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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.
What's with the LFTR design, is that just some crackpot idea or is is the canine testicles?
... 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.
I thought I saw this supposedly quite safe "Pebble Bed" small-scale reactor design reported on then linked to by Slashdot some time ago, but I don't see it mentioned in the article. I am not having luck finding it in the Slashdot search either. Did I dream that? One of the important features of it was that it was "walk-away safe" - as in, were the cooling system to catastrophically fail, it could not achieve "meltdown." In fact, it could be safely repaired and re-started with very little material damage whatsoever.
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.
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.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Forgot to add 'In the US'. Lots of other countries are still using it and building new ones.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
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.
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/ff_new_nukes/
KTHXBYE.
(But seriously, seems like a good idea from what I've read.)
.: Max Romantschuk
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.
The problem with sodium is that if it ever cools, it solidifies. If you ever go offline, you need to continuously heat and pump your sodium coolant to keep it from freezing. Maintenance on the system is tricky, at best. So I hear.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
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.
Tourist buses frequently crash in Pripyat.
They are already trying to add two new reactors to the Turkey Point nuclear plant south of Miami. http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/col/turkey-point.html
Why does everyone think of nuclear power (or coal, or natural gas, or renewables) and oil as some sort of zero-sum game? Oil is used for three things mainly: transportation fuel, heating fuel in some parts of the country, and as a raw material for industrial processes. Nuclear power is good for one thing: generating electricity. While I will admit that there is plenty of small ways that we can trade off oil usage for nuclear-generated electricity, there aren't many wholesale ways of reducing oil consumption via nuclear. Are you going to heat your New England home with nuclear electricity? Will you create plastics feedstock from nuclear electricity? Even though in both cases one can do these things, we aren't about to because it's cheaper to do them using oil.
The big one is electricity, and I for one am pessimistic that we'll see a wholesale shift away from gasoline/diesel (i.e., more than 1/3 of all vehicles on the road propelled by electrical power)in anything less than 25 years.
And even then, it's not like we'll magically be trading nuclear electricity off for only imported oil. Oil is a global commodity. The determining factor of where the U.S. gets its oil from is where how much it costs. If it's cheaper or more profitable to bring it by tanker from the Middle East than it is to pull it from the Gulf of Mexico, you can bet that is where we'll get most of it. In truth, where does the U.S. import most of its oil from? Canada. Mexico provides us with as much oil as Saudi Arabia. We get more from non-OPEC nations than we do from OPEC [lots of stats here]. I am glad that the summary used the term "dependence on oil" rather than the more politically useful "foreign oil". I just wish that everyone else could wrap their head around it.
To think that Carter was the last President that was an Engineer !! Now all we have are lawyers
G
The first is almost ready (was approved in 2002) and 2 more have been recently approved by parliament. The current 4 plants produce a total of 2721 MW, which is 30% of the total finnish electrical power, and the fifth, soon to be put into use (around 2012 - ok, soonish), will add another 1600 MW. The other two, recently approved, plants would add about 1400-1500 MW each.
The interesting thing is, the plants were approved mostly based on economic criteria, but everybody had in the back of their had the higher market stability of the fuel prices for nuke plants, and the independence on, shall we say, problem-prone sources (arab countires and russia). The group that lobbied against the plants proposed building natural gas plants, fueled by gas imported from Russia. After Russia used their natural gas supply as a political weapon, that group got pretty much stunted (even though it's not politically correct to say so). By the way, Libya used their natural gas as a weapon, too, for instance against Croatia, when that country criticized the PLO at the UN. Just in case you think Russia is the only country engaging in such tactics.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
On the other hand you have a lot of coal (85% of the electricity production plus exports). And coal by a conservative estimate kills 3 or 4 times the number of people who died due to Chernobyl each year!
People die from Chernobyl each year?
English is fun!
And every year, coal kills 3 or 4 times the number of people who died due to Chernobyl!
I have no idea if it's true, but at least that sentence might make more sense to you.
You have to keep killing the zombies. They just get up again after some time.
Nuclear IS back.
~Sticky
why thousands of small to medium size hydro-electric side diversion dams aren't built on all the rivers in the USA where it makes sense? Not sexy enough? Boring technology? Just works? Robust? Too decentralized and under local control? Too much redundancy in case one goes down? Too little radiation or dependence on foreign powers? What? What?!
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Same discussion in europe as well.
What pains me is that facts don't matter, ideology does. We want to get out of nuclear power, says a majority here in Germany, but it leads to no new nuclear power plants being built. Which sounds fine until you realize that it means the old ones continue to run. And run. And run. The most unsafe ones, some built in the 1960s.
