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US Approves Two New Nuclear Reactors
JoeRobe writes "For the first time in 30 years, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved licenses to build two new nuclear reactors in Georgia. These are the first licenses to be issued since the Three Mile Island incident in 1979. The pair of facilities will cost $14 billion and produce 2.2 GW of power (able to power ~1 million homes). They will be Westinghouse AP1000 designs, which are the newest reactors approved by the NRC. These models passively cool their fuel rods using condensation and gravity, rather than electricity, preventing the possibility of another Fukushima Daiichi-type meltdown due to loss of power to cooling water pumps." Adds Unknown Lamer: "Expected to begin operation in 2016 or 2017, the pair of new AP1000 reactors will produce around 2GW of power for the southeast. This is the first of the new combined construction and operating licenses ever issued by the NRC; hopefully this bodes well for the many other pending applications."
It's about time we did something to address our growing energy needs.
Now if we can get politicians to quit treating building more oil refining capacity as a political football, we might take another meaningful step toward energy independence.
They'll build them in the South and then send the power up North where the states refuse to allow them.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
I'm so glad the problems in safely disposing of nuclear waste have been solved!
If we are going to adopt electric cars in a big way, we need this badly.
Glad to hear it.
-Eric
We have tons of waste from the traditional uranium plants to use up, might as well start building some reactors that produce almost no leftovers.
...as soon as someone forgets to pay the gravity bill, it's Fukushima all over again!
"The NRC thinks the probability of three nuclear reactors having a meltdown within 3 days is ZERO. They chose this to minimize the cost of development of the AP1000 reactor."
That's because the NRC is a sock puppet for the Commercial Nuclear Industry.
https://plus.google.com/107839599438746451936/posts/gEhU26JjGWV
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Cue the environmentalists to come running out of the woodwork, filing every lawsuit they can find, protesting the work site, and in general trying to slow down and interfere with the construction of said nuclear power plant.
The level of public ignorance never ceases to amaze.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
USA rules !!
Will they be built with standards and interchangeable parts, or by the lowest bidder using totally unique designes that ensure no personal or parts can be used on both?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
(14G$ / 2.2GW) doesn't sound like a good price point to me, with the price of solar being at $3/watt and falling (assuming "AC Watts" have the same energy as "DC Watts"). Why so pricey?
The first thing we should do when we get it working, is hook it up to a DeLorean, send it back in time, and prevent Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima.
That amount of power is sufficient for approximately 1.81 time-travelling DeLoreans.
I am officially gone from
You obviously didn't learn anything from it. Well, nothing that's true, at any rate.
It is not a problem. Just use Nuke Away(tm).
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=nukeaway&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCAQtwIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DtiC_LCEgSEQ&ei=bBg0T-PrNMWe2wWA0fmcAg&usg=AFQjCNE9QSTafT15eL7-WE7191uZCLJCNQ&sig2=mfvkzUZNqfx0C2PDrcD6Cg
Fight Spammers!
It can still fail in case of the loss of gravity.
Good, enough power to send Marty back twice.
Fight Spammers!
Yes much better to keep drilling in the gulf - that's never been a problem...
Per kilowatt nuclear is the safest when all things are taken into account. The problem with nuclear power is the worst case scenario: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima. So that is the balancing effect.
A crude analogy would be comparing cars to airplanes by mile traveled.
How does this design vary from say, Pebble Bed reactors?
I seem to be liking what i've read about Pebble Bed Reactors
What we learned from Fukushima is that this is EXACTLY what we need to do - we need to start building modernized reactors that roll in decades of safety research and engineering into their design, as opposed to repeatedly service-life-extending old clunkers with ancient safety designs.
And if we don't go with nuclear - what's our other option? Gas, the industry which has contaminated more groundwater in the past five years with drilling activities than almost the entire history of civilian nuclear power?
The nuclear industry has an excellent track record - it took decades before the first incident of a civilian reactor letting out any measurable contamination, and that incident was triggered by a natural disaster that killed over 25,000 people instantly, hitting a reactor that was so old that it was originally scheduled for permanent shutdown prior to the earthquake.
(I don't consider Chernobyl to be a civilian reactor - even if the Soviets tried to claim it was "civilian", the only reason one builds graphite-moderated water-cooled reactors is to have the option of using it as a cheap source of weapons plutonium.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
The won't be anywhere near ready for 2017 and they will cost much more than $14 billion.
You're right. It hasn't. Even with as much whining as there was with the BP spill it really wasn't as terrible of a problem as environmentalists wanted it to be.
By "we learned nothing" do you mean we didn't learn to stop relying on 40 year-old nuclear power plants built using 50-60 year old designs? Because I'm pretty sure building new designs shows that we did, in fact, learn exactly that.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
As a resident of Georgia, all I can say is: good.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Right and Global Warming is a myth. You just keep praying away the problems.
It generates about one sixth of electricity from nukes and plans to build a lot more of them within next 20 years, public support dropped after Fukushima, but has already recovered. That's not too special, but it's completely different league than Germany with it's traditional over the top reaction to social wave du jour or Austria's hysteria (sorry, Austrians, there's no better name for it).
Troll 2.0 Fear my asocial networking!
WAIT!?! Why rods? I thought pebble beach reactors were the way to go now.
What you should have learned is how to read....
These models passively cool their fuel rods using condensation and gravity, rather than electricity, preventing the possibility of another Fukushima Daiichi-type meltdown due to loss of power to cooling water pumps.
That doesn't mean they won't have another type of meltdown at some point, but what is your answer? We can't rely on coal and oil forever.
These are NEW designs that don't rely on power to cool the rods. Hardly a fukushima scenario.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000#Passive_Core_Cooling_System
Fuskushima used old reactor designs much like 3 mile island. In fact, it was months aways from being decommissioned.
I am far more interested in seeing GE Prism and the micro thorium reactors be approved.
Now, we need NRC to push approval for the micro reactors. We have a large number of coal plants that are going to be shut down over the next 10 years. The choice is what to replace them with. Ideally, small thorium reactors are the ideal choice (though I also like the idea of adding thermal storage combined with a small natural gas boiler).
The other issue that we have, is that many of the nuke plants are old like Japan's. These plants are going to be closed down over the next 20-30 years. Right now, they are LOADED with large quantities of 'waste' fuel. That 'waste' will need to go to WIPP to be buried for 20K years or more. HOWEVER, if we get the GE PRISM reactor going, then we can drop these into place at each of these sites, and fuel them with the 'waste' fuel. The much smaller amount of output from it would then last only 200 years, of which the worst part is over in something like 50 years.
Seriously, all of the waste fuel that exists in America combined with thorium (which we have plenty of), combined with AE and Natural gas could fuel America for the next couple of centuries.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Nuclear operating costs are far lower than fossil fuel plants... but they are higher than solar photovoltaic, wind, and hydro in almost all cases.
As for the "nuclear is always on" claims, that's true for the most part. The thing is, not every hour of electricity is worth the same. The Southeast (and most of tUSA) has surplus capacity even after the GWs of coal retirement hit 2016-2018. What we need in order to keep the price low is inexpensive *peaking* capacity. Guess when load is highest? Yip. When the sun is shining; more precisely, summer months on clear days at around 3pm M-F non-holidays. Guess when the cost of generating electricity with fossil fuel is the highest? Yip, during peak hours [thanks to economic dispatch, a good thing].
As for me, I'm not opposed to nuclear power, and I do believe that carbon emissions are the most important challenge of our generation. Nuclear waste is a real problem /. tends to gloss over [by either ignoring it in absolute terms or ignoring the foreign policy and transportation implications of reprocessing]. I'm opposed to the cost. Nuclear is far more expensive than renewables, we don't need the nighttime capacity, and if the First Nuclear Age is any indication, cost per MW will go up over time, not down.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Nuclear is costing a fortune in legacy costs safeguarding the waste, and its only getting worse as more and more is generated. We should invest in deep drilling techniques for geothermal and put $$$$$$$$$$ into fusion research. The problem with saying "oh that was an old design, things are safe now", is that if you amortize the plants over a smaller lifespan, the cost skyrockets to even more than it is now (already the most expensive method of generation, and that doesn't even include legacy/cleanup costs). Guarentee when those "old" plants were originally proposed, the funding was looked at over a 40+ year lifespan. You can't expect to just rebuild the plants every 20 years because better designs have come along.
I'm not entirely sure if this is true for all new reactors, but new reactors do have passive protection. The old reactors were designed simply wrong to handle catastrophic failure in power supply.
Fukushima was certainly a PR nightmare and I do hope the Japanese government officials in charge of nuclear safety learn to control their corporations better now.
Actually the parent AC is right. The massive calamity turned out to be more of a tourist problem then an environmental one.
Germany exports electricity to France, which despite its 58 nuclear reactors cannot satisfy the needs of its citizens. Who need extra power because they mostly heat their home with electric heaters.
source:
http://cleantechnica.com/2012/02/09/clean-energy-loving-germany-increasingly-exporting-electricity-to-nuclear-heavy-france/
Okay, let me get this straight...
In a state that get's Hurricanes (a lot) we are putting two new nuclear reactors that we _hope_ won't be another Fukushima?
Call me paranoid, but this sounds like a stupid decision.
There ain't no other choice right now that will meet demand and not generate CO2. There is a downside but it's the least bad choice right now. How many wind farms or solar ones can produce that kind of base load? 2.2GW and with reprocessing the fuel should last long enough to get fusion figured out and then antimatter reactors would be the final step.
Everything is tied to energy. With it, anything is possible. Without it even the Stone Age wouldn't have been as goo because at least we had fire.
There was measurable contamination from Three Mile Island--there is no doubt that unstable nuclides of nobel gases escaped into the wild.
We can compare the oil spills in the gulf, and not just the BP one, there are others that have been reported to still be spewing out crap. Those are "gifts that keep on giving". There are large swaths of the seabed that are just lifeless now.
Contrast that to the area around the worst nuclear disaster in world history. Years later, it has become a game preserve. Were it not for the rad meters, it has become an ecological paradise where nature has come back.
If Chernobyl is the worst nuclear disaster we ever will have, while undersea drilling is still a nascent technology where a blowout can happen at any time, I'm all for nuclear power with only caveat.
The caveat is that in today's economy, there is no responsibility. Stakeholders have been replaced by shareholders. A reactor head can be made out of pot metal, be installed, and it fails. The company that made it can just shrug, file bankruptcy, the owner of the company take his golden parachute and live in the Bahamas. What would be needed is regulation where if there is malfeasance, there will be people going to prison and fortunes taken away, and not just pawns thrown under the bus to appease the masses, then back to business as usual.
