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Nuclear Power Could See a Revival
shmG writes "As the US moves to reduce dependence on oil, the nuclear industry is looking to expand, with new designs making their way through the regulatory process. No less than three new configurations for nuclear power are being considered for licensing by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The first of them could be generating power in Georgia by 2016."
honestly, this is 20 years overdue. Especially with the new reactor designs. Now, if we could only reprocess the damn fuel we'd have a clean method of power generation with very little overall waste for a couple hundred years at least.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
... currently most eco-friendly power source we have actually used instead of being ignored and feared.
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
Do they automatically post this article every couple months? It seems like Nuclear has been on the verge of revival for a couple decades now. I doubt we will ever see it.
Following hot on the heels of, "American manufacturing is dying because of the unions," we'll see, "America lacks nuclear reactors because of the environmentalists."
America lacks nuclear reactors because we have a strong oil lobby tied with government, and America lacks manufacturing because it's cheaper to outsource somewhere with lower CoL and a glut of desperate workers. In each case, precisely as is logical, it's the people in control who get to make the decisions and not some group convenient to demonise.
Nuclear power is the way to go, pity it wont ever get done though; soon as your Senate, Congress or whoever handles the decisions on these sorts of things decide to move forward on the issue someone is going to stand up and say "Chernobyl", "Three Mile Island" and possibly "dirty bomb" or "fallout (not the game mind you)" and the whole proposition is going to die right there.
Even if that does not happen there will be widespread protests with other people chanting the words above.
Not to forget that The West have been continually spurning other countries for wanting to build nuclear reactors for years and years, so suddenly deciding to build more reactors of their own is going to put the US in a tough spot geopolitically.
The way I see it though is that for the time being fission plants along with a gradual move towards a hydrogen economy offer the best chance for independence from oil. In the long term though we need to focus on getting a commercially viable Fusion reactor design up and running, it is basically the only fuel source that offers any chance of us not having to hollow out our planet in the long run.
Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
I know, and as a supplementary option it might be okay. But I strongly oppose those who argue that we don't need any local power generation, since all the power we want is available in the Sahara desert.
Also consider that radioactivity is not the only danger with the waste. The materials involved are also very toxic.
Pfft. Break them down long enough and they decay into lead. I've nary heard one word about lead toxicity. ~
But then CO2 isn't the only problem. A relatively recent designed powerplant (note not a fuel reprocessing plant, or CANDU reactor or anything else fancy, but simply a modern heavy water reactor) which produces a testube sized amount of radioactive waste is equivalent to a coal plant which aside from the CO2 it produces will also produce 300kg of highly radioactive flyash.
Repeat after me. Dilution is not the solution to pollution.
People only fear nuclear waste because it is concentrated in a very dense area. I mean fuck I'd be more worried about the toxicity of the waste of any number of the hundreds of thousands of chemical plants we have around the world, rather than a few hundred plants in the insanely regulated nuclear industry.
Nuclear can and has been used directly for heating. There are plenty of urban areas which already have centralized steam plants for heat, where this could be implemented easily. If it bothers you to think that the steam heating your building passed through a steam generator attached to a reactor, then, use heat pumps powered by nuclear generated electricity. You will be warm.
You are correct though, about petroleum use in transportation -- it's going to be around for a looong time. And I admit that, though there is a nuclear plant 12 miles from where I'm sitting, my house is heated with gas.
It only reduces the amount of waste if it doesn't produce other kinds of waste in equal amounts. Also consider that radioactivity is not the only danger with the waste. The materials involved are also very toxic. I highly doubt that even the newest generation of nuclear reactors takes in fissable heavy metals and outputs something at most as dangerous as CO2. I would be happy if you prove me wrong.
One of the major benefits to nuclear power is its energy density. If you got your entire life's worth of energy usage (including heating, electricity, and transportation) from nuclear power, the amount of uranium fuel you would have consumed would be the size of a baseball. It would be converted into a wide variety of materials, and some indeed would be toxic (many radioactive, but for varying durations). But think of how easy it would be to deal with the quantity of material. Given reprocessing (as I assumed anyway), it would be below background radiation levels in 300-500 years.
Try to get your life's worth of energy from fossil fuels (as you mostly do right now), and you are dealing with materials that are just as toxic, but the quantities would be larger by a factor of about 2 million. You can't bury that anywhere. It's going all over the place.
So there is as much chance of seeing another Chernobyl as their is as seeing another Titanic.
That would be a better analogy if the Titanic was built with the thinnest metal to save money, was loaded to capacity with lit candles and TNT, had no watertight hull compartments, lifeboats or flotation devices, and was run into into an iceberg at full speed on purpose as a "test."
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I have not forgotten it, I just recognize the infeasibility of it. Even over a 40-year build out, we would have been hard pressed to build enough nuclear power to displace petroleum as an energy input even for today's usage, let alone synthesizing petroleum replacements.
This graphic is particularly informative. Alas the units are a bit archane (quadrillion BTUs, or quads, as a measure of energy. One Quad = ~300 terawatt-hours), but you can see the relative proportions easily enough.
Electrical energy is about 40% of our total energy consumption in the U.S. Transportation is about 30%, industrial ~20%, residential ~10%. The U.S.'s energy comes about 37% from petroleum, and only about 8% from nuclear. So, to replace the energy petroleum gives us, we'd need to have about 6 times as much nuclear energy as today, or about as much energy as we get from coal and natural gas combined. Most of that natural gas goes to heating and industrial processes, not electricity production. That's just energy for transportation and heating - it doesn't begin to cover the petroleum we use as feedstock for various industrial processes.
If my math is correct, it's about another 1200 GW of installed nuclear capacity - about as much power as the entire US grid currently produces. At a cost of several billion per GW of nuclear plant, that works out to a couple trillion dollars. So not only would our total electrical production need to roughly double, but it would leave the grid about 2/3 nuclear-based. I know that there is precedent: France's electric grid is 80% nuclear. But France's electrical power output is a relatively tiny amount of energy compared to US's nuclear capacity today.
Nuclear power is not a panacea, end of story.