Would I rather not have something that can blow up horribly in my neighbourhood? Uh, yeah. But given the choice between a 1960 reactor that is long past its expected life span, and a new more modern one, why are we picking the 1960s?
Ideology, plain and simple. Stupidity and greed.
To the power companies, the old ones are more profitable - no expenses building a new one, but full profit.
To the politicians, they don't want to be seen "supporting" nuclear power by issuing permissions for new plants. But they don't want to turn down the briber^H^H^Hlobbyists, either and not endanger the power supply, so they make - the worst choice possible. Congratulations.
Why are we paying these guys, again? To represent us? A twit and a braindead hooker could do better.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I find it hard to get excited for any of this news. They haven't built a new nuclear plant in the US in over 30 years and they have been touting these new licenses for at least the last 5 years. Yet there has been no progress.
Break some ground, pour some concrete, and order the reactor steel from Japan (we no longer have the ability domestically) and perhaps I'll get excited.
I think the problem is that a little marketing is needed, in a good (is that possible?) way. Say for a chemical spill, and you have the best case scenario in that it is self contained, not leaking into the ground water, etc. That spill will be as toxic now, as next week, as next month, as next year, as one hundred years from now. If it's leaking allover the place, well then you're just spreading the toxins around, hopefully (as in the best case) it will dilute enough in the long run that everyone get's a little bit of cancer, etc, rather than having community cancer clusters, animal and baby deformities, sterility, etc. In contrast with with nuclear waste, the problem solves and cleans itself, becoming exponentially _less_ dangerous each half-life.
:)
On a side note, it's perhaps time to answer the age old question: "If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?". Cameco (CCJ) is the biggest uranium producer in the world, and it's stock is just coming off it's 52 week lows so it maybe a good time to get in if this 'nuclear revival' is taking place, or perhaps not, who knows.
Oh come on... someone modded this interesting? All you have to do to prove the AC wrong is point toward that big glowing ball in the sky.
I'd drop a pebble bed reactor in my back yard if I could. It'd pay for itself over the lifetime of the reactor, lead to a much more robust power grid if enough people did it and generate far less pollution overall. Plus you get to see the neighborhood association pop blood vessels when you apply for the zoning, how cool is that?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=50308
Are you serious? This is news now? Where has the author been for the past,oh let's say, 5+ years? The nuclear renaissance has been in full swing for a while. The NRC and nuclear companies are hiring like crazy. New nuclear engineering programs are starting up all over the place.
I live about 40 miles from a nuclear plant and I'd be fine with another one closer, if it's of the more modern designs. If the environuts and scaremongering weren't so successful at misleading people, we'd be farther ahead at installing more advanced designs that produce less waste and even reuse other waste. And as long as the waste is stored safely after coming out of the more advanced designs that use it up more effectively, I would be fine with that too. I'm sure there are lots of other people that would feel the same way if they knew the facts about the situation and the relative merits vs coal, which is what we use most of currently. The part about the high paying jobs doesn't hurt either.
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
The Hyperian has a 10 year life, not a 5 year one.
Still, there's a signficant economy of scale here, at 70MW a pop you'd be shipping huge amounts of reactors around.
You're not going to be producing reactors that make 20 times the power off an assembly line, but it's 20X the power at not 20X the cost.
These smaller reactors are good for smaller communities in remote areas. Up in Alaska, I'd go so far as to wire up the towns for steam/hot water heating using 'waste heat'. 70 MW of electricity likely means ~140MW of waste heat, which can be used to heat homes and keep main roads free of ice and snow.
I don't read AC A human right
Get out of here STALKER
No question about it, you can talk about it, even hope and plan for it. But no way ever is construction going to start.
The small little thing called the "environmental impact study" is where it all comes to a stop. Sure, the first study says it is practical and has minimal impact. Then the protests and questions start. The second study is called for to address this. Then more protests. The third or forth study is where things begin to really show throught - the government would really like to be behind it, but it wouldn't be "popular" in all the right circles. Hence, the government isn't going to block the protesters from the process.
So no reactor will be built. End of story.
Unless and until the government says to the environmental wackos to sit down, shut up and allow the country to move forward very little in terms of electric power generation is going to change. There will be no large plants built and all you will see is a bunch of small (less than 1,000 MW) "peaker" plants being built - usually with an unbelievably long public comment and environmental impact study period.
I'll help with that marketing -- I'm no stranger to nuclear issues as my name here implies. I would gladly store and guard a few drums of really hot (the shorter half life stuff) waste here -- I'd put thermocouples or the moral equivalent into it and supplement my already existing off the grid alternative power system nicely. And have a nice source of things to calibrate my gamma ray spectrometer from. As has been pointed out -- it wouldn't take that many guys like me to handle all the hot stuff there is, and it will go dead fairly quickly anyway. See http://www.coultersmithing.com/
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
What an odd article. For example:
"To meet such costs, the operator would need a guarantee of constant electricity prices around 65 euros (88.9 dollars) per Mw/hour for a long period of time"
thats 9 cents a kilowatt. That's not really that expensive. In the US anyways.