Oh it's still an environmental problem, but most of it is conveniently out of plain sight:
http://articles.cnn.com/2010-12-07/opinion/cousteau.gulf.oil.spill_1_oil-spill-deepwater-horizon-ixtoc
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Basically, Germany considered only two options:
- close all nuclear plants down as fast as possible
or
- keep all old nuclear plants running for as long as possible
Trying out completely new designs was not considered, especially since new experimental designs showed problems.
Also consider that Germany is densely populated compared to the USA, and not very large either. A nuclear accident would be a severe blow to Germany, as well as a failure to properly store nuclear waste.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
Now the legions of contractors and subcontractors will sweep in on a tidal wave of self-service and mediocrity to see who can offer the lowest price for their labor and the best kickbacks to the politicians and NRC people in charge of protecting us.
It doesn't matter how good your design is or how strict your regulations are when the people that build, own, maintain and oversee nuclear power plants prize money over all other things, including the safety of the population. This is why we continue to have huge industrial disasters. Not because nuclear power is unsafe, or drilling for oil in the gulf is unsafe. It's because the people in positions of responsibility are weak, selfish idiots.
The construction cost of the pair of AP1000 works out to $6.36 per watt (ish)... the only way to get a cost that high is if the plant never actually goes online. In reality, the plant will operate for 40-60 years. The world nuclear association has a reasonable writeup of the actual costs of current reactors, and the estimated costs of new ones. It's looking like it'll be around 10 cents per killowatt.
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
Engage NIMBYism in 3... 2... 1...
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!
I can go out in t-shirts and jeans in July. I need to use AC about three weeks a year. And November-March it mostly just rains a lot. Did I mention that we have plenty of clean water here in NW Oregon?
Finding God in a Dog
Nail, hit head.
Nuclear power done right brings a lot to the table:
1: It is energy dense, so it doesn't take up valued land. Solar and wind farms are great, but energy losses through wires cause those to become not feasible.
2: A reprocessing, "breeder" reactor can reduce the need for high level waste dumps.
3: Reactor fuel is relatively cheap and abundant. When uranium becomes an issue, there is always thorium (although that is still a research leap ahead.)
4: Safety. The deaths per terawatt figures completely show this.
And it only will get better. The reactors in use today are designs built when disco was in fashion and people wore leisure suits. Modern reactor designs are generations ahead in safety, usability, and economy than the existing reactors that are on life support. Take an implemention of a traveling wave reactor. If done right, there would be zero need to enrich uranium, and the by-products are useful items.
Had we had nuclear power R&D in the 1970s and 1980s, I'd probably say we would be at least 20-50 years ahead in technological growth than we are now. Even the need for petroleum wouldn't be much, as any oil would be used for polymers, rather than burned. Even used plastics can be "boiled" via a thermal depolymerization reaction and reused.
I'm happy to see some sort of energy progress in the US other than gas and oil.
..but accellerating them to 88MPH is probably not an option...
whereas many countries, including germans with their impeccable engineering and psychopath security standards (on top of what eu requires) shutting down all reactors and going off of nuclear in around a decade, america knows it better.
"Oh no, THEY are mistaken. but, we are not !!" .................
then again, we have to be a fan of nuclear thing in slahsdot, right ? because it is 'geek' ?
just fuck off. really.
Read radical news here
There are over 1800 measurable sources of gamma radiation in space. Just because something is measurable, doesn't necessarily mean it's dangerous.
Nah, it's all a scam by Southern Company (parent of Georgia Power) to boost profits. I've been a shareholder for 30+ years. I live in Marietta. What they have done is to effectively double the price of electricity across the state to fund building the reactors rather than taking out a loan to build them. It's bait-and-switch. Once they have the money to build the reactors, the prices will never go down. They will have X years to build the reactors and in the mean time will come up with a number of excuses as to why our electricity prices didn't go down. Inflation, cost to operate, environmental regulations, you name it, any "reason" that they can come up with to pad their salaries and options. I'm a little guilty myself; their dividends aren't bad...
I'm looking for a direct quote from last fall from a Georgia Power rep (Jeff Wilson?) talking about how they have all sorts of hydro power, but I can't find it after a half-hour of scouring the Internets. Link's probably dead anyway. That's what I get for not printing. An article came out where there was a report from Georgia Power or Southern Company, generated by them where the company found itself as a huge polluter. A spokesperson from Georgia Power/Southern Company totally downplayed the report and dismissed it going so far as to say that they have lots of renewable power deployed. There was a quote "from the horse's mouth" IIRC about how there was so much power generated (50MW? installed IIRC) at Lake Sinclair. If you lived around the area and ONLY if you lived around the area and actually paid very close attention talking to workers, you would know that the guy was lying through his teeth. They aren't generating ANY power there because there isn't enough water now to even be run through the turbines. Installed capacity != realized capacity. If anyone can find this article, please post it. It was probably from the AJC or Athens or Milledgeville press.
Here's one that I dug out of my email on Georgia Power's water usage.
Another on coal ash pollution.
We have two of the world's top ten dirtiest power plants in operation RIGHT HERE IN GEORGIA!!! One of these (Cartersville) powers Atlanta, so I can't complain too much. :)
Source
Go to Milledgeville and behold the brown afternoon/evening skies. Been like this for longer than I've been around. They may actually be closing that plant because they're too cheap to install scrubbers.
There is such thing as clean coal or at least "cleaner" coal. And I'm just as much for nuclear as the next guy, but that's not what this is about.
Just another move by Southern Company to increase profits. Nothing else.
Expect massive cost over-runs and unexpected downtime.
His point was not that there was nothing else available, but that there was nothing else available that would economically produce the quantities of energy. Methane and such like don't scale that well.
âoeAny society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
The Kardashev scale: why you can only conserve so much energy before slowing down civilization.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
We learned something: don't have cooling systems depend on electricity.
Mark Anthony Collins
Nah, it's all a scam by Southern Company (parent of Georgia Power) to boost profits. I've been a shareholder for 30+ years. I live in Marietta. What they have done is to effectively double the price of electricity across the state to fund building the reactors rather than taking out a loan to build them. It's bait-and-switch. Once they have the money to build the reactors, the prices will never go down. They will have X years to build the reactors and in the mean time will come up with a number of excuses as to why our electricity prices didn't go down. Inflation, cost to operate, environmental regulations, you name it, any "reason" that they can come up with to pad their salaries and options. I'm a little guilty myself; their dividends aren't bad...
I'm looking for a direct quote from last fall from a Georgia Power rep (Jeff Wilson?) talking about how they have all sorts of hydro power, but I can't find it after a half-hour of scouring the Internets. Link's probably dead anyway. That's what I get for not printing. An article came out where there was a report from Georgia Power or Southern Company, generated by them where the company found itself as a huge polluter. A spokesperson from Georgia Power/Southern Company totally downplayed the report and dismissed it going so far as to say that they have lots of renewable power deployed. There was a quote "from the horse's mouth" IIRC about how there was so much power generated (50MW? installed IIRC) at Lake Sinclair. If you lived around the area and ONLY if you lived around the area and actually paid very close attention talking to workers, you would know that the guy was lying through his teeth. They aren't generating ANY power there because there isn't enough water now to even be run through the turbines. Installed capacity != realized capacity. If anyone can find this article, please post it. It was probably from the AJC or Athens or Milledgeville press.
Here's one that I dug out of my email on Georgia Power's water usage.
Another on coal ash pollution.
We have two of the world's top ten dirtiest power plants in operation RIGHT HERE IN GEORGIA!!! One of these (Cartersville) powers Atlanta, so I can't complain too much. :)
Source
Go to Milledgeville and behold the brown afternoon/evening skies. Been like this for longer than I've been around. They may actually be closing that plant because they're too cheap to install scrubbers.
There is such thing as clean coal or at least "cleaner" coal. And I'm just as much for nuclear as the next guy, but that's not what this is about.
Just another move by Southern Company to increase profits. Nothing else.
(See post)
if the USNRC does its job, nuclear energy is safe to use. it's only when they sign off unsafe locations that we wind up in trouble. we know how to safely operate reactors. the question is, do we do it?
Mark Anthony Collins
You're correct here - Many of the safety features in this plant (and even its predecessors) would have allowed Fukushima to have survived the tsunami without any core damage.
For example, in addition to the diesels, the ABWR design has a gas turbine in the (heavily reinforced) turbine building.
The ESBWR design (similar in safety features to this AP1000) could have survived the loss of both that gas turbine and all of the diesels thanks to the PCCS - Maintaining PCCS operation only requires you to bring a fire truck onsite within 72 hours.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Oh it's still an environmental problem, but most of it is conveniently out of plain sight:
That's what he said... not a problem.
$14 B / 2.2 BW = $6.36 per Watt
So much for DoE's predictions of $3-3.50 a Watt, which we all know was bogus. Moody's nailed it.
Per-kilowatt I'm amazed at how expensive this is. $7/W just in construction costs? Yeah, I know nuclear has a higher capacity factor than wind and solar, but still... ouch.
And the article summary repeats the whole "passively cooled" thing as if that equals "safe". :P First off, it's not even a true passive system. The "passive" system must successfully activate within 30 minutes, and only works for 72 hours. It's only passive in that it doesn't require electricity once started, and assuming that it works properly. Secondly, "passive" does not automatically equal 'safe' anyway. For example, a number of graphite-moderated reactors have been declared "safe" because of a negative void coefficient, so if you lose your working fluid and air gets in, the reaction still slows down. Great, except that hot graphite *burns* or otherwise erodes (burning graphite is what spread the Chernobyl radiation).
In general, "passive safety" is an excuse to cut down on containment structures, which have saved our collective behinds many times over. And the AP1000 is no exception, with its bargain-basement containment design. I'm amazed that the construction cost on these is still this high despite the corner-cutting.
Why must all aquatic villains play the organ?
Kind of depressing that none of the postings modded up at this moment reflect an anti-nuclear position. There's something a bit off about that. Here's how i see it on Slashdot with the topic of nuclear energy:
How to be modded up: create a duality of only nuclear and coal options for energy production; belittle the dangers and significance of nuclear disaster; insist that there isn't any issue with waste from nuclear plants and that we will 'use it all up'.
How to be modded down: mention that uranium is a finite source and that we WILL eventually deal with a depletion in the same way we're facing oil; inject that the costs of insuring nuclear plants are outrageous and that no private firms will (leaving it to governments [ie: citizens] to cover in the event of an emergency); highlight that it takes DECADES to get a plant to operating status (how is that going to help now, next year, or in the next 10 years?) Fact is: nuclear is *expensive*. Finally, a sure-fired way to be modded down is to insist that we have technology accessible to us NOW that can reduce emissions and is not nearly as expensive (environmentally or economically) as nuclear will be.
