Slashdot Mirror
Americans Favor Moratorium On New Nuclear Reactors
An anonymous reader writes "While a drop in public support for nuclear power would be expected after an incident like the Fukushima reactor crisis, the nuclear disaster in Japan has triggered a much stronger response among Americans. When Japan — the nation that President Obama held up as an example of safe nuclear power being used on a large-scale basis — is unable to effectively control its considerable downside, Americans are understandably leery about the same technology being used even more extensively in this nation. And safety concerns about the existing nuclear plants also deserve serious attention."
Seeing a large nuclear disaster has made people wary of nuclear power.. now that's just shocking!
All seriousness though, between the American media fear mongering and the fact that there is actually something to be afraid of, this isn't too surprising.
I still personally think that nuclear power is the best bet. I imagine (and this is an uneducated opinion) all the junk coal and oil plants pump out under regular circumstances is probably going to kill more people than the japan nuclear crisis over the long run, and alternative energy just isn't close enough for people to wait.
I am beginning to think that my fellow Americans are afraid of success. We claim we want energy independence, but do very little to achieve it, despite valid and workable options staring us in the face. New reactors are precisely what we need in this situation (with more modern safety features compared to the reactors in Japan as well as decreasing our reliance on foreign energy).
With something like 20% of the US's electricity presently coming from nuclear power and *all* of those reactors approaching or already past their lifespan, all those Americans need to decide what exactly they want to replace them with.
While certainly worrisome, please keep in mind:
* Nobody has actually died from this incident yet. (Versus regular deaths in coal mines, etc.)
* The incident can be learned from and other reactors can be improved accordingly. (Again versus the situation in many coal mines, etc. which are unlikely to see any further improvement.) In fact, many claim the risks of these particular reactors were known but not acted upon, something which can be handled with stricter rules.
Poorly informed people, lead by sensationalist news stories, when asked leading questions, will give obvious answers.
moratorium, until we have at least a 20% wind power and 10% solar power in the energy mix.
What? Do you think that a truck rolls up and sets up the ACME Nuclear Power Station and they're rock'in? It takes years for a nuke plant to come on line. In the meantime, the solar and wind and whatever will have to be developed and implemented.
This just disgusts me. The ignorant public (who can blame them since all their info is from TV and shit websites) will keep nuclear on the sidelines for decades.
We have the technology for much safer and nearly unlimited nuclear power. Only hurdle is how to deploy. What I am talking about is TWR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor) and LFTR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor). They "burn" waste from current reactors, can be shut-of nearly instantly, no water cooling, and a smaller footprint and cost. Now we have to overcome this bad publicity provided by the old technology.
Journal
I find it amusing how US media is worried about Fukushima nuclear contamination of Japan and surrounding arrea, including US territories or... Europe. They seem to forgot hundreds of nuclear tests made by the US both in Pacific and continental US. I wonder which event released more radioactive material in the atmosphere, a few hundreds nuclear test or the damaged reactors from Fukushima? (and I'm not even considering detonations over Hiroshima and Nagasaki).
More Britons support the building of new nuclear power stations than oppose it, despite the crisis at Japan's Fukushima plant, an opinion poll says.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Yup. Due to the news media's disgusting exaggeration of the event, , and the 60+ years of "all radiation = bad = kill you dead", a bunch of people who don't understand a thing about nuclear power generation from the 60's, let alone modern reactor technologies are going to browbeat the power industry into the least effectual, most expensive forms of power generation. And it'll be the power industry's fault when power prices skyrocket. It'll also be the power industry's fault when these sources of power fail at maintaining baseline power levels.
Way to fucking go. Decision by committee of imbeciles.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Sorry, but if you think Wind/Solar can be used for baseline power, you're on drugs.
You have NO idea exactly how huge the battery capacity you're suggesting is. Nor how expensive and high-maintenance such an array is. And if you're adverse to the environmental impact of a few tons of recyclable nuclear waste, how adverse are you to the environmental impact of a few megatons of battery medium?
Please put some thought into what you're trying to suggest.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I just got a postcard from 2211, They said to go with solar when we can... all the wind farms permanently damaged the jetstream and now the equator is 180 farenheit and the poles are -200.
Until we get the solar thing figured out, they recommend nuclear power; just try not to use 40-year-old reactors that are built on the ocean and within 150 miles of a major faultline.
The minute gasoline hits $10/gallon. Crude is still on an up trend and the scary thing is this time it's not a bubble, it's a clear trend.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I read contradictory statements regarding this topic.
