thousands of deaths and is a major contributor to millions upon millions of dollars in damage to property and the environment. Some of the known perils of Dihydrogen Monoxide are:
Death due to accidental inhalation of DHMO, even in small quantities.
Prolonged exposure to solid DHMO causes severe tissue damage.
Excessive ingestion produces a number of unpleasant though not typically life-threatening side-effects.
DHMO is a major component of acid rain.
Gaseous DHMO can cause severe burns.
Contributes to soil erosion.
Leads to corrosion and oxidation of many metals.
Contamination of electrical systems often causes short-circuits.
Exposure decreases effectiveness of automobile brakes.
Found in biopsies of pre-cancerous tumors and lesions.
Given to vicious dogs involved in recent deadly attacks.
Often associated with killer cyclones in the U.S. Midwest and elsewhere, and in hurricanes including deadly storms in Florida, New Orleans and other areas of the southeastern U.S.
Thermal variations in DHMO are a suspected contributor to the El Nino weather effect.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
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.
Just chapter 11 will do http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c11/page_68.shtml, or even just page 71 http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c11/page_71.shtml.
Summary: Gadgets and other devices on standby consume a tiny fraction of that consumed by heating, lighting, transport and other activities. The major energy savings come from better insulation, more efficient transportation, and just doing less. Whatever we do has to be on a big scale, and renewables/efficiency savings alone (for the UK), means a _lot_ of turbines/panels.
The rest of the book is well worth reading though, it brings what many of these debates lack - meaningful numbers in context, such as http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c10/page_64.shtml. The website is http://www.withouthotair.com/
1:Rems to cancer rate is not linear.
2:Most cancer has little or nothing to do with radiation.
In any case we're not proposing actually eating it.
We're talking about burying it in a hole.In the desert. Miles from anyone.
Waste storage is well handled. The eventual end point for the small amounts of HE waste is as a glass, which is stored in columns inside cylindrical steel cans. This glass can not "leak" (certainly not "will eventually leak"). They are stored underground in caverns and monitored. Even if one were to be submerged in water, the glass would not dissolve, although the storage sites are picked to avoid water tables anyway. Some of these cans are also set into concrete.
It's not like on "The Simpsons" or on CSI where nuclear waste is a bright green glowing liquid that is shoved into a rusty steel oil drum with a badly fitting cap and excess spilling down the sides where it was carelessly topped up.
We do not want coal fired plants. They release high amounts of radioactivity into the atmosphere, and don't just produce CO2 - there are other wastes to get rid of, including a ton of ash and nasty sulphurous compounds, and carbon capture is not a long term solution. It would be better to simply compress it and use it rather than pump it back into the ground. Perhaps when fridges and AC units start using liquid CO2 as their refrigerant we'll see more of that.
I remember researching an article for coal plants, they had 32,000 injuries and 100~ deaths per year from coal mining. But hey, out of sight, out of mind right? The boogey man that is "nuclear energy" must be stopped because it MIGHT hurt someone.
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
People freak out at anything that puts out a few rems but don't seem bothered by shipments of arsenic, cyanide or any on of the thousands of other things which are far far far far far more likely to kill you, maim you etc.
A nuclear plant 20 miles away is a reason to picket and scream and complain about how everyone is going to be killed in some nightmare scenario which people who actually know about the subject aren't worried about but a pesticide plant outside your town is no big deal.
It's like being terrified of meteorite strikes while playing in traffic.
and what do we do with the waste, runoff, and pollution from non-nuclear power generation? where's your outrage over the contamination of our environment from mining coal?
we're already behaving in a short-sighted fashion, and burdening the next generations.
Yup. Too bad the IFR (Integral Fast Reactor) program was killed. If I recall correctly, the half-life of its longest-lived waste was something on the order of 50-100 years, and it extracted on the order of 70-90% of the energy available in its input uranium, instead of something like 5-20% (what typical LWRs are capable of). (Again, this is *if* I recall correctly, it has been a while since I read the IFR literature.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I said it during the Cold War, and I'm happy to say it again: MORE NUKES! LESS KOOKS!
Yeah, I've heard a lot of reasons not to have nukes of any sort - bombs, reactors, you name it. The best reason I've ever heard, was Chernobyl. A perfectly good plant was destroyed by idiots stretching the envelope. And, yes, there will be more idiots in the future.
But, even Chernobyl doesn't convince me that nuclear plants are bad. It only convinces me that we need to weed out the idiots, and prevent them from making decisions about how a plant should be run. Don't allow morons to power up to max, then try to do an emergency shutdown, then try to crank it up to max power again, just to see if they can.
Fission, and eventually, fusion, are indeed the energy sources of tomorrow.
If that runs contrary to the greenies' agenda, well, tough titty. Al Gore should have invented fission, instead of the intarwebz, then he could make money on Obama's new nuclear policy.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
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.
Some corrected facts about nuclear energy.
"1/Nuclear energy does not make economic sense. http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=50308 [ipsnews.net] (translation: it is expensive)"
But cheaper than oil, natural gas, Wind, and Solar. Only coal and Hydro are cheaper.