FYI, on my own habits - i rarely mod down a post, unless it's blatantly ignorant of any factual matter, and even then it's rare. As suggested, i try to use my mod points to mod up, not down. Would love to see a bit more of that here for a more balanced display of discussion on this subject...
Well then do not eat shrimp or fish or clams or mussels that came from the gulf.
The gulf has seen bad spills before (Ixtoc I). Oil seeps into gulf naturally. The Gulf of Mexico does get oil in it all the time and has been for 1000s of years. It might be one of the best places to have a spill. Which really ticks the environmental people off. Don't get me wrong, spills are bad and should be avoided. They going to happen at some point for some reason. Steps should always be taken to minimize them.
Uh, The cost of building these reactors was added into power bills several years ago so, in effect, Georgia Power customers have been paying for this construction before it is built. With the current crop of Politicians in the state unwilling to have any risk assumed by their corporate masters and also unwilling to permit there to be the slightest appearance of the Taxpayers assuming any risk the Public Service Commission approved a rate increase to fund this before construction or even approval. Oh, and it it does not get built for any reason those rates will NOT be refunded.
I agree - if nuclear had more R&D in the 1980s and 1990s, most likely the waste challenge would be solved. There are plenty of candidate technologies for it - the IFR had the potential to provide 100% of this country's electrical needs for decades, if not a century, using only waste from our existing LWR installations as fuel. The waste from an IFR would be low-volume and only "hot" for a few hundred years, unlike current LWR waste.
As to fusion, we need to stop shooting for the "ideal purist" approach of fusion-only energy, and look into subcritical fission reactors using fusion as a neutron source as a stepping stone. Pure fusion is the ideal final goal, but we'll never get there without a more short-term realizable intermediary step of some sort.
At that point, we might have the energy storage technology to make solar and wind feasible - right now, we don't have the ability to make the output peaks of solar/wind match our demand peaks, or even come close.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
...the area around the worst nuclear disaster in world history. Years later, it has become a game preserve...
No. It's become the city of Hiroshima, just like it was before.
Just imagine what the planet will be like when strip mined oil shale is the primary source of energy. If running out of oil is the main motivation of change then that is the change we will get.
Steps should always be taken to minimize them.
Like not using oil perhaps? Spending our money on clean technology rather than 10s of billions of $$$ for already massively profitable oil companies?
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
When the nuclear industry started building power plants they promised electricity "too cheap to meter." Nuclear power turned out to be by far the most expensive way to generate electricity. The real reason no nuclear power plants have been built in decades is because with the cold war ended so we no longer need the plutonium from reactors to build more bombs. It will be quite a while before nuclear power will be price competitive with fossil fuel. The AP1000 sounds like a decent design but there are far more promising designs being developed. I like pebble bed reactors because being thermally limited they can not melt down even with a total cooling system failure. Longer term reactors using thorium instead of uranium look promising. We have much more thorium than uranium; thorium reactors will produce lower volume and less dangerous waste; and we don't have to worry as much about waste being weoponized.
The individual you were referring to obviously meant accident. Hiroshima was rather on purpose. I don't think anyone would disagree.
You can't really compare the effects of nuclear weaponry a few generations later to the effects of power plant disasters either. They are entirely different beasts.
Antimatter? really? Please realize that science fiction is indeed science fiction. Antimatter can not be harvest as a natural resource, it is at best a really really expensive form of energy storage because we have to create antimatter before we can use it.
Fusion may be possible sometime this century, maybe.
As for solar? in the southeast we can get about 1kw per meter a day at 20% efficiency. With a 1 square mile array we could get a little over 2.2 gw.
20% is entirely doable with solar thermal, and it can even generate a base load at night with a large enough thermal reservoir.
As for wind, Not a fan of it myself. To unreliable and needs an energy storage system of either pumped or chemical storage. Neither is very efficient and pumped storage has issues with land destruction.
I am still very much pro nuclear with these newer safer reactor designs.
Don't worry. We'll be out of oil soon and our civilization will be pulled kicking and screaming into the future.
By future you mean Natural Gas? We are only at the beta testing stage, at best, of alternative energy. Yes this is a damn shame, we should have worked more diligently on it after the first energy crisis of the 1970s, but that didn't happen and we have the reality we must deal with today. Today there is little alternative to oil beyond nuclear and natural gas. We still have decades of research and testing ahead of us before solar, wind, tidal, batteries, etc may become viable large scale alternatives.
We could wish it were different but such wishing will not let us move food from farm and ranch to store on a large scale.
There ain't no other choice right now that will meet demand and not generate CO2. There is a downside but it's the least bad choice right now. How many wind farms or solar ones can produce that kind of base load? 2.2GW and with reprocessing the fuel should last long enough to get fusion figured out and then antimatter reactors would be the final step.
Is there any reason to believe that Antimatter will ever be a viable energy source? Are there deposits of antimatter somewhere in the near universe that can be mined? I thought antimatter had to be created with huge amounts of energy?
1: It is energy dense, so it doesn't take up valued land. Solar and wind farms are great, but energy losses through wires cause those to become not feasible.
Except that you can place the 'power plant' on people's roofs. No transmission losses at all.
2: A reprocessing, "breeder" reactor can reduce the need for high level waste dumps.
This produces weapons grade material though no?
3: Reactor fuel is relatively cheap and abundant. When uranium becomes an issue, there is always thorium (although that is still a research leap ahead.)
More energy hits the earth from sunlight in an hour than we use in an entire year. (or some similarly huge disparity)
4: Safety. The deaths per terawatt figures completely show this.
Deaths from nuclear are notoriously hard to estimate because they play out over decades. *Potential deaths* from nuclear are pretty damned high given worst case scenarios.
Deaths from solar? literally zero. But but, people fall off the roofs...which is ridiculous. People fall of roofs building houses too. Put the panels on the new constructions and you've absorbed any increase into the current required process anyway.
Solar is quite ready to take over grid scale 'production' of energy. What isn't yet ready is the storage of that energy for later use. Hydrogen fuel cells being the most likely candidate but more research and funding is needed.
Nuclear is the best option we have for climate change mitigation at the moment, but that doesn't make it remotely a good idea in any realm of sanity.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Not even considering that most of the "waste" is usable fuel contaminated by a small amount of fission byproducts.
my penis is measurable but it that wasn't going to make the point i wanted to make
I've stumbled in to the Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder part of this discussion.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
it's only when they sign off unsafe locations that we wind up in trouble
Like placing them on top of seismic faults that we didn't know were there?
Or perhaps placing them in areas where you didn't know there could be a tsunami that big like Fukushima?
Lets not even get into flying a 747 or something into the spent fuel cooling ponds which aren't hardened against so much as a hand grenade.
You can't plan for the unknown and as we've seen numerous times, the unknown has a funny way of being something you don't expect. With nuclear, failure simply isn't an option, but with unknown conditions you can't guarantee against failure.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Three Mile Island was a panic, but nothing actually happened. Chernobyl was an actual disaster and Fukushima was a very real problem. Fukushima is/was NOT as bad as some coal power related incidents, it just happened faster, and had the new N word in it, so it gets attention. Coal fires due to mining have actually created some rather large exclusion zones of their own here in the U.S.
Tautology that's contradicted by existing technologies that, in many cases, have been around for decades. We can dramatically reduce our energy consumption (mass transit, rail over highways, better insulation) while investing in green energy (energy needs greatest on hot, sunny days).
The way isn't the problem here, it's the will.
...because Three-Mile Island was clearly *so* hazardous to those nearby. I think someone standing outside the plant would have received ~350 banana-equivalent doses.
While nuclear power doesn't generate a lot of CO2 directly (ignoring the backup diesel generators) the mining, transport and processing of uranium does generate CO2 emissions.
I could be wrong (or my information out of date), but my understanding is that modern reactors produce much less waste because the waste they do produce can actually be used to fuel other reactors, and so on for a few production generations, so that the final waste products are much less than what used to be typical. There is still waste, of course, but the situation is not nearly as bad as it used to be.
Check out my world simulator thingy.
This produces weapons grade material though no?
No, indeed. You still need to refine to weapons-grade level. And if someone is doing that, then they probably would have built the plant anyway.
Deaths from nuclear are notoriously hard to estimate because they play out over decades. *Potential deaths* from nuclear are pretty damned high given worst case scenarios.
And are notoriously exaggerated.
Deaths from solar? literally zero. But but, people fall off the roofs...which is ridiculous.
It happens, no? Then it's not ridiculous. It's worth keeping in mind that actual deaths from nuclear power, from mining through to nulcear accident, are so few, that even deaths from people installing wind or solar is comparable.
Solar is quite ready to take over grid scale 'production' of energy. What isn't yet ready is the storage of that energy for later use. Hydrogen fuel cells being the most likely candidate but more research and funding is needed.
Not for base load power. You mention "storage". That increases the cost per watt of solar considerably. For peaking load, solar makes a lot of sense and I wouldn't be surprised to see it make inroads, even in the complete absence of government subsidy.
Nuclear is the best option we have for climate change mitigation at the moment, but that doesn't make it remotely a good idea in any realm of sanity.
Eh, but it is a strong argument for it being a good idea in some realm of sanity.
I think you're wasting your time. Presto Vivace can learn nothing. He'll still be trolling the same FUD 40 years from now.
hitting a reactor that was so old that it was originally scheduled for permanent shutdown prior to the earthquake.
1. The Fukushima plant was up for a 10 year permit extension
2. The day before the Fukushima accident, the NRC granted a 20 year extension to the US Vermont Yankee plant of the exact same design
This decade is going to see a lot of nuclear plants, that built during the 70s, reaching their designed end of life.
I'm guessing the NRC is going to do what Japan's regulatory body was ready to do: rubber stamp the permit.
It's tragic because we now know how poorly maintained Fukushima was
If only most nuclear regulation wasn't based on self-inspection and self-reporting.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
i hear so many 'claims' about how wind , solar, etc etc are all primed to take off and fix the power problem.
The fact we are still building nuclear reactors that run ( an extraordinarily low ) chance of causing HUGE casualties and making land uninhabitable for LIFETIMES , is unconscionable, if those claims are true.
Does anyone have any hard facts on the cost of electricity coming from solar or wind vs the same from Nuclear? Are the reasons primarily economic , or is their physics problems also preventing the use of other means to generate power?
aka , why are we building these instead of solar and wind farms?
I'm not trolling here, i'd really love some serious answers by someone who knows more about it then me.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
Nah, we just need to find the ZPMs that the Ancients left scattered around the Pegasus galaxy ...