They also do weird comparisons. The compare build tie to a gas plant the produces 1/3 the power. But dont' talk about longevity of the two plants.
Anyways, the economic risk can be offset a number of ways.
Cost to consumer goes up directly or through taxes, construction cost guarantee, deferred loans, and so on.
It also show that perhaps the should be build by the government and not the private sector.
of course referring to an IPS article on this issue is laughable.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Time for a nuclear accident so that the President can flip-flop on this and ban all nuclear power like he's repeatedly (three times now) tried to stop off-shore oil drilling. Then his pals who've invested in "green energy" and carbon credits will hit their pay day.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I'm pretty sure 1.21 gigawatts ought to be enough for anybody.
Actually the longer the half-life, the fewer places there are to store nuclear waste safely. We live on a dynamic planet with lots of powerful geologic processes that operate over long time spans.
Most nuclear waste today is not stored safely at all, geologically speaking. It's stored at the power plant where it was created. It's still there because it has been so hard to find anyplace else that is sufficiently safe for everyone to be ok storing it there.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
The real issue with nuclear power is less the fact that environmentalists are against it and more that nuclear power simply isn't very profitable. The nuclear industry has a sordid history of colossal engineering failures, cost overruns, and the like... which means investors are really leery of ponying up the enormous amount of cash required to get one off the ground. Remember that a few months ago the gov't announced huge new load guarantees to the nuclear industry? And now we're seeing a bunch of interest in new nuclear plants? Hint: these two events are related more than coincidentally.
The loan guarantee thing isn't bad, but what would be even better would be to get a damn cap & trade or carbon taxation plan going. That would cut the legs out from under the coal fired electricity business, and provide a boost to nuclear, solar and wind. Then we could stop knocking down entire mountains and spewing loads of pollutants into the atmosphere. The market would sort out the best mix among the big three non-fossil power sources.
Lots (and lots) of plug-in hybrids and straight up electrics are going to be hitting showrooms within the next few years - the Nissan Leaf is all-electric, and the Chevy Volt is a plug-in hybrid. Switching to electricity for transportation (at least a big chunk of it) will be easy.
100,000,000 gallons of nuclear waste in the US
Seems like a lot, until you realize it would all fit in a cube ~230 feet (71 meters) to a side. Assuming you were dumb and didn't reprocess it into usable fuel instead.
-- Terry
China currently has 11 nuclear power plants generating 9.1 GWe. There are at least 9 nuclear power plants in China currently under construction. Xu Yuming, executive director of the China Nuclear Energy Association, said in Beijing on July 6, that China plans at least 60 new reactors by 2020. The World Nuclear Association expects China to ramp up to at least 85 GWe by 2020. Xinhua has reported that nuclear plants provide 2.3% of China's power today and the proportion is planned to rise to 16% by 2030.
Here are some sources:
Uranium Bottoming as China Boosts Stockpiles, China ups targeted nuclear power share from 4% to 5% for 2020.
Yes, YOU! FREEZE!
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Not a comment on whether I agree or disagree with the nuclear reprocessing issue, but there's another important thing missed from the Carter decisions that is often overlooked.
Carter put solar panels on the White House, and offered a sizable tax credit for buying solar panels.
Reagan had the solar panels removed and ended the tax credit, putting many solar panel companies out of business.
I often wonder what the country would look like if we had pro-solar presidents from Carter until now. My guess is that we wouldn't be having any energy issues at all, solar panels would be cheap and common and painted or rolled onto almost every surface, and that battery technology would have advanced alongside the widespread use of solar.
Who knows, I could be wrong:), but every time I think about Reagan removing the solar panels from the White House, it just pisses me off.
My understanding is Integral Fast Reactors can't breed nuclear bomb material because the plutonium is mixed in with caesium and other junk. It's not 'clean' enough, and basically there are plenty of cheaper ways to build bombs. The power / bombs link is tenuous at best. Many countries that built the bomb did so before building nuclear power, and many countries today that built nuclear power don't have bombs. Oh, and as 93% of the world's Co2 comes from countries that ALREADY have the bomb, what exactly would we gain by banning IFR's? I happen to think Fast Breeders are the answer to peak oil, global warming and nuclear waste! Besides, 10% of USA electricity comes from burning old Soviet Warheads: nuclear power is literally eating nuclear bombs.