"2/Having to store waste for over 100000 years is not what someone with any common sense would call 'green'."
You don't you just reprocess the fuel rods like they do in France and Japan and have for years.
"3/limited liability. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act [wikipedia.org]"
Yes that one does exist. Of course since you have nut balls claiming that wifi makes them sick....
"4/fuel-dependency"
Yes it is terrible if we move to a thorium cycle we only have a few centuries of fuel left. With breeders maybe no more than two or three centuries.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
page 104 and before you declare "YAY WE CAN DO IT!" also page 107.
If you have any beef with his figures read the appropriate section in the book.
Excellent summary. Now, if I only had the book to translate your summary of the book.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
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?
In short, that same article basically says you can use different thorium cycles to make bomb making much more difficult. This article is also fairly old. Wired did a more recent one (obviously not a scientific journal. http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/ff_new_nukes/ )
From the article that line is taken from
Mod me up, mod me down, do your worst you modding clown.
And what are you doing about the radon released by coal mining and burning? You know, released straight into the atmosphere instead of as a lump of metal?
Or do you only care about radioactivity if it's from uranium?
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
No, not unless you're a low paid foreigner.
Actually, living in a small apartment I cut my electricity usage during non-peak months by close to 10% by unplugging everything when not in use (including internet, computer, television, etc). This was about 50kWH/month, which translates to roughly 70W constant draw. The modem/router was 20, the printer was 10, the computer was 10, the television was 10, etc etc etc.
And no, none of my computers use over 150W. The only people who have 200+W computers are those with gigantic graphics cards, and they are also part of the problem if they leave those on 24/7. Get off AIM already.
What are we going to do with the waste? Until I hear a good answer to that question, nuclear power just doesn't cut it from my standpoint. Obama's nuclear plan, just like the rest of his policy, and US government policy in general, is shortsighted and leaves the burden on our kids. If we put 8bln into real solutions, we'd be able to build one.
What are we going to do with the waste? Don't know. What should we be doing with the waste? Reprocessing it like everyone else in the civilized world already does.
First, a word about modern reactor waste. If you just look at the crappy Westinghouse reactors the President announced loans for and don't even consider recycling all their waste (and we can do vastly better), the per-capita waste over the 60+ years life of the plant fits in a Coke bottle. Take a better design (CANDU, for instance), get less waste. Reprocess the waste you do get (which you can do multiple times in a CANDU reactor), get even less. So the actual level of waste we're talking about over a lifetime on a per-capita basis fits in a bottle of soda. Do what everyone else does with the waste and you end up with far less.
Second, the President has not specifically addressed what we're going to do with all our soda bottles of waste, but "senior" people dealing with the issue are supposedly telling journalists behind closed doors that they're looking at a number of possible solutions and that any final result will probably have to include reprocessing. If we were smart, we'd build a bunch of CANDU plants and feed our existing "waste" into them as fuel. CANDU plants are remarkably flexible. We can feed our existing waste into them now, take apart decommissioned nuclear weapons and feed their nuclear material into the plants later, and then switch either to natural uranium or to thorium. The CANDU plants would simply continue churning out clean, safe power throughout the whole process.
China's building CANDU plants right now (among others). Some CANDU projects have already been completed (either on or ahead of schedule and either on or under budget). To the best of my knowledge, the remaining CANDU projects in China are all ahead of schedule and under budget. That's what happens when you do something over and over again: you get better at it and it becomes cheaper and easier to do.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
While I agree with most of your points:
Where is the harm in covering area with windmills?
Why put levies on a riverbank, the people living nearby need water to drink, surely when there's a flood it will only make them more healthy!
They kill birds and bats but that's a red herring since cats kill many orders of magnitude more.
I actually like wind.
It has it's place.
It just can't provide much more than 20% of the power we need at the right time in the right places without either throwing grid stability out the window or throwing away lots of the power generated.
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
That's not a technical problem.
If you're going to include madness and political problems then no solution you can propose to any human problem with anything on earth is viable.
Generally I agree, but the image problem isn't just perception; it is reality. When there is a problem at a nuclear facility, it dwarfs those at any coal mine. Remember Chernobyl?
I honestly am not being mean when I say you really have no idea what you're talking about. Whenever there's a discussion about nuclear power plants, someone always brings up Chernobyl.
Anyone who brings up Chernobyl in the context of nuclear power plant safety quite honestly hasn't the slightest idea why Chernobyl happened or why it's physically impossible for it to happen in any nuclear power plant ever designed or built in any western nation, let alone a modern reactor design anywhere on Earth. Start with the fact that Chernobyl's design was backwards. If you don't understand what I mean by that, please read up on nuclear reactor design before commenting further on the topic of nuclear power plants.
Whether you realize it or not, your comment is the purest form of FUD.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
With coal power, talking about 'radiation' is like asserting that you're not going to ride inside a car, as cars are dangerous...you're going to ride standing on the hood of the car.