If the stuff is going to become scarce in 150-200 years or so (these estimates are at current consumption levels but do they really know for sure I doubt it) then I really don't see the point in developing another dead end infrastructure. Esp one that while can be very safe, rarely is in practice (for the usual nontechnical reasons - save money, cut corners, unwisely build in an earthquake zone, ad nauseum).
I mean sure - that's great for us as individuals (until an earthquake strikes that is), but for once let's not foist a new set of problems on our grandchildren.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Those would be the Canadian style reactors, which aren't physically capable of melting down. (Well, technically with a lot of outside assistance and deliberate sabotage, you could force one to melt down, but you'd probably die in the process.)
Unfortunately, our public are just as stupid and uneducated as the American public, and are screaming and pointing at exaggerations of the problems in Japan, and claiming them as proof that all Nuclear everything is bad and going to kill us all, despite any actual facts they might encounter. There are people campaigning to have the Canadian Nuclear plants shut down before "an earthquake causes them to explode just like in Japan", despite:
1) They're on the freakin' Canadian Shield, the largest, most solid tectonic plate on the planet, and we just don't _GET_ earthquakes here past about a 3.0, and those are not centered here, they're from way the hell off at the edges of the plate, usually causing mudslides in Quebec.
2) The reactor design is completely different, and, as you mentioned, the control rods are kept in place by the electric power produced - thus, a failure results in immediate safe shutdown.
3) It wasn't the damn earthquake that broke the reactors. The earthquake didn't damage much at all there, except probably knocking a lot of things off shelves, and giving a few people heart attacks. The damage was when more water than is found in the great lakes got dumped on the reactor buildings and shredded them. Again, our reactors are not anywhere near the ocean, and the great lakes don't have enough water to do that kind of damage, unless you found a way to take the entirety of Lake Erie, and dump it all on the plant at once.
The worst part? People screaming about how dangerous nuclear reactors are, are actually the reason they're still as dangerous as they are. They lobby politicians to make new laws banning research into improving the reactors, and then we're stuck with 1970s technology producing tonnes of toxic waste, because an "environmentalist" screamed "WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!" and got improvements banned/restricted. 'cause nothing says "I'm thinking of the children" quite as well as sticking them with a massive pile of radioactive waste that didn't need to be there, if it hadn't been for some moronic busybody declaring that things were bad.
Actually, if not a THICK layer of red tape, SSTAR and HPM type reactors could be deployed exactly like that.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Any chance safe nuclear power has is set back when governments lie about risks or the extent of any accidents. The USSR government lied about the safety of nuclear plants and then lied to cover up the extent of Chernobyl. Residents of the Ukraine heard about the disaster from the BBC days before their own government. I heard this first hand from friends of mine who lived in Kiev at the time. The government and power company in Japan is lying through omission about the extent of the ongoing danger in Japan. They have only been forthcoming when outed by foreign media.
I like nuclear power. I think it is safer than belching radioactivity into the air from burning coal. However, nuclear power has a long track record of official deception and lies that will make it harder to have a reasonable discussion about moving ahead with safe and zero carbon nuclear options in the future.
I'd say it is the fault of the nuclear industry for failing to educate the masses that there are choices now besides the big ass clunky reactors like Japan has.
With the small Thorium reactors you can have a reactor in a shipping crate, just bury it when you are finished with it and which would power a decent medium sized city easily and you can simply add more as needed. With the smaller size comes much less risk and they would be much easier to harden to survive even the kind of unpredictable catastrophes like struck Japan, and they also need to be showing how well our current reactors are doing even though most are 40+ years old.
So if you want someone to blame blame the nuclear industry, because if they were educating the masses on their options instead of singing "oh poor me" or completely ignoring the public they might have a more favorable outlook.
Also having a CEO that isn't a greedy pussy and bragged about having his family home in sight of the reactor might do wonders, as it never ceases to amaze me how many CEOs talk about how nice their plants are and then live as far away from them as possible. Putting their asses with their mouths are certainly wouldn't hurt their image none.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Fusion is a great long term proposition, even if we never learn how to make a reactor other than the one we are orbiting, but I think we will. The thorium won't run out before we figure out fusion. But right now we need to be worried about if fossil fuels will run out before we get the thorium reactors built, not whether they will be prone to the same incidents seen in 30yr old reactors essentially designed as nuclear weapons refineries.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
I decided to try to start learning about nuclear power a little over a year ago, driven mostly by concerns about waste disposal, and safety.
One of the things I've learned is that current reactor designs only use a tiny, tiny percent of fuel potential of the Uranium - basically, about 1 percent.
So, one option is that we keep using the current fuel cycle for another 150-200 years, then when Uranium gets scarce, we start using breeder reactors, which 'unlock' the fuel potential of the remaining 99% of the Uranium which remains in our 'spent fuel' and 'depleted uranium' tailings.