/sarcasm
Even if you dump cash into fusion, you still end up with a nuclear waste issue. Fusion kicks out a lot of neutrons, so activated radioactivity is a real problem when you decommission reactors.
No, we can dramatically reduce the energy consumption of certain tasks. But the net effect of most energy efficiency measures is simply an increase in productivity - not a reduction in aggregate demand.
Energy efficiency has close to no point to it if it is not met with the possibility of reducing energy consumption below some key number where it still pollutes the environment.
Its okay. They're putting it in Georgia.
How has the nuclear industry suckered so many /. moderators?
Somehow being anti-nuclear is being equated with the anti-technology ignoramuses. I personally know a nuclear physicist (well, he did plasma work for fusion so maybe he is not a nuclear physicist.) My friend is against nuclear power for many reasons that never get mentioned, including the fact the USA ran out of uranium in only 50 years and now imports the stuff when it used to be one of the richest nations in uranium mines (now Canada is #1 with about 2/3 of what the USA once had.)
7 BILLION per nuclear plant? In the decade it takes to build a plant there are always cost overruns as the politicians and lawyers find ways (over that decade) to milk even more money; naturally, once you dumped in 1 billion you can't STOP! You have to spend 10 billion so you don't waste that 7 you put in! Although, in reality the clever politicians double the costs to "prevent" cost over-runs (but in a decade those politicians will be removed from such blame.)
Can't we put that 14 Billion into getting southerners away from running their air conditioners 24/7 during half the year??
In the DECADE before those plants are built, solar and wind will be less than HALF the cost they are today, more accepted and we may have wave and fusion nearing fruition (where is the investment in fusion? bet they don't get 14 billion...) Higher prices might cause needed changes to be made everywhere else. How about a smarter grid that doesn't LOSE 10-20% of the power? When they say 10% line loss that is a ball park average; I bet Georgia probably has a pathetic power grid.
If there was anything to this next gen nuclear power we'd be building one of those-- instead we are making the same old design with a couple tweaks. Personally, the idea of passive cooling in humid hot Georgia sounds like something is wrong.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Well then do not eat shrimp or fish or clams or mussels that came from the gulf.
The gulf has seen bad spills before (Ixtoc I). Oil seeps into gulf naturally. The Gulf of Mexico does get oil in it all the time and has been for 1000s of years. It might be one of the best places to have a spill. Which really ticks the environmental people off. Don't get me wrong, spills are bad and should be avoided. They going to happen at some point for some reason. Steps should always be taken to minimize them.
I recall from memory, and I do not have an online account with them, but on the print edition of Scientific American a few years back there was a report of an experiment on the space shuttle, in which they tried to estimate the natural seepage of hydrocarbons in the gulf of mexico by photo analisys of day views, since the oil slicks had a different reflectivity. The photos were quite amazing, it was really pervasive.
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
As to fusion, we need to stop shooting for the "ideal purist" approach of fusion-only energy, and look into subcritical fission reactors using fusion as a neutron source as a stepping stone. Pure fusion is the ideal final goal, but we'll never get there without a more short-term realizable intermediary step of some sort.
This is silly. There's been enormous progress on fusion over the decades. ITER may be the first time we actually achieve long term self-sustaining reactions.
But there's practically no cross-over between fusion neutron sources, and fusion energy sources. If you want a neutron source, build a Farnsworth–Hirsch fusor and save yourself a lot of time and trouble - but those things will never be self-sustaining (unless Polywell's work out, but it seems more like those were a badly monitored experiment then real progress).
The problem with nuclear power is the worst case scenario: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima.
The problem is the willful ignorance of the media because the mysteriousness of nuclear power provides an almost unlimited source of material for media hyperbole. The differences between Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima are so enormous - not just the outcome but the risks taken and events leading to the accident - it is ridiculous to include them in the same list.
I would encourage people to understand these accidents and, in particular, look at the culture of safety/corruption in the organisations/countries involved. Chernobyl became operational before a key safety requirement was met (and, ironically, attempts to address this led to the accident). We now know that there were safety concens over Fukushima but TEPCO wasn't going to shut a profitable power station. Where safety regulators have the final say and are not corrupt, nuclear power, like everything else, will be much safer. Most aspects of everyday life are not 100% safe, e.g. walking down stairs, driving, flying etc., but in the USA/Canada and many European countries, at least, nuclear power should be low down on our list of things to worry about. My worry is that investment in nuclear power may detract from investment into developing sources of renewable energy.
Westinghouse Electric Company was bought in 2005 for $5 billion by the Japanese company TOSHIBA,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westinghouse_Electric_Company
And the U.S. has the British company BP drilling much of the U.S. oil.
Why is the U.S. excited about its self-sufficiency?
Why does the U.S. push foreign company energy projects more than its own projects?
With China producing 30 percent of the world's engineers, Russia 7 percent, and the U.S. only 3 percent (see this week's Science article); and
with 8 out of 9 of China's political leaders engineers;
what part of the world's engineering curve does the U.S. think it sits?
Nail, hit head.
Nuclear power done right brings a lot to the table:
1: It is energy dense, so it doesn't take up valued land. Solar and wind farms are great, but energy losses through wires cause those to become not feasible.
2: A reprocessing, "breeder" reactor can reduce the need for high level waste dumps.
3: Reactor fuel is relatively cheap and abundant. When uranium becomes an issue, there is always thorium (although that is still a research leap ahead.)
4: Safety. The deaths per terawatt figures completely show this.
And it only will get better. The reactors in use today are designs built when disco was in fashion and people wore leisure suits. Modern reactor designs are generations ahead in safety, usability, and economy than the existing reactors that are on life support. Take an implemention of a traveling wave reactor. If done right, there would be zero need to enrich uranium, and the by-products are useful items.
Had we had nuclear power R&D in the 1970s and 1980s, I'd probably say we would be at least 20-50 years ahead in technological growth than we are now. Even the need for petroleum wouldn't be much, as any oil would be used for polymers, rather than burned. Even used plastics can be "boiled" via a thermal depolymerization reaction and reused.
I'm happy to see some sort of energy progress in the US other than gas and oil.
1.energy density: a whole relatively small community must buy into the project, and since the workforce of the reactor while in operation must necessarily be highly qualified ( at least to make us gullible citizens think that someone is in control), the payoff is not usually in jobs; economic kickbacks tend to go out of hand, so it's difficult to find a place for a nuke;
4: "Safety. The deaths per terawatt figures completely show this", but people like my wife are afraid of flying, all the while leisurely zipping around town in a very small car that gets absolutely no attention. "Honey, do you know that when brakes sound like that it means that they're at the end of the tether?".
I am italian, and the grounding of the Costa Concordia has been the talk of the town. Eleven people died, on about a total of 4.000 between crew and passengers. It's 0.27%.Sorry for the ruthlessness, but it's like me saying to her: "Honey, remember that if you have an accident in which the car is a wreck, you risk being killed or injured by the 400th car you write off". Sorry, human minds do not quote odds, or rather, our ancestral instinct does not work for very small or very big odds, look up Kahneman and Tversky.
"Had we had nuclear power R&D in the 1970s and 1980s, I'd probably say we would be at least 20-50 years ahead in technological growth than we are now. Even the need for petroleum wouldn't be much, as any oil would be used for polymers, rather than burned. Even used plastics can be "boiled" via a thermal depolymerization reaction and reused."
Absolutely true, and no one knows that more than the politicians. If they really thought that Nuclear power was part of the necessary diversification of supply, they should have spent some money on reactors and research. If they thought that it was a nightmare, they should have decommissioned at once. As it is, "let sleeping dogs lie" is the watchword. Italy does not produce nuclear energy, but it farms it off to the french and buys it at inflated prices; Germany has decided to decommission in the future, just enough to let the price tag sink in and do its sensous dance.
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
Potential deaths from just about every source of energy are "pretty damned high" if you look at the absolute worst case scenario. That's why engineers and people that are far smarter than I am work to reduce the danger level to a point where the worst case scenario is highly unlikely and even if an accident occurs, the damage is limited to an absolute bare minimum.
I'm all for nuclear power, however i don't think it should remain in a for profit system that is going to try to extend it's service for years past it's decommission date for a little profit, and possibly due nothing on minor safety issues cause that would hurt our profit margin for the year. I think all nuclear plants should be designed/operated and owned by the people living in close proximity to them, with the financial backing of state and federal government. It's the only way to ensure safety is the first priority. Cause to do anything else would be exceeding dangerous as proved by 3 Mile/Chernobyl/Fukushima. If you disagree then ask your self why did congress set limits on insurance damages, when we could build plants that could be fail proof with no risk of containment breach. Simple answer was they want corporations to be in charge so they can extract money from them in fines and bribes. Kinda hard for the Federal Government to fine it self and not bitch about paying the fine, just look at the EPA case against Area51 for burning toxic waste. It always a game of who's going to pay for it to them. Sadly the way it is now, the population always pays a far heavier price then owners of the plant.
And are notoriously exaggerated.
So you agree that any death estimates associated with nuclear are without reasonable merit. So the death argument should be removed as a reason why it is a good idea.
actual deaths from nuclear power, from mining through to nulcear accident, are so few, that even deaths from people installing wind or solar is comparable.
Ah the converse. If they are so few as to be a reason that nuclear is a good idea, then solar is likewise a good idea for the same reason. Hence it should also be removed as a reason why nuclear is 'better or good'.
Storage is and will be built into any system's cost. You pay for the storage and transportation of coal and gasoline - the difference is the point in the cycle at which the energy is stored. In gas and coal it's stored upon creation of the fuel (millions of years ago). With solar and hydrogen it's stored at the time the 'fuel' is consumed. With nuclear you even get to pay for the post use storage (x 100s of years) - which isn't reflected in its price...
The key difference is that with solar/wind/hydro etc, the 'fuel' is quite literally 'free'. In every other system, you have to pay for the fuel itself as well as the infrastructure.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Well that's not even enough to power two DeLoreans....
or turning biomass into feedstock for polymers through the fisher troper process
we really do not absolutely require oil, it is very conveinent and our infrastructure is still not ready for the post oil world
The Corporate Welfare State economy [AKA: Faux-Capitalism] needs to be able to exploit the public, create temp-jobs and increase C*O salary/benefits/retirement packages. The Jerry Falwell pseudo-christian motto "Oh Lord, Give me money or give me death!"
I am surprised the pseudo-christian plutocrats of the Corporate States of America (CSA) republic have been unable to elect an emperor for US.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Parts of Ohiio have been burning for more than 125 years. (Devil's oven)
eh, maybe its because your wrong? Consider:
1. Slashdot has a conspiracy to promote coal and nuclear
or
2. you just don't have your facts straight
You might try informing yourself on the subject. Elsewhere on this page is a link to DOE information on the total cost of operation. You say "nuclear is *expensive*" -- but there is a citation needed (just claiming some random facts is not a citation). And more importantly, expensive compared to what?