If you are concerned about energy security, independence from imported oil, peak oil, climate change, coal particulate pollution and lung disease, heck, IF YOU ARE CONCERNED ABOUT NUCLEAR WASTE then this is even MORE of a reason to build a whole generation of GenIV reactors!
According to environmental scientist Professor Barry Brook, today's waste could run the world for 500 years if we built enough IFR's. Who knows what energy technologies we'd have by then? But for now, we owe it to our great grandchildren to solve climate change by burning today's nuclear waste. Viewed in this light, nuclear waste is not the problem but the solution!!!
http://bravenewclimate.com/
Frontline has a good essay on Carter's decision and the reasoning behind it. It was not a simplistic, stupid decision, it was reasonable based on the facts returned by the Nuclear Energy Policy Study Group, and it's hard to argue anything has changed since then. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/readings/keeny.html
... but Cherenkov radiation. [Checks] Definitely ; Cherenkov radiation is from the interaction of a particle and any medium it passes through ; bremsstrahlung radiation is from the interaction of a charged particle and the electromagnetic fields of other charged particles or an externally imposed field.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
I guess I'm wondering how many countries were planning to break into Y-12 in Tennessee to get their weapons grade plutonium, but that damn Jimmy Carter foiled their plans with an executive order so now they have to breed it themselves... ?
This was supposed to be a "lead by example" thing, and it was a "look at those fools causing problems for themselves" thing.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
>Given the long lifespan of nuclear power plants
The plants don't actually have long life spans, what's happening is that the government keeps re-licensing them long after their original shelf life has passed. That is, they'll do that until one of the plants on an over-extended lifetime pops. Maybe then we'll stop, like how we didn't start dealing with space shuttle foam damage until we blew up a shuttle.
Many of the still-operating pressurized water reactors have materials in their structure (containment steel, piping in the "hot" side of the water systems, etc.) that are in terrifyingly bad shape. The plants are kept running since it's obvious that once you shut them down, there's no income from them and big decommissioning costs kick in. We'd finally have to find out what it really costs to fully decommission a plant; we'd also find out how the hell to do it, because nobody knows how we'll cut up a huge, very "hot" mass of steel and concrete, how we'll dispose of the chunks, how we'll dispose of the spent fuel and low level waste, or (and this is my favorite part) how we'll dispose of all the tools that became "hot" from cutting up the plant.
So, to prevent the true cost of a decommissioning from becoming apparent (and also to hide that we have no clue HOW to do it), owners just don't decommission their plants. The owners of the Millstone plants in Connecticut shut down Millstone Unit 1 because even they couldn't ignore the facts and justify the BS anymore (the exception that proves the rule). But Unit 1 is just sitting there because the owners don't want to add to the $680 million they've spent so far on decommissioning (and, again, because they have no idea what to do next, or how).
Millstone 1's owners are frantically trying to get their decommissioning costs picked up by the Connecticut or federal governments, or by customers. They seem to believe that anybody but the themselves should be responsible for their mess.
Across the industry, decommissioning costs were not properly (if at all) figured in. Ever. Because the owners and NRC knew that good estimates render the actual cost of plant output economically non-viable. That's true, and you're going to have to get used to it. And remember, this is the industry that repeatedly told us the juice from these plants would be "too cheap to meter".
I give them credit for an elegant and simple solution (prevent decommissioning costs by not decommissioning), but the consequences are astounding and dangerous. Eventually, one of these old plants is going to fail catastrophically.
So, it's more expensive to shut a nuke down, that is, until some old plant finally screws the pooch because the neutron-embrittled steel in the containment fails (or whatever error cascade actually occurs), all hell breaks loose, and we find out what THAT costs...
Design life on Millstone 2 was supposed to be 25 years plus or minus; it's still chugging away (licensed now until 2035, so unless it blows up it will run more than twice as long as it was designed to!) and scaring the hell out of those of us who understand what's actually going on in all the materials under bombardment from the neutron flux.
Oh, did I mention that they cranked up the output way above what it was designed for?
So, let's see: far older than its design life and pushed way beyond spec; sure, that'll be fine. What could possibly go wrong?
Does this blind-faith idiocy bother anybody else who understands how engineering is SUPPOSED to be done?
Things DO GO WRONG when pushed beyond limits, and here is a wonderful example, in recent real-life words, of what happens when such pushing or corner-cutting comes back to bite you:
"Are you fucking happy? Are you fucking happy? The rig's on fire! I told you this was gonna happen. [pause] I am fucking calm! You realize the rig is burning?" - James Harrell, Transocean installation manager, Deepwater Horizon.
Timeline - Millstone Unit 2
Construction Permit Issued: December 11, 1970
Final S
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