With breeder reactor technology, after extracting 1% of the energy for about 250 years (we've already been using reactors for over 50 years, so the clock has already started), we should be able to get something like 99 * 250 years times more energy (assuming energy consumption levels remain about the same; that's a dubious assumption, but provides at least a good starting point; it also assumes the breeders can consume the full 99% of remaining U-238, which might not, in practice, actually be true - there might be some 'losses' in the process, but we should at least be able to extract a large percentage of what remains).
So, that might be something like 20,000 more years worth of power from that Uranium.
Then there's Thorium. Thorium is a metal which is 4 or 5 times more abundant in the earth's crust than Uranium is. Right now, Thorium is a mostly useless 'waste' product from mining operations extracting other rare-earth elements (like Neodymium which is used for very strong permanent magnets in high-tech equipment, including those little earbud speakers for your phone/mp3 player, some designs of electric wind turbines, hard drives [I think], or anything which needs very strong magnets).
Thorium would most likely be used in a type of reactor called a LFTR (most folks pronounce that as "lifter"), which is the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor. A LFTR very efficiently burns the Thorium, extracting virtually 100% of the available energy, so we should have something on the order of 100,000's of years of energy supply using Thorium.
In the end though, we'll probably be using fusion power long before those eventualities. It's hard to say for sure, but I would think that at most, we'll only be using fission reactors for another 100-200 years anyhow.
The alternative is to switch them off, and go back to using oil and gas from foreign sources and coal fired stations. While people *think* nuclear is unsafe, coal mining is *proven* to be unsafe. Just consider the number of miners killed every year.
Somehow, public opinion has managed to come up with the worst possible solution, by not thinking through the consequences of the soundbite press and media and knee-jerk decisions it promotes.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
In the meantime the coal reactors will keep on pumping more radiation into the air than a nuclear station ever would. And mercury, etc.
No sig today...
I am in favor of making the people that run them directly responsible for the consequences. They can't be allowed to profit and then go "aw gee what happened?".
Rick B.
> The increase in background radiation will
> absolutely cause a raise in cancers
Increase in background radiation where? Do you have numbers to cite here?
> there's the matter of radioactive material put into
> environment
Details? Which isotopes are we talking about? Is it worse than your typical coal plant operating for a month?
> Radioactive elements can never be made safe.
That's just not true. For example, oxygen-15 makes itself safe in a matter of hours (half-life of 120s with decay to a stable nitrogen isotope). A large fraction of the radioactive release from Fukushima has been elements like that.
Now maybe what you mean is that long-half-life isotopes can't really be made safe. I agree; the goal would be to prevent them escaping the containment vessel.
> Solar, wind, and hydrothermal are much safer.
I'd _love_ to see numbers for this, on comparable scales.
That is, how safe or unsafe is your typical solar plant generating 0.8GW (which is what each of the reactors at Fukushima was generating)? How safe is your typical wind plant of that capacity? Whole-life numbers (i.e. including construction and maintenance) would be good. Problem is, no one actually tracks that stuff, so we don't have those numbers....
> that would otherwise plague a small area around
> the plant
Uh... you can't have it both ways. If pollution from coal plants (including the radioactive elements they put in the air) is localized to a "small area", how is that not the case for nuclear?
> But since the deaths from nuclear are primarily
> cancers
Citation please?
> The best you can do is mitigate the risks.
This is true for all power-generation setups. The only question is when in the life cycle the highest risks are. For photovoltaic solar, for example, it seems to me that they are primarily at the solar cell production stage and the related industrial accidents. For hydroelectric they're when your dam is operating (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam is a good read). For nuclear there's the initial uranium purification or plutonium production and operating risks. But yes, risk-mitigation is the name of the game. That's how life in general works: walking down stairs is unsafe. People die from it all the time. We do it all the time, but we put in handrails and people who're particularly susceptible to the risk get single-floor houses...
Thing is, with nuclear, you don't want a bet, you need a sure thing, at least in safety. GE has lately been pointing out about the Mark I reactor design, that they've run for 40 years without a major mishap. That's with 23 in the US, and how many others abroad? Let's pretend in total there are 40 of them. Then of 40 Mark I reactors over 40 years only 6 have partially melted down! If we project that out to a century, there will only be a 37.5% failure rate for this design. What, you say they won't run for a century? But the NRC has recertified the plant of this design in Vermont for another 20 years, and issued that after the Japan meltdowns. Surely if they can recertify it now, they can do it twice more.