According to the DOE the cheapest is oil (by a good margin) followed by coal and nuclear and then solar. I forget just where hydro, etc., fit in, but you can look it up yourself.
Maybe the DOE is part of this conspiracy. Those who believe in conspiracies generally find no end of their adversaries and enemies. It *is* easier than admitting maybe you were wrong.
I'm pretty sure there are no (commercial) graphite moderated reactors in the US. (Wandering slightly from that point: I'm also reasonably happy to leave policing other countries' nuclear policy to IAEA rather than the US...) So I'm not sure that's a great example.
I'm not clear on what the bargain basement containment is that you refer to. But I have my own understanding of the changes, which I'll share... From what I've heard/read/learned, past light water reactors in the US use used a single containment vessel: steel reinforced concrete, which is also the reactor building. Newer ones have a solid steel containment vessel AND a concrete reactor building (with less steel reinforcement maybe?.
Why this is better/adequate? Steel is much better as a secondary pressure vessel (think Fukushima hydrogen pressure -> explosion). Steel also conducts heat much better than concrete, so you get heat out of the containment without transferring mass out of containment. Then you drip water on the outside of steel containment to remove the decay heat building up inside, and this also controls the pressure, too. The concrete reactor building is your plane shield.
That said, manufacturing that giant steel vessel is an added cost that other reactors didn't have. They also made the actual pressure vessel more expensive to fabricate by getting rid of some of the weld seams. (Said seams end up being the most likely candidate of problems after 40 years of reactor operation, though such failure has not occurred in the US... Fukushima maybe? I don't think we know yet.)
(I am a nuclear engineering grad student, but keep in mind curriculum doesn't spend that much time on actual reactor containment design... so I'm not an expert, per se)
Dude, you can't put a wind generator big enough to power a house on its roof. It would be way too big, transmit a loud hum throughout the house... and weren't we talking about safety a minute ago?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
we learned to have reactor that can shut down with gravity, instead of relying on external power source and generators. I mena, sine you have such a strong opinion, you DID compare bother reactor types, right? RIGHT?
Or maybe you are too stupid to realize how ignorant you are.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
How to be modded up: create a duality of only nuclear and coal options for energy production
Many of the most-upmodded comments in this discussion actually reflect the entire spectrum, and include hydro, wind, solar etc.
Fact is: nuclear is *expensive*.
This comment has covered it. Long story short, it's in the middle of the pack - not the cheapest source of energy, but reasonably cheap - much cheaper than solar - and you can use it in places where you can't do cheaper green stuff like hydro or wind.
Anyway, I don't see anyone proposing to replace other green energy sources with nuclear. A reasonable position on this is to use the former where they are available, to the extent of natural capacity - much like Pacific Northwest mostly uses hydro today, because it has that opportunity - and fall back to nuclear everywhere else. What people here are objecting to is when nuclear is completely ignored, and yet money is instead given to solar which is much more expensive and has a narrower scope of application.
How to be modded down: mention that uranium is a finite source and that we WILL eventually deal with a depletion in the same way we're facing oil
It's not exactly a secret, which is why pretty much any nuclear story on /. will see thorium reactors mentioned in the first few posts. In the meantime, uranium will last us for 70-80 more years, more than enough time to flesh out thorium tech to the same level of safety and efficiency. With luck (and money!), we might even get fusion by then, which will close up on the energy issue once and for all.
yes, massive spills is exactly like slow leaks.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Yeah, cause I remember the last time a tsunami destroyed parts of Georgia. Oh that's right, that doesn't happen there.
The worst thing about Fukishima was all the bad press nuclear engergy got. We still have fucking stories about it, but nothing about all the destruction the tsunami caused to Japan, other than the fucking reactor. Nor do we ever get any press on the other reactors that Japan has that survived the tsunami.
Don't get me wrong, the worst case scenario is bad, but so is the worst case scenario of burning coal and oil. The nice thing about a reactor blowing up, unlike increased CO2 gas, is that only the immediate vicinity is destroyed as opposed to the whole human race. AKA, global warming.
Build more fucking reactors, and have some clean fucking energy for once.
21st Century Renaissance Man
Three mile island cause exactly zero deaths. not turning the other generates on and relying on coal has caused 50+ death, statistically.
Chernobyl was a disaster. One the is no longer possible with any current reactor.
Fukushima, yes, be the problem that happen there can NOT happen in these reactors. They don't rely on human intervention, generators, or need a power source to shut down.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Not that I care anyway and the reason is this:I will live approx 50 years still assuming all goes well. This means that most likely I will no be directly affected by any of next nuclear disasters. Still some people will. Japanese people thought the same as you I guess. From your last sentences I also infer that you would not mind moving to Fukushima as radioactivity is such a good thing for health - I think property prices are quite good at he moment and as long as you get any ISP to bring connection there you can even work and post some stuff from there.
we have technology accessible to us NOW that can reduce emissions and is not nearly as expensive (environmentally or economically) as nuclear will be.
Which one is it? Sun? Wind? My assumption so far is that a "hamster treadmill" is not practical or cheap, or we would see it used more in places other than Germany, where the "phobia of things people don't understand" took over.
I am also a little worried about the global climate change that will bring famine and war some 50-100 years from now, because the most power-hungry nation was burning coal for energy in the 21st century. Paint me paranoid.
Glad to hear.
Since I do not live in the U.S. exclusion zones (due to sudden sink holes and toxic levels of SO2 and CO, no, I wouldn't live in a Japanese exclusion zone either. However, more people have actually died from the coal fires than from Fukushima, so I guess if I actually HAD to live in one of them, it would be Fukushima, especially since it will be safe again a lot sooner.
But I guess you prefer to breath carbon monoxide at lethal levels and die now rather than get excessive radiation exposure and perhaps die later.
yes, because gravity might stop working~
Are you sure the AP1000 uses graphite as the moderator? Are you positive it's not light water? Think carefully.
" (burning graphite is what spread the Chernobyl radiation)."
using tin for the shed was the real cause, FYI.
"with its bargain-basement containment design."
no it isn't. In fact the shell is 3-5 times thicker then other reactors. But, of course you read the design information and already new that? RIGHT?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
2.2gw...GREAT SCOTT!
"mention that uranium is a finite source and that we WILL eventually deal with a depletion in the same way we're facing oil"
move to thorium?
" highlight that it takes DECADES to get a plant to operating status "
that's false.
"to us NOW that can reduce emissions and is not nearly as expensive (environmentally or economically) as nuclear will be."
no, we don't.
Nuclear is expensive compare to what? remember, these plants will have an operation life time of 80 to 160 year.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Got to do the guitar solo....
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/09/us-usa-nuclear-license-idUSTRE8181T420120209
While nuclear power doesn't generate a lot of CO2 directly (ignoring the backup diesel generators) the mining, transport and processing of uranium does generate CO2 emissions.
Just as I'm sure the mining, transport and processing of coal generates CO2 emissions.
"To prevent this day from getting any worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD THING" 1GJU8xLuDKDxEs4KLf8fAGyptoDsqvEsBT
These numbers are what the GP is referring to. On a per-Joule basis, nuclear power does have the lowest number of deaths by far. There are a number of factors, starting with the comparatively small volume of fuel required. Coal requires much larger mining operations because the energy density is lower than uranium. More mining equals more opportunity for regulatory capture/failure producing unsafe conditions and mining accidents. The second factor is air pollution: The number of deaths caused by excess smog from coal-fired power plants is large and measurable.
I always think it's funny that solar power is cited as more than 10 times as deadly than nuclear on a per Joule basis. I understand most of those deaths are due to installers falling off house roofs, and since the total volume of production is low the average is not favorable. The bottom line is that once a nuclear plant is operational, the personnel protection regulations do a damn good job of keeping folks out of harm's way, and since they constantly pump out power and fail so infrequently, the average is pretty damn good.
That's where the Triforce is located!
Or is it in New York? I'm confused by all the awesome.
to provide enough power to keep new seasons of Archer coming out.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Please point to where I said that the AP1000 uses graphite.
I assume I don't have to explain the meaning of "for example"?
no it isn't.
Yes, it is. It's a single-layer containment structure; there is no secondary containment. Quite the opposite, the outer shell is designed such that it would encourage the output of any fission products that escape primary containment. The inner shell is thicker than normal, but it's your only line of defense. And it's just plain steel -- with a huge number of welds (each weld being a potential point of failure) and surrounded by a shell that encourages convection of warm, high moisture air (or even salt air in seaside locations).
Corrosion has been a *huge* issue for nuclear reactors, and corrosion problems have been far more common than the NRC has ever predicted (and the record of lousy jobs being done on inspection... well, let's just say it's pretty bad). In this particular case, your main threat is damage like the Beaver Valley hole -- a hole that went right through the primary containment vessel between inspections and was found two years ago (which would be far worse in a design like the AP1000). Here you have a steel shell channelling oxygen and moisture-laden air up against the steel through areas that are difficult (and in some cases, outright impossible) to inspect, and to top it off? A giant steel tank of water overhead (have you ever seen an old water tank that *doesn't* at some point spring leaks and drip on what's below it?)
Overconfidence is always the greatest weakness of nuclear power plant designs, and I see it galore in a lot of the new designs like the AP1000.
Why must all aquatic villains play the organ?
$7/W doesn't sound that much to me
Even with PV, which is generally more expensive than thermal, FirstSolar is producing cells for something like $0.75/W nowadays. Now, there's a lower capacity factor, and you still have installation costs, but still... that's it, your only costs. No relevant disaster liability, no fueling, no decommissioning, none of that. Just a tiny bit of regular maintenance.
Why must all aquatic villains play the organ?
The AP1000 has no secondary containment vessel. It's a step backward. It's a single steel shell with a big tank of water over it. One layer. Lots of welds. In contact with corrosive air. Surrounded by a building which is, instead of trying contain releases, designed to encourage them them to vent (in order to help cool the shell).
Why must all aquatic villains play the organ?
And seeing as the local environment has been able to handle slow leaks, obviously it's able to handle massive localised influxes of crude! ~
LOL at the Slashdot idiots who don't even know the first thing about safe nuclear energy.
How many of you have even heard of LFTR? Idiots.
The problematic welds I were referring are on the pressure vessel, NOT the containment vessel
As for the containment vessel, the air is not corrosive (any more than regular air) unless you have an accident with the pressure vessel. Even on the timescale of Fukushima, I'm pretty sure corrosion won't be a problem before we have such a facility under control.
