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Economy Puts US Nuclear Reactors Back In Doubt
eldavojohn writes "Remember those 30 new nuclear reactors the US was slated to build? Those plans have been halted. A few years ago, it seemed like a really good idea to build a bunch of nuclear reactors. The environmental impacts of other energy production methods were becoming well known and the economy was tanking. Well, natural gas is now much cheaper, and as a result it looks like building a single nuclear reactor in Maryland is such a risky venture that Constellation can't reach an agreement with the federal government for the loans it needs to build that reactor. The government wants Constellation to sign an agreement with a local energy provider to ensure they'll recoup at least some of the money on the loan, but Constellation doesn't like the terms. So, the first of those thirty reactors has officially stalled, with no resolution in sight. It looks like it'd take an economic meltdown to trigger nuclear reactor production in the US."
Seriously though, this delay could be a good thing. They were going to build the wrong sort of reactors and perpetuate all the problems of the 1950s atom bomb production plants.
Thorium reactors, pebble beds..? Not on the shortlist. I'm guessing Westinghouse has plenty of lobbyists.
No sig today...
Oil spills are visible to the naked eye and are of course not good either but the time that they are really causing any dangers is short compared to nuclear spills.
Seriously? An ex-roommate of mine became a geologist and researched the effects of arsenic leaching out of coal mine tailings. So... lets both agree a reactor fuel rod is harmless after X million years. Are you seriously trying to tell me that the arsenic in the mine tailings magically disappears in a similar interval of time?
Oil spills are a VERY special case because what came from living things can easily be eaten and broken down by living things. Arsenic and other heavy metals from coal mining don't disappear the same way.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Sadly no commercial power reactor in the US has ever produced nuclear grade material.
The DOD after demanding we go uranium (over the cheaper and more plentiful thorium) to make weapons found it would be difficult to securely and covertly build bombs with commercial reactor output.
Instead they found it far more effective to build dedicated "bomb reactors". We build a dozen or so plutonium piles which dutifully converted uranium into plutonium under the optimum conditions to boost weapons grade yield. Those reactors ran for roughly 3 decades.. Today we have roughly 20,000 dismantled plutonium pits (from obsolete weapons) plus a couple metric tons of bulk plutonium. Once produced and refined the plutonium lasts very very very long time. The US could arm not just itself but the entire world w/ nuclear weapons just from our dismantled pits. There is no need for uranium reactors to produce weapons.
Sadly we are stuck w/ a different kind of legacy. Because of the DOD insistence (for the option they never used) ALL our expertise, knowledge, operateing experience, processes, and ancillary businesses are 100% focused on uranium. Going to thorium would be like starting all over. No company is going to take that kind of multi billion dollar risk without govt support.
If we want to make the switch to thorium it would require a $50 - $100B commitment from US govt to build the research reactors, the testing, the build out to commercial grade plants, then build a dozen or so plants so we get economies of scale plus the training, and the support businesses (fuel processing, etc).
You can't build a single nuclear reactor. The overhead is too large. You need a minimum critical mass of reactors to get economies of scale. There is no way to switch to thorium using free market principles (at least not at current energy prices). The risk vs reward simply isn't there.