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Could the US Phase Out Nuclear Power?
mdsolar writes "In the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, [German Chancellor] Merkel announced that her country would close all of its 17 existing reactors by 2022. Other nations, including Japan, Italy, and Switzerland, have announced plans to pare back nuclear power, but none have gone as far as Germany, the world's fourth-largest economy. Merkel vows to replace nuclear power with alternatives that do not increase greenhouse gases or shackle the economic growth. Could the US do the same? An increasing number of reports suggest it is not beyond the realm of possibility, and Germany could provide a road map."
No.
And neither can Germany.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
No. This is just another anti-nuclear FUD article from mdsolar. Secondly, if the US did phase it out what exactly is going to replace it? More coal plants? Yeah, that sounds like a brilliant plan but would be an extremely amusing backfire from the anti-nuke nuts campaign.
What the hell are they going to replace it with? More fossil fuels?
Sunshine and wind aren't going to meet any nation's energy demands with current technology.
Can we stop being scared of fission please. Yes it will kill people so will coal solar wind hydro etc. Please can we live in the real world where people die. Once we do that we can figure out that fission is the next to least bad option next to hydro. Since nearly all the potential hydro is tapped out already it's the only currently viable option.
No sir I dont like it.
Why would they want to?
It's easy to panic about whatever the latest disaster was rather than actually rationally evaluate the trade-offs of various options.
Of course we could. It might be painful and messy, but we could. The more relevant question: *should* the US phase out nuclear power?
...and the coal industry would be thrilled.
See: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html
And you men and half of the Internet as well are just as bad. We sit here, considering Wikipedia the all-in-all. We consider the greatest end of science is the classification of past data. It is important, but is there no further work to be done? We're receding and forgetting, don't you see? Here in the America they've lost nuclear power. In Japan, a power plant has undergone meltdown because of poor repairs, and the Chancellor of the Empire complains that nuclear technicians are scarce. And the solution? To train new ones? Never! Instead they're to restrict nuclear power.
--Salvor Hardin, paraphrased
The most rational, prudent, safe, and progressive thing to do would be to phase out the current, 1st generation plants, but simultaneously remove, insofar as possible, obstacles to safer 2nd / 3rd generation designs such as CANDU.
Nonaggression works!
I think you'll find the answers to those are radically different. Could we? Sure, with enough expense ( time, effort and currency ), we absolutely could.
Should we? Absolutely not. Japan showed us what could go wrong with old designs and bad policies. We paid for those lessons, it'd be irresponsible to throw them away.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Germany will fill the gap using dung fired power plants using all the horse crap from the state mandated horse based transportation system. Though of course, fossil fuel based transportation will remain available to citizens making above a certain amount of Deutschmarks and the political class since they have important business to conduct. All nice and tidy, and somewhere in all that crap, there's a pony!
What would Richard Feynman do, if he were here right now? He'd do some math and he'd follow through!
But if we use breeder reactors that burn the plutonium then the only place at risk is the plant itself.. It's our backasswards old plants that are the problem, not modern nuclear plants.
It's like arguing against modern hybrid or electric cars because ones built in the 70's were gas hogs.
I only ask that if they get rid of nuclear, they also say no more new coal plants. Tit for tat and all that.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
How the hell does anyone get killed by wind, unless they fall off a tower? And deaths/megawatt hour for nuclear are hard to figure, as it may take years to die from radiation exposure, and it can manifest itself in a number of ways. Plus there's the whole issue of rendering a large area uninhabitable for generations.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
The US hasn't built a new plant since TMI. As plants are decommissioned they're being replaced with coal and Natural gas plants.
What really needs to happen is a complete phase out of the older generation nuclear power plants and a phase in of the next generation of nuclear power. From there, we use the knowledge gained from the reactor replacements to build the future generation plants.
Sitting back and letting our plants get older and older instead of replacing them on schedule is like sitting on a time bomb.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
There are plenty of reactor designs that do not need Pu in the fuel. Thorium reactors come to mind. To boot, thorium is relatively cheap, and the biggest deposits are in countries that have decent infrastructure.
There are other designs that do not use plutonium in any, shape, or form. TWR designs come to mind. In fact, most Gen IV designs are similar. No way these designs are going to be spitting any Pu amounts, much less enough to make it useful for terrorists.