It's an improvement over a reinforced concrete containment vessel - it can handle about 2.5 times the internal pressure safely.
Is going to steel containment from reinforced concrete (that doesn't handle pressure as well as steel) a step backwards in your opinion?
I will admit that I thought there was a larger gap between the outer building and the steel containment than this picture indicates.
I prefer neither one. Quit talking as if filthy old coal is the only alternative to nuclear.
Wind, water, and sun. And a bit of geothermal. And efficiency. That's where we should be going.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Seriously. Even if you are against nuclear power, you would be a dangerous fanatic if you'd not rather have modern, much safer reactors around than the old crap that can blow up any day.
That's the problem with our western politics. It's really hard to follow a set direction for a decade or two with elections every few years. So one government wants to get out of nuclear power, the next one doesn't - in the end, you don't get out but you also don't invest, and the power companies are too scared that the next time it really is the end of it all and thus save on modernizing as much as they legally can.
And then you end up with really old, horribly insecure and outright dangerous nuclear reactors. In other words, you get the worst-case scenario that absolutely nobody on either side of the discussion ever wanted.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I don't live in Georgia, but I have a fundamental problem with so called Work-In-Progress funding, where rates increase to pay for construction.
That problem, essentially, is that you are forcing people to pay higher rates now, with the promise of lower rates, maybe, in the future, to justify the higher rates, but. . .
Those new nuclear reactors will probably take at least 10 years to come on line, if not longer. So, for the next 10 years, you are forcing ratepayers to pay for a power plant they are getting no benefit from. By the time that plant is online, some percentage of the local population will have died or moved. They will pay for the plant, but never receive the benefits of it. Some other percentage will die or move in the first few years of operation, meaning they never get enough benefit to justify the higher rates they had to pay.
It may even be true that ultimately, it leads to lower rates for customers of Georgia Power, but those customers will not all be the customers paying for that benefit today.
In other words, you are forcing people to invest in someone else's ownership of a valuable power plant. Although, in the end, when you are dealing with local monopolies, I suppose that's always true anyhow. Still, seems unfair to the folks who have to pay higher rates right now but will never get a discount.
2. The day before the Fukushima accident, the NRC granted a 20 year extension to the US Vermont Yankee plant of the exact same design
This decade is going to see a lot of nuclear plants, that built during the 70s, reaching their designed end of life.
Other issues aside... Vermont doesn't have history of tsunamis + earthquakes.
"It just can't be that hard to make a bacterium that eats cellulose..."
It is very difficult. Apparently, billions of years ago plants chose cellulose as their structural material because it is strong, extremely chemically stable, and because bacteria doesn't want to eat it.
Even if you dump cash into fusion, you still end up with a nuclear waste issue. Fusion kicks out a lot of neutrons, so activated radioactivity is a real problem when you decommission reactors.
It's a much smaller problem, though. Spent fuel from nuclear fission is minimum 24,000 years, up to a couple of million years (np-237). Meanwhile, the radiation in the fusion container that is bombarded with the neutrons you're referring to has a half-life of about 12 years. Much easier to deal with, and much less of it.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
As I've said before, deaths are not a good measure of safety. You should use something that measures all the losses, like the amount of insurance and damage claims paid out, costs of emergency and medical work, compensation for land lost to contamination, and that sort of thing. The total cost of the Fukushima accident is well above $100 billion, and may be around $300 billion. It's very roughly $60 billion for the land that has to be abandoned for decades and perhaps centuries. It's at least $15 billion to decommission the plant. TEPCO may have to pay out $130 billion in claims. By some measures, 1 human life is worth about $5 million. Which puts a natural disaster such as Hurricane Andrew, at 39 deaths, as only $195 million in damages, when it is really $26.5 billion. You will vastly underestimate the costs of nuclear accidents when using only number of deaths as a measure.
The only notorious exaggeration going on here is the absolutely incredible blindness towards the potential and actual damage implicit in statements like "nuclear is safer than x because there have been fewer deaths."
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
When the Germans leave nuclear technology you know its time to move on and embrace the next technology revolution. The question where to dispose nuclear waste is unresolved.
Not really, it's much more the way (unless you consider people's lack of willingness to starve). Just to keep the grocery stores full of fresh food requires a tremendous amount of fossil fuel. Stop the trucks running for a week and the shelves would quickly be empty. Within three weeks there are people in the cities starving. And that's just the transportation, which would take decades to change over to anything renewable.
Consider that coal generates more the half the electricity in the US. Ending the use of fossil fuels for electricity too fast means trading lives. The cost of power climbs, as does food. More would die from temperature extremes (more from cold than heat, but plenty from both), malnutrition, and reduced mobility.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
> $14 billion and produce 2.2 GW of power (able to power ~1 million homes).
Hmm, what if you put $14,000 worth of solar cells on 1 million homes (or $28k on 1/2 million homes, or ...) So you don't generate as much power. But you generate it at a time when you are using the most power. You don't need to hire and train a bunch of folks to run a reactor, and emergency equipment to handle a disaster. Nor do you need to pay to get rid of the nuclear waste. The day to day costs to run solar has to be tons cheaper than a nuclear reactor.
How close are we to it being more sense to do something like that?
Really?
http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/08/30/2324243/making-fuel-with-newspapers-and-bacteria
""Scientists at Tulane have found a natural bacteria (dubbed TU-103) that produces butanol. While butanol-producing bacteria aren't new, there are a few important points about this particular bacterium. It is the first natural bacteria that converts cellulose directly to butanol without the cellulose needing to be processed into sugar first, and it can do this in the presence of oxygen, which kills other butanol-producing bacteria. The simplification of the process could significantly decrease the production costs of butanol. This bacteria could allow virtually any plant product, such as newspaper or grass clippings, to be used to produce fuel for conventional vehicles.""
http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/06/11/1958225/researchers-find-wood-digesting-enzyme-in-bacteria
"AffidavitDonda writes with news that University of Warwick and University of British Columbia researchers have "identified the gene for breaking down lignin in a soil-living bacterium called Rhodococcus jostii. Although such enzymes have been found before in fungi, this is the first time that they have been identified in bacteria. The bacterium's genome has already been sequenced which means that it could be modified more easily to produce large amounts of the required enzyme. In addition, bacteria are quick and easy to grow, so this research raises the prospect of producing enzymes which can break down lignin on an industrial scale. By making woody plants and the inedible by-products of crops economically viable the eventual hope is to be able to produce biofuels that don't compete with food production.""
So fuck off.
The world installed 26 GW of solar and 41 GW of wind capacity in 2011. I think that is past beta.
Before anyone makes the comment, I am aware that those sources have around a 20% capacity factor (average output/nameplate capacity), because they operate intermittently. Still, that comes to 13.4 GW average power, or 6.7 times the output of the two reactors in the story.
The GP wrote, "The nuclear industry has an excellent track record - it took decades before the first incident of a civilian reactor letting out any measurable contamination". I agree that the noble gases were not going to pose any threat to anyone. However, the difference between TMI and a china syndrome reactor is just luck.
I was simply pointing out that we routinely accept equal or greater consequences but pay it no mind because it isn't the n-word. I am an advocate of using wind, water, and sun where practical, but it's not practical everywhere.
However, this plant will be built and it is hardly the end of the world. Quite the contrary, it's a step in the right diretion because otherwise it would have been coal or perhaps natural gas (and more fracking).
1. The solar panels on your house, the walmart, your covered parking, and many other places don't take up any valued land. Nuclear power plants don't take up valued land because, well, the land around a nuclear power plant isn't all that popular (land around these new reactors is a bargain, on sale on craigslist: http://augusta.craigslist.org/reo/2763330361.html ). Nuclear plants aren't all that land efficient: Plant Vogtle is a 3100 acre site. That's enough for roughly 900MW actual average output power in solar power at today's technology. That means that compared to Voglte even including the expansion, nuclear is only about 5 times as dense, they are in the same order of magnitude. Add to that that when a nuclear plant is decommissioned (even in case of no accidents), it's land and the land used for storing the fuel remains can't be re-used for many thousands of years, while a solar plant can be bulldozed over and then it's perfectly safe to build a preschool with a sandbox on the site. In fact, the solar plant can be on the roofs of filled preschools spread across the same land area where the electricity consumers are. Who wants a nuclear plant on their roof? And electricity from Nuclear plants doesn't need wires from the plant to consumers?
2. The Sun does all the reprocessing for free and safe.
3. The Sun shines for free and solar power is even more abundant than nuclear reactor fuel. I had some on my head today. No seriously, there is much more commercially viable solar power available than the nuclear and coal industry want to to believe.
4. How many people died from solar plant accidents again? How many people needed to evacuate and leave everything behind in a hurry for one?
And it only will get better. Solar power is getting cheaper and more easy to install every month. Nuclear plants only get more expensive to build each time one is built.
Fukushima is/was NOT as bad as some coal power related incidents, it just happened faster, and had the new N word in it, so it gets attention.
I dunno, these happen pretty fast.
Based on what logic, exactly? Just because an unanticipated event happened at TMI, it doesn't prove that ANY unanticipated event could have happened. Anyway, TMI is ancient history as far as new reactor designs go. It's like saying a Prius is unsafe because a 1973 Pinto can explode.
i get the feeling that if you were saying the above directly to me, i'd be getting hit by crumbs of sandwich from the ferocity of it.
was there a point in there?
actually, even the summary states that the reactors are passively cooled to avoid the very problem that happened in Japan.
so, yeah, we learned. in fact, we learned before it happened, as this design hasn't just been sketched on a napkin in march last year.
but the same argument goes for nuke - there's been problems, so don't use it at all.
no wonder nobody can agree on anything - we're all arguing precisely the same moot point on both sides.
Half-life doesn't work that way.
Long-half life radioactive elements aren't much danger since they're actually far less radioactive. It's all about the total volume of emitters present.
with the current reactors being considered by NRC, the waste problem is the same as the old reactors, unfortunately.
reactors that can breed fuel (ie, burn up waste), are seen as a proliferation hazard. some LFTR designs are a very good way to make nearly 100% pure U-233.
i'm all for them though... we can use the U-233 to start up more reactors just as well as we can use it for bombs.
i never heard anyone dying from reduced mobility...
maybe measurable immediately next to the outlet pipe right as the accident was happening.
radioactive xenon has a very short half-life. and it was a small amount, and the atmosphere is very big. and noble gases don't bioaccumulate, so even if you breathed the stuff in, it'd be gone in the next breath, giving you a pretty small exposure even in the impossible worst-case scenario of you putting your mouth over the outlet pipe like it was a joint.
The Japanese said that too: can't happen here, Chernobyl caused by incompetent Russki operators, faulty Russki design yadda yadda. Guess what? Japanese nuclear scientists/engineers & operators make mistakes, too.