This is a design over which 3 top GE engineers resigned in the 70s, saying it was unsafe. The AEC at the same time considered ordering all Mark I plants shut down, but declined to because of the political implications for atomic power. And that containment vessel that's been leaking in the Japanese Mark 1s? In the US they're routinely packed with 5 times the spent fuel they were engineered to hold safely, while in Japan they are only at 2-3 times engineered capacity.
Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
I think that opponents of nuclear power create a bit of a paradox by opposing *new* nuclear power plants:
By opposing the construction of new nuclear power plants, whose designs benefit from decades of experience gained with older designs, knowledge about their failure modes, ways to improve cooling with passive cooling systems, etc, you effectively act to keep older, less safe nuclear power plants in operation longer.
So, would you rather be living near a newer, safer plant, or an older, slightly less safe (but still, mostly safe - it took a massive earthquake and tsunami to take out those old Mk 1's in Fukushima) plant?
That said, I certainly think we should (and I'm positive we will) do extensive investigation and analysis of the problems at Fukushima Daiichi, find what lessons can be learned from that, and apply those lessons to both existing, and new reactors.
But it's worth repeating: opposing new nuclear will likely have the effect of keeping older nuclear online longer than it would if there were new nuclear plants built to replace the old ones.
The thing that mostly makes them expensive is the ten years of approval process and the five years of meetings you have to have with the NIMBYs to eventually get to build one.
The only way to convince investors to sign up for all that crap is to promise them a massive return on their money, ie. the debt repayment ends up costing you an order of magnitude more than the sum of the materials/labor needed to actually build it. See Economics of Nuclear Power Plants
Still, you could be supplying the entire country with cheap energy for less than the cost of the banking bailout. Imagine what that could do for the economy...(as opposed to giving the bankers a taste for free money which will just make them do it all over again).
No sig today...
All joking aside, I keep hearing about "pebble bed reactors" as being the Power thats Going to Save the World.
But it's my understanding (correct me if I'm wrong) that nobody on the planet has yet succeeded in building one that's actually worked, let alone a commercially successful one.
If we're going to start making decisions on what kind of energy plant we build based on hos much radiation it throws off, doesn't that mean we'll stop building coal burning plants?
The interesting thing to me is how completely inaccurate all of the media has been in this entire "nuclear crisis". I work for a very large energy company with some of the guys that go visit those nuclear plants every year, most of them with PHDs in Nuclear Physics. Their concerns right now focus mainly on the nuclear fuel rod storage and how they are going to handle the excess amount of heating and unspent fuel rods sitting in empty cooling pools. There are absolutely no major concerns around the radiation levels past the power plants property lines. There has so far been ONE casualty to this accident, and people think that nuclear is unsafe? People in California are taking Potassium Iodide and several of them have gone to the hospital for their stupidity. If you are interested in the information about the nuclear event, and information about the actual power plants and exposure levels? Here's some reading, enjoy :)
Things it would be nice for the news media to have read before they started talking...
GE BWR Manual
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/teachers/03.pdf
GE ESBWR - Latest Design: Unbuilt.
http://www.gepower.com/prod_serv/products/nuclear_energy/en/downloads/gea14429g_esbwr.pdf
Wiki Concerning Accident
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_I_nuclear_accidents
Wiki BWR
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BWR
Spent Nuclear Fuel Calculations
http://repository.lib.ncsu.edu/ir/bitstream/1840.16/2309/1/etd.pdf
Graphic: Plant Status
http://news.nationalpost.com/photo_gallery/japan-earthquake-graphic-nuclear-reactor-status/
Earthquake/ Radiation Levels/ No.2 / Status
http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/03/16/graphics-explaining-japans-nuclear-reactor-disaster/
Tsunami
http://news.nationalpost.com/photo_gallery/japan-earthquake-graphic-where-the-wave-hit/#more-52826
Inside Reactor 2
http://news.nationalpost.com/photo_gallery/japan-earthquake-graphic-inside-fukushima-daiichis-most-worrisome-reactor/
Meltdown Dynamics
http://news.nationalpost.com/photo_gallery/graphic-meltdown-fears/
Exposure Levels
http://news.nationalpost.com/photo_gallery/japan-earthquake-graphic-how-fast-will-radation-kill-you/#more-52930
Earthquake Data/ H2 Blast/ Radiation Spread
http://news.nationalpost.com/photo_gallery/japan-earthquake-graphic-nuclear-plant-blasts/
Nuclear Fission product Decay
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission_product
NRC: Zirconium Cladding Fire
http://www.irss-usa.org/pages/documents/SGS_213-223_response.pdf
Reactor Status: Excel Spreadsheet
http://www.jaif.or.jp/english/news_images/pdf/ENGNEWS01_13002