Seriously, people. Solar and wind cannot supply our needs. Do the math. We can work on that, sure, but we need power now.
Oil and gas are just bad ideas all around. Gas prices are already high enough.
And as for coal...good grief, people. Do you know why coal's so cheap? Well, a) safety regulations are lax, so people die mining it, b) They mine it by blowing the tops of mountains, c) it reduces more radioactivity materials in a year than all radiation ever released in the US due to the nuclear power industry.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Where is the harm in covering area with windmills?
Nothing, considering the land is hardly "covered" at all. It's certainly a very different kind of "covered" than what a coal or nuclear plant's footprint entails. Yes there are some things you can't do with the land that is occupied by a wind farm -- like build office buildings -- but you can do a lot of other things -- like farming or ranching.
This kind of bullet-point engineering is counterproductive, especially for the nuclear advocate because nuclear plants have a lot of bullet points against them. But on the actual merits, i.e. considering what each bullet means, nuclear looks quite good.
But not good enough to develop to the exclusion of wind, because wind is good and we can and should build more (and are building more). That's okay, because the real reason why wind isn't good enough to develop to the exclusion of nuclear is that it's simply not going to be able to take care of base load.
We need to be building nuclear plants and wind, and trying to play the two against each other is just a bad idea. Fortunately, between the extant development of wind and this new deal to build nuclear reactors, it looks like we might actually be headed down a sensible path.
I'm shocked, honestly.
The enemies of Democracy are
Nuclear *with* reprocessing is not short sighted. The waste can be on the order of a few tons per year and can be safe in a few 100 years with current plans for waste management. Problem is, its still cheaper to just not reprocess and in the US there is no commercial incentive to produce less waste. Radioactivity is not the big boogie man its made out to be. Some waste from plastic manufacture are a lot more poisonous and never break down and yet we deal with a lot of that sort of thing all the time. Proper management is easily doable.
But pretending that all the problems are solved with fossil fuels by pumping back into the ground is naive at best, and ignorant at worst. You have not idea of the scale of even a 1GW power station. And you can't replace a 1GW plant with 1GW of wind turbines or solar... you need either massive storage facilities and/or massive over generation capacity...which results in expensive electricity.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Not complete true. Minnesota has had a moratorium (a "ban" if you will) on new nuclear power plants for 15 years. If it's against the law to build it, credit is the least of your worries.
Not sure about other states.
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.
Methods that make Thorium reactors have a small waste foot print, can also be used with Uranium. As for bomb concerns... you can make a bomb from U233 which is what you get when breading from Th. Th fuel cycle is not really more resistant in this regard. The molten salt reactors can even be a little worse since Pa is separated out chemically and left to decay into U233... nice pure bomb metal... or close enough.
But proliferation concerns are overrated at best.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
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.
You have been FUDed!
The 100,000 year figure is complete and total bunk created as a scare tactic only. What they don't tell you in those figures is that after 500 years, the dangerous high level waste will have decayed to the point that it's harmless. The remainder will be valuable nuclear fuel ready to be refined and put in a reactor. Preferably, we reprocess it like other countries and never dispose of the valuable resource in the first place.
Of course, before we mined it and used it as nuclear fuel, it was in naturally radioactive geological formations where any child could just wander in and get irradiated (very mildly) and that's how radioactive it will be for most of that 100,000 years you wring your hands over. The world is safer from radiation today because we are collecting all that dangerous natural uranium and putting it behind locked doors.
Apparently it DOES make economic sense since TFA indicates that new reactors are being installed right now by people who will have very carefully analyzed the expected return on investment and obviously likes what they saw.
agreed, most people dont understand that chernobyl was a breeder reactor built on a positive reactivity coefficient. The rods themselves controlled rector power instead of using a thermal moderator like water. It also did not use the designed requirement of being able to be shut down with the most critical rod stuck at the top.
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.
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.
You don't have to take it on trust.
I don't think you understand how this works.
They don't want to believe that nuclear waste isn't ZOMG SCARY.
Your explanation is long and complicated.
Ergo by claiming that complexity itself is a sign of duplicity, they can dismiss your explanation and continue believing what they want to believe.
Trust and math really have nothing to do with it. They never had any intent of trying to understand what you're saying or verifying your facts or anything else that might suggest a desire to be educated.
The enemies of Democracy are
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.
The correct answer to #1 is 0.
0 people were killed or seriously injured by the Three Mile Island accident. The amount of radiation the average person in the area received was roughly equal to that received during a normal chest x-ray. The max anyone got was less than what you get from a year of celestial background radiation exposure.
Scientific studies and reports compiled in 1981, 1990, 2000 - 2003, 2005, 2008, and many others in between all found 0 causal link between the Three Mile Island nuclear accident and any deaths. The 2000 - 2003 study by U-Pitt looked at radiation exposure information gathered from 36,000 people living near the plant at the time of the accident, yet it found "no consistent evidence" linking the Three Mile Island incident to an increase in cancer or mortality rates.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
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.