The number one problem is the profit motive -- which is also a design feature of the American nukes.
,quote>Where safety regulators have the final say and are not corrupt, nuclear power, like everything else, will be much safer.
Good, then we know there to site our NPPs! Big Rock Candy Mountain, here we come!
As for wind, Not a fan of it myself.
I see what you did there...
Really, more nuclear? Wow, this has to be the most retarded decision in quite a while. Talk about trying to solve a problem from the wrong end. Poor country, I'm happy I don't live there.
I have a question. Could the current waste materials be used in new breeder reactors, or are they not of sufficient quality? I'm at least an entire decade behind on nuclear reactor science & engineering (my level of knowledge is probably around "stuff go boom, slowly"), so I really have no idea.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Sorry they aren't. Coal has quite a good number of operational deaths in the mining side and on the health effects of emissions side. Those aren't exactly 'potential', those are factually expected given the pollution of the atmosphere and the dangers of mining.
Solar? potential deaths? seriously?
Wind - again, don't stand within a 1/4 mile of a big turbine when it's really windy and there aren't any potential deaths.
Hydro - again, planning for expected scenarios like a dam breaking by restricting housing in the valley downstream solves that problem pretty easily. Or even just making reinforced high ground evacuation sites like they do for tsunamis. No significant 'potential' deaths.
Oil - a harder nut to crack as the effects of spills tend to be less direct and take longer to materialize but I won't say there are huge 'potential' deaths there. As we saw in the Gulf disaster (or rather didn't see), adequate planning can mitigate much of the 'potential' damages.
All of the above are normal and expected operational situations that you can plan for and implement. You simply can't do that for a reactor breach because you can't go into the area. When it fails, it's gone and you simply can't do anything about it without killing quite a few people. Chernobyl's workers paid the ultimate price to save a lot more people. If you don't have that ability...and when it's failed, you don't get to say what you will and will not have to fix it.
Failure scenarios mean that the precautions didn't work. You no longer have backups and have to deal with the full brunt of the disaster. Dams and spills are the only ones you can remotely say fall into this category and both of those only cause damage in a very limited area that you can plan for and mitigate.
Nuclear failure renders 10s or 100s of square miles inhabitable for decades. And everybody in that area is at risk for 'potential' effects. It's the reason nuclear plants cost so much. They simply can not fail. And yet as we've seen...they do.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Dude, solar on the roof. And even then small wind turbines com in lots of sizes and shapes. Outputs 6 kW hours. Stand a few up in a neighborhood and you've got a significant local source of power with no transmission losses.
Or a 6 foot diameter blade tip rotor that estimates 1500 kW/h annually.
Rather than massive big plant, think lots of smaller installations that can provide a good chunk of base load. All using 'free' fuel.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
More people died in the Japan disaster from the Chiba City natural gas plant exploding than the nuclear reactor. But guess which one got all the press?
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/03/11/article-1365318-0D92E346000005DC-921_964x572.jpg
Roofers fall off roofs all the time putting solar in.
There's no utterly safe energy source, but nuclear has done a damn good job proving its track record.
Germany has sold electricity to France this winter because France could not cope with their load of electric heating. Germany had a surplus even though we shut down half of our nuclear power plants for good last year.
There might have been some luck in the equation but it's not nearly as bad as all the naysayers were predicting.
This is nothing new but your electric devices use 60-70 even 80% of there overall consumption when they ARE OFF!!! The Standby mode..
Typical computer uses about 400 watts when on, however there are LED lights for home use even outdoor use that are very low in energy consumption and very bright. This and putting electric devices on a power strip, then shutting the power strip completely off will save energy, not much to the typical home owner but you are wasting 200-400 dollars a year by not shutting down these stand by devices.
But people refuse to do anything or come up with excuses not too. This America after all we must destroy it before anyone else gets to it, and if we happen to help push other countries in the same direction, oops, not our problem let the next generation figure it out.
I don't think it's the economy that worries me it's the MBA who never studied nuclear physics at the head of the company that worries me. In the old days per 1950s most companies in technical fields where managed by people who understood what their products where. If you say to a chemical co. CEO, "How dangerous is a hydrofluoric acid leak??" "Um, I don't know."
Also the quantities of material that are mined, transported and processed are orders of magnitude smaller for nuclear. That c-squared constant in the theory of relativity does wonders for energy density if you can make use of it...
Solar? potential deaths? seriously?
yes seriously.
Working in construction is one of the most dangerous thing the average Joe can do:
http://money.cnn.com/2005/08/26/pf/jobs_jeopardy/
http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfar0020.pdf
Roofers in particular being the worst.
Now there are worse jobs out there, but my understanding is that per kW installed solar and wind kill a relatively large number of people because each install is a relatively small output.
Let's say your new nuke plant kills a dozen people over the course of it's life - that's terrible and a disaster, and certainly well above the proven average - but consider that to install solar panels on roofs equal to that plant's capacity would require of the order of a million installs. Plug that into the statistics and you're looking at about 30 people killed (if I have my numbers right).
Now that's not factoring in the deaths from the truckers who transport the materials, or the deaths from pollutants during their production or any deaths from servicing the panels during their life or when decommissioning them, that's not allowing for any deaths from construction of the storage facilities that would have to go with such a solar install. The list just goes on.
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
Edited Repost of an earlier comment I made
Nuclear power is only expensive because of the coal and enviromental lobbists
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=886&dat=19890326&id=dOdSAAAAIBAJ&sjid=KYEDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6879,6110878
Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station
Inital proposed costs 2.8 Billion
Final Cost 5.8 Billion, 9.3 Billion with Financing added in
1.8 million Manhours wasted
Unreasonable costs attributed to APS management from the post construction independent audit:
50.34 Million
I talked once with a senior security administrator at APS who started out back in the day working security at the construction of that plant and he told me this story.
Due to regulations each contractor had to have the contents of their tool bag inventoried before they were allowed to begin work or leave work and had to log each item used and where it went.
Each item brought into the plant had to be listed on a sheet with each Item getting a line.
Example 1 box of screws
1. cardboard box screws with plastic window 50 count
2. plastic window from box of screws 50 count
3. 1 screw - from box of screws 50 count
4. 1 screw from box of screws 50 count
5. 1 screw from box of screws 50 count
I could go on but you get the point
This was in the days before computers were everywhere so it had to be hand written. At the end of the shift the same procedure was followed and the lists were compared and if there was any discrepency between the two and the contractors work log which recorded each item used and where it was used, a security guard had to accompany the contractor to locate the missing item and recover it.
Initally contractors were put on the clock before they entered security and taken off the clock after they exited security, so there was incentive for workers to pad their hours by bring in unnecessary boxes of screws, and ocassionally leaving an item in the facility so that they could milk overtime. eventually it was sorted out but the contractors constantly found ways to abuse the regulations to justify extra pay.
The plant at the time of the above story had no nuclear material present and the above work area that the contractors were being let into would never be exposed to nuclear material during operation (office building), but the regulation was in place purportedly to reduce the amount of potential nuclear waste by limiting and controlling the amount of material that went into the plant.
Until the regulations governing nuclear power plant construction are rationalized there will be little nuclear plant construction in the US and it will always be expensive and over budget. Nuclear is cheaper than current solar technologies and coal but its the ridiculous unnecessary regulations that drive up the cost. Corner cutting is a logical outcome of excessive and unnecessary regulation. Regulations need to be in place, but they need to make sense too.
> lead summary: licensed in early 2012, expected to begin operation in 2016 or 2017
You must be stupid to believe that or maybe 2012 is BC and 2017 is AD...
The new finnish 1000MW nuclear reactor has been under construction for almost 11 years now and still not ready. The pre-allocated budget was exceeded 2,5 times.
Half-life doesn't work that way.
Long-half life radioactive elements aren't much danger since they're actually far less radioactive. It's all about the total volume of emitters present.
After 50 years, the fusion waste is far less radioactive than the fission waste, which has to be contained for another 23,950 years. No matter how you look at it, dealing with fusion radioactive waste is much easier.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
i never heard anyone dying from reduced mobility...
Actually, most people who die from starvation during drought die for exactly that reason: If they could move 100 or 200 miles, there would be food available. There are other issues, but that's the easiest one to point out. During the "dust bowl" years in the mid-west, that's what most people did to avoid food shortages - they moved west.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
True. You forgot cleaning costs, though, which still doesn't make it expensive by any means.
They do that so no errant screws or objects are left in the machinery, so when the fuel is finally put in, it functions as it should without burning everyone's face off in a brilliant flash. This is a good thing.
If [deaths] are so few as to be a reason that nuclear is a good idea, then solar is likewise a good idea for the same reason.
If you're talking about PV, have you accounted for deaths from the creation, use and disposal of all the nasty chemicals required to make them?
"Maybe the DOE is part of this conspiracy"
Gee, you think?
You are referring to "DOE" as in "Department of Energy", right? Formerly known as the "Atomic Energy Commission"? The organization who's budget is highly dependant on developing nuclear technology? The one who has an interest in promoting development of such technology in order to get a larger budget?
Now who would *possibly* think their numbers might be skewed in favour of "Advanced Nuclear"?
But that's absolutely false. The reason there have been no new licenses for nuclear plants for decades is that nobody has applied for any - and that, in turn, is because nuclear power cannot be generated profitably without heavy taxpayer sponsorship. The economics of nuclear power are completely impossible to work with in a purely capitalist system. This is a simple, well-known fact, not a theory or propaganda, and it's why the Cheney Energy Task Force re-implemented the Price-Anderson Act in 2005 along with per-watt subsidies. Socialism is a requirement for terrestrial nuclear power plants, because they aren't economically viable without it.
Every reputable analysis of the costs of nuclear power shows that gas, coal, and biologically produced sustainable fuels are all cheaper than fission. The market has proved this by failing to build any new nuclear plants in the absence of government sponsorship.
That's also absolutely false. Gas generation from waste and agriculture distributes evenly - without militarization of processing and use facilities, so it scales tremendously better than nuclear, which distributes extremely poorly due to the requirement for a relatively small number of highly secure (typically militarized) installations with titanic grid interconnection requirements.
Furthermore methane can be shipped nearly losslessly using existing pipeline distribution networks, avoiding electrical losses, or it can be cheaply converted to electricity at any point and supplied to the grid.
Nuclear's not cost-effective or desirable or carbon-neutral. With very little capital investment (relative to nuclear, although unfortunately not to coal) bio-gas is all three! But nuclear allows the preservation of existing economic and political power bases, so authoritarians and entrenched power brokers love it .
You could say the same thing about any form of energy. Coal, natural gas, solar, wind they all create vast amounts of CO2 in the production and transportation of the necessary components or fuel.