I'm sure you know this, as a nuclear engineer.
You mean, like Spain does? Oh, wait, Spain exports energy to France, and last year over half of its energy production was from renewable resources.
Actually, Spain imported 2% of its energy from France, and gets 20% of its domestic power from nuclear plants:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Spain.
-- Terry
We could also, if we wished, eradicate widespread vaccination and the refrigeration of food.
I was going to read your comment, but I was so weirded out by the fact that somebody on the Internet indents paragraphs.
As a member of the weapon's effect test group in Eniwetok my buddy and I put on coveralls and walked a few hundred years to ground zero to kick around the glass slag. We weren't supposed to but that's been years ago. I'm now 84. Have COPD related to partly to smoking but aside from that I'm healthy as a horse. The dangers of radiation are overblown in the extreme in my view. Smoking is FAR more dangerous!
That is how they die for the most part. Same for roof mounted solar.
Hydro power makes large areas uninhabitable for as long as you want power. Ask the folks that live in the area flooded for the three gorges damn all about that.
If we want to be sure that we don't want one of our major cities to be blown up one day, we should shut down nuclear power
Of course! It is not like there are THOUSANDS of NUCLEAR WEAPONS ready to do actual damage at moments notice. No sir!! After all, nuclear power produces plutonium so efficiently that the highly inefficient US military decided to make their own plutonium pits instead for these weapons..
And of course plutonium cannot be used as a fuel because using that instead of virgin uranium makes bunnies cry.
proliferation point of view, with respect to the risk of nuclear terrorism
I say we go further. burn all physics books!, especially those ones that deal with particle and nuclear physics. No one needs to know about cross sections. It is the devils knowledge!!
On a more serious note, anyone that brings up proliferation as a significant problem is a little crazy. You know, there are these things like radiation detectors that can detect a few atoms of contamination. I think they would detect a nuclear reactor worth of fuel going missing... It is not easy to build a nuclear weapon even though conceptually it seems so. An effective plutonium device is very difficult to produce and a "dirty bomb" is the most useless type of a bomb and it is easy to clean up.
If you want to worry about proliferation, worry about chemical and biological agents because these happened and are likely to happen again.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_anthrax_attacks
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarin_gas_attack_on_the_Tokyo_subway
Here's a nice list of attempting smuggling of nuclear stuff. Basically all after USSR fell apart. None of these were sourced from nuclear energy. They call came from nuclear weapons programs.
http://articles.latimes.com/keyword/smuggling-russia
PS. This was mostly sarcasm, but since mdsolar is probably modding with 10 accounts, this will get -1 anyway ;)
And finally, nuclear energy from Uranium will not become exhausted for at least 1000 years. With fusion, nuclear will be permanent base load, unless we nuke ourselves over coal/oil/gas/food/water (take your pick) to kingdom come..
Power reactors do not produce plutonium for bombs. A power reactor fuel cycle produces plutonium that contains a substantial percentage of the isotopes Pu240 and Pu242. These are fine for reactor fuel, but they have a high spontaneous fission rate, which makes them very bad for bombs. (Hint: Neither India nor Pakistan used plutonium from their power reactors to make their bombs -- they both went to the great trouble and expense of building special-purpose breeder reactors. Ask yourself why.)
This is yet another FUD article on nuclear power submitted by mdsolar. I personally have nothing against publicizing the dangers of nuclear power, but this should be done in a fair way. User mdsolar has repeatedly posted FUD articles on nuclear power and frequently gets them through because of the mass volume of his submissions and the lack of attention paid by the moderators to specific users' agendas.
mdsolar, reveal yourself. What is your viable plan for generating electricity once you have wiped all the reactors off the map? How do you plan on dealing with the decommissioning and waste? Could you try easing up and submitting articles not chock-full of such alarmist banter? Are you a BP employee?
One also has to look at the high level nuclear waste. There isn't that much of it. On a pragmatic basis, toss it in a breeder reactor and keep using it until it turns to lead.
You underscored a problem. People go batshit when they hear the word "nuclear". Take a MRI for example. It used to be called NMRI. However, people heard the first word in that abbreviation and thought that their body's component atoms would wind up ripped apart like a bad Star Trek transporter malfunction if they were scanned by such a device.
