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."

Comments

The new designs use the old waste

[MacFury]

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 beauty of some of the new reactor designs is that they use old radioactive waste as their fuel source. By some people's estimates we have about two centuries worth of fuel for the energy needs of the entire United States just in our existing stockpiles of nuclear waste. Not only would we not have to mine additional fuel, we would be significantly reducing the amount of waste that we need to store.

Here's a TED talk that covers the subject:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaF-fq2Zn7I

By the end of life of these new reactors, solar should be cheap, efficient and plentiful.

Re:The new designs use the old waste

[tophermeyer]

People only fear nuclear waste because it is concentrated in a very dense area.

This is a point that I think a lot of environmental activists miss entirely. The highly concentrated nature of nuclear waste is a benefit to nuclear power, no? I have trouble seeing how people do not see this as inherently better than the current distributed CO2 spewing systems. It's not like we're going to run out of places to safely store nuclear waste, but we are in a position where we are very rapidly poisoning the atmosphere of the entire planet.

why not just more solar?

[turing_m]

The biggest issue I have with using nuclear energy for power in a widespread fashion is that it is the most dense source of energy known to man by far, and once used it's gone. Future space exploration and colonization will probably require nuclear fuel, especially if it's beyond the solar system.

Meanwhile we have deserts that are receiving orders of magnitude more solar energy than the world currently uses, that could be harvested using technology we have today.

Finally, looks like the start of the right thing

[jcochran]

Nuclear power is one of the cleanest sources of power we have so far. Now if Obama will correct the damn stupid mistake Carter did, things will be a heck of a lot better. Yes, we have a nuclear waste problem and it's a large one. But it's not a technical problem, it's a political problem. President Carter back in 1977 issued a directive that stopped reprocessing of civilian nuclear waste. Mind, the US nuclear industry was built with the assumption that waste reprocessing would be available. So the result is that we have more waste than planned for being stored for longer periods than planned for, all because of a decision to change the way things were done. And said decision was made without putting into place an alternate method of handling the waste. Yes people, we have a nuclear waste issue, and if Obama can reverse the brain dead stupid decision made 33 years ago, that would be one of the best possible things he could do for the United States. But some people still hear the word "nuclear" and suddenly their brains and reasoning turn off and they start thinking worse case issues and problems ignoring the fact that many of the problems are political and not technical. What about cost overruns? Well, stop dragging them into court attempting to stop construction. What about the nuclear waste? See the beginning of this post people. What about Three Mile Island? Your point is? The safety measures worked and the public never was in danger. During TMI, they debating for *three days* about whether or not to evacuate the area. Next time a damn bursts, be sure to take three days to come to the decision about heading for high ground. The safety measures *worked* even though the operators practically did everything they could to screw things up.

Re:Thorium

[Anonymous Coward]

Except there WAS a demonstration LFTR reactor built at Los Alamos and operated for several years back in the 50s and 60s.

LFTR has several advantages over Uranium based reactors.

• Thorium is a thousand times more abundant than fuel-grade Uranium.
• We have enough Thorium inside the continental US to supply our energy needs for millenia.
• LFTR reactors produce a tiny fraction of the nuclear "waste" that Uranium based reactors do.
• LFTR reactors have a simpler cooling requirement than conventional reactors (at a cost of a more complex chemical reprocessing requirement).
• The nuclear reaction in a LFTR reactor is inherently thermaly self-regulating (similar to pebble-bed reactor design); i.e., no nuclear runaway reaction.
• The LFTR reactor design is failsafe. In the event of an accident, the Thorium fuel drains out of the reactor into a storage tank and the reaction STOPS.

We don't have to change EVERYTHING for Thorium RIGHT NOW, but maybe we should be start investigating LFTR technology again so that a decade or two from now so we WILL HAVE a safer, more reliable alternative to Uranium based reactors.

Yeah, I know, LFTR reactor is redundant.