It is almost amazing that when the world needs more energy (more people, and more energy per person), the voices that are loudest and most often listened to are ones which want to reduce the available sources of energy.
My question is, why do people want to be still stuck on oil for transportation and coal for the grid in 20-40 years? Why is dirty as all get-out lignite coal (the mainstay of most coal plants) viewed as the clean and safe solution. Why do people state that nuclear isn't a 100% fix, so don't bother?
I wouldn't say that the Germans are smarter than anyone else, they just appreciate damn fine engineering.
In a debate on TED talks, taking the pro-nuclear side, Stuart Brand said something that sums up the whole thing: "I am not so much pro-nuclear as I am pro-arithmetic."
The anti-nukes keep making assertions about how we "don't need nuclear or fossil fuels" that are violations of basic arithmetic.
Assuming we're to be permitted to continue having a technological civilization, of course, which is not, perhaps, a given.
Reading through the first and second pages comes up with such treats as "Fukushima meltdown could be template for terror", "sustainability experts: nuclear energy not essential", "radiation understated after quake" and "nuclear in 2018 more expensive than solar PV today". Definitely an agenda there, especially with the abuse of the word 'terror', regardless of whether or not the stories are credible.
Merkel vows to replace nuclear power with alternatives that do not increase greenhouse gases or shackle the economic growth
Pixie dust and unicorn piss?
I was watching a Nova documentary on the weekend about the issue of power in the US. it came out after Fukushima and there was this one guy who used to be an activist against nuclear power in the 70's talking about it. He said something along the line of even after the Fukushima disaster it's still a viable solution.
The documentary went on to show how newer models were being built to be safer. They were starting to standardize and simplify their models of plants to make them more safe. One thing for instance was the water tanks were above the reactors so if there was a complete loss of power and diesel generators failed gravity would still be able to pump cooling water into the reactor for a period of time(until the tank runs out something like 1-3 days).
The reactors that are a problem are the ones built in the 70's these need to be phased out, the U.S. hasn't built a new reactor since it was banned in the 70's. This scares the hell out of me. Proper construction and disposal of waste could be a lot cleaner than coal.
Big Oil knows its stuff, and the fear campaign is working, and has worked since even before 3MI. The guys know that nuclear power would kill Big Oil.
Why? Reactions that are (as of now) energy expensive could be done on massive scales. Desalinate water, pull CO2 from the air, combine the two in a number of reactions, and one can get ethanol. Combine a reactor and a thermal depolymerization plant (which essentially "boils" plastic to short chain carbon atoms), and gasoline would be ready to be used from the sewage plants and garbage cans.
Eventually Big Oil will have to move to another energy source, as oil is becoming more and more expensive to obtain. We have passed peak oil a long time past. However, cheap, polluting lignite coal is abundant, and until that crap (which arguably is one of the worst energy sources out there) is gone, Big Coal will still have their boot on the nuclear power industry's neck.
I live above the Marcellus Shale gas formation.
Given the rampant groundwater and stream contamination resulting from hydrofracturing operations south of me in Pennsylvania - I'll take a brand-new modern nuke plant in my area over the commencement of gas drilling operations without any hesitation.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Funnily enough Germany is actually exporting solar power to France, because nuclear power can't provide power during peak hours and solar does. Germany is one of the biggest solar producers, with a capacity of almost 17GW.
http://www.energydelta.org/en/mainmenu/edi-intelligence/latest-energy-news/special-report-solar-power-aids-german-nuclear-shutdown
A couple comments on this.
87% of all statistics are made up on the spot. Twenty bucks says that GPs assertion that nuclear is a tenth the cost of solar is one of them.
Can't do attitude. Love it.
Um, Dimock?
This is one of the key reasons I am a much bigger supporter of the nuclear industry than the gas industry. The nuclear industry admits to their mistakes and constantly strives to improve safety - look at the vast improvements in safety design from BWR to ABWR to ESBWR even before the first BWR accident in history. When an accident occurs, changes are made to prevent it from happening again.
The gas industry, on the other hand, simply says "we are safe". They won't tell you what is within the fracturing fluid, they won't admit when they've fucked up and deny it every turn, and of course - since they believe (or at least would like us to believe) they're safe and all that groundwater contamination and spills never happened, they don't make any safety improvements.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?