Time to offend someone
No, no, no. The environment must be kept 100% pristine with no chance of error, so all this drilling must be shut down. If that means a few obese McDonalds-eating SUV-driving suburban-living Americans have to pay more for gas, that's just fine. And if that means the whole US economy must collapse and we must all be reduced to the standard of living of Bangladeshis, well, that's fine too. And if that means that most of us must die so the rest can survive by farming using 19th century methods, why, that's OK as well. Anything for the environment.
As I said in another post in this discussion, install solar at time of construction and now your 'deaths' are largely absorbed by the already on the roof workers.
Transportation of materials deaths? really? You do realize that absolutely *every* activity has these costs right?
Production of the panels? again, every thing has this.
But more importantly, you are talking about normal 'operational' conditions. Construction, transportation and maintenance. These are not 'potential' scenarios but actual real things that have to happen.
A nuclear disaster doesn't 'have' to happen. That's what 'potential' deaths are. What are the 'potential' deaths should solar panels 'fail'? A wind mill? Don't be within a 1/4 mile when it falls down. etc. How do you deal with a full blown core breach and exposure? You simply can't without quite a few killing people.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
As opposed to the uranium refinement and long term waste storage?
Everything has construction costs. Solar and wind don't have failure costs like nuclear does. Period.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
install solar at time of construction and now your 'deaths' are largely absorbed by the already on the roof workers.
Transportation of materials deaths? really? You do realize that absolutely *every* activity has these costs right?
Absolutely, but you can't ignore them; when assessing costs you have to assess all costs not just the ones that are convenient to your argument.
Just as when calculating the costs of coal you have to count in the costs both human and material of the fuel you have to do the same for all installations and technologies. Why is a death of a truck driver who is transporting a solar panel (what would not be needed to be transported if it wasn't needed) not a death that you should count, and a death of someone building a nuke power plant one that should be counted. I see no difference.
A nuclear disaster doesn't 'have' to happen. That's what 'potential' deaths are. What are the 'potential' deaths should solar panels 'fail'? A wind mill? Don't be within a 1/4 mile when it falls down
Statistics says otherwise. Whatever the cause of the accident we have enough data from past experience to say x activity carries this risk so we can assume that it will have similar in future. Why does it matter that the accident was "Fred forgot to clip his safety line on then slipped on some oil Bob had spilt" rather than "First we got the requirements wrong, then we designed a system that needed active cooling, then we designed multiple systems to do that, then didn't realise that what would happen if our initial assumptions were wrong would be the failure of the next but 2 line of defence" . If the person died in service of providing x MW of power, then they're still dead.
I'm not sure why it matters if they're potential deaths from driving to the work site, or potential deaths from a reactor accident.
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
I reserve my comment until after that guy fro http://fairewinds.com/updates/ has given us his analysis on this.
He KNOWS this stuff.
I propose we use Fairy Dust Reactors. Through the application of rainbows to a highly compressed gas composed of Fairy Dust and ground unicorn horn (acts as a stabilizer), it generates 83% more power, and it 97% more efficient. The real added bonus is that if something goes wrong, such as the Troll workforce rioting and accidentally blowing of the facility the only result will be the loss of the Troll work force (who cares really), and the explosive release of happiness. The Fairy Dust and ground unicorn horn may tickle your nose a bit, making you scrunch your nose up like Renée Zellweger or Meg Ryan, and perhaps sneeze, but it is 100% non-toxic! Now some people might argue about the cruel killing of unicorns for their horns to be ground up for use in the reactor. Not to worry, they are safely chained up by the thousands in compact and efficient "Hornaries" where the horn is extracted and processed before sending the material to the plant. Using this method, the horns regrow every 15 days, to be extracted again, and again essentially making this a renewable resource. Currently the only thing holding back operations is the lack of trained leprechauns used to harness the rainbow power within the catalytic process. Some have suggested importing Care Bears to do the work, however it has also been pointed out that they are highly unionized and are not afraid to use their "Care Bare Countdown". Even with these challenges however, this is by far a better alternative to those filthy nuclear operations!
That's the problem: regular ambient outdoor air is far more corrosive than indoor air (or better, an intentionally low moisture/low oxygen gas gap). And it's far worse if either the air is exposed to cooling tower mist or ocean air.
The reality is that steel vessels leak over time. Its what they do. And it's really, really dang hard to stop them. Whether you're talking about ships, water tanks, or yes, nuclear reactor containment structures. Who cares what pressure it's designed to handle when you have a Hole In The Side?
Why must all aquatic villains play the organ?
Because I talked to a friend who did some rad. assessment post TMI and he was told, while on site a few days after the incident, that it was just luck.
As for safety, you appear to have drunk the kool-aid, "it's safe now because we have new technology." Similarly, I've been hearing for decades, "the advancement diesel has made over the last 5 or 10 years have made it comparable to gas." The problem is that there is no testing methodology for this type of problem and humans tend to miss the same types of mistakes. The enterprise is inherently unsafe, and some may choose to accept that, but at least acknowledge that is what you are doing.
Dude, I guess your Kool-Aid says to trust in nothing. Fortunately, we no longer require flagmen to walk in front of automobiles to ward off pedestrians and horses. This, in spite of 10's of thousands killed in automobiles every year in the USA alone. Why? the risk/reward ratio favors it. Again, it is as illogical to automatically reject technological advances as it is to blindly trust it. And as for TMI, the whole thing was an ACCIDENT, caused by chance occurrences. It just so happened that this accident revealed a number of weaknesses in the physical plant and operating procedures that now made fission power plants MUCH safer. Internal combustion engines are "inherently unsafe", using your same criteria. It's so typical to see people eschew simple logic in order to push their personal agenda, and then try to marginalize people with better sense that disagree with them.
Let me say this now....
GRAPHITE DOES NOT BURN!!!!! It is nearly impossible to get the correct conditions to have graphite burn. Chernobyl and burning graphite is a myth that started when they were still trying to figure out what was going on.
Visit any of the steel mills that use graphite electrodes. They will pull those out when they are glowing hot and let them sit in open air with no adverse affects.
I'll say it again.... Graphite does not burn!!!! This is what makes it the perfect core material.
The examples you gave involve small hazards to society (though extreme to those who pay the price) with small benefits. These are much easier risks to quantity with performance tests. The cost of building thousands of cars for crash testing is not so prohibitive that we haven't done it and vastly improved crash survivability. It is notable that what engineers thought would make a safe car in the 1950s was not so good. It took the actual testing in an emergency situation to find out that the design needed many fixes.
On the other head, a Fukushima type disaster where the wind didn't always blow out to sea and where there was not an ocean nearby to put waste into would be an accident beyond comprehension. As is there will be an exclusion zone for the foreseeable future--and that is in the upwind direction. If TMI had a china syndrome, it could have been that New York City would have had to evacuate indefinitely. The cost to the economy as people's way of life is awesome. Did we make it safe before we took this risk? Well, we thought we did... but then it turned out we just got a little lucky in a very unlucky moment. What will lead to safety improvements over the next several decades? Probably more trial and error. Lets let that happen in France and Japan.
Yes.
Existing CANDU designs can actually use LWR waste with only "dry reprocessing" - reshaping the spent fuel into a new form.
However that's only a slight improvement in efficiency.
The IFR-style approach would require LWR to be reprocessed prior to entering the IFR cycle - but yes, existing LWR waste can be used to fuel a breeder like the IFR.
Even without breeder reactors, reprocessing can greatly reduce the waste issue - just not nearly to the degree that an integrated breeder + pyroprocessing approach like the IFR could.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Why was this modded "funny"? Coal Fires are very real and very destructive. Apparently there are coal fires in China that are even worse.
I disagree our best can get real good at times like these.
What may be is hard to know.
Contains is the word and its out there somewhere. Well maybe fusion would hold us a while;)
I agree with the last thing you said. Therein lies the problem. No will no way? When we have the will nothing is impossible.
I'm sure we could live with that amount. Maybe we would even have more land to grow stuff that eats CO2 24/7. Carbon sequestration is going to cause a big blob and kill us all.
It's proven very difficult to permit a reactor on a site that doesn't already have one. Fukushima had six in one location. Vogtle will now have four. Cost cutting has been just as much a factor in the AP1000 design as in the sub-compact GE Mark 1 (with insufficient vessel containment size). Only this time, we don't have the GE Three sounding the alarm, we have the USC one (Edwin Lyman) and the NRC one (John Ma). I'll leave the always alarmist Arnie Gundersen off this reputable list.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000#Safety_concerns
Graphite does burn in some circumstances, and it's a myth that it does not.
* Fresh, pure graphite under atmospheric conditions with no additional source of heat will erode at high temperatures, but not self-sustain. Which is still quite bad.
* Any alteration to those starting conditions can yield a self-sustaining graphite fire. That is, A) alteration to the graphite structure due to long periods of intense radiation bombardment and/or infiltration, B) significant impurities or defects in the graphite during production, C) non-atmospheric conditions, such as high temperature steam instead of just air, or elevated pressures, D) continued input of nuclear decay heat, self-sustaining the erosion process as an effective continuous burn.
Your steel mill is a great example, as they're constantly burning through graphite electrodes (each lasts only about a week). To reiterate the significance of that: if that were nuclear core material, it'd all be in the air in a week.
Why must all aquatic villains play the organ?
Solar and wind do use fossil fuel energy for production and transport but it's conceivable to use solar and wind for that. But after the solar and wind plants are in place they require no fuel to be delivered to them unlike coal, natural gas and nuclear and they don't produce toxic waste in their operations.
to approve New Nuclear Reactors in Iran.
Recipes for USA bankrupt - http://tinypaste.com/0d66f dd = dollar deluge (printed in the infinity)
You should use something that measures all the losses, like the amount of insurance and damage claims paid out, costs of emergency and medical work, compensation for land lost to contamination, and that sort of thing.
You can't separate legitimate costs of nuclear power from costs of public hysteria. Deaths are a harder thing to fudge.
The only notorious exaggeration going on here is the absolutely incredible blindness towards the potential and actual damage implicit in statements like "nuclear is safer than x because there have been fewer deaths."
It's not blindness and not at all incredible, but rather a reasonable metric of safety.
Relying on a few large providers is a trait nukes share with oil, indeed. Carrying around electricity implies some inefficiency, while carrying oil implies pollution. The reason why I don't like this model, however, is that it doesn't promote autonomy.
The other thing is nuclear waste. As it lasts thousands of years, I cannot believe that the ultimate cost of storing it has been evaluated, not even to an approximation of three orders of magnitude. We don't even know what language people will speak 5000 years from now, so how can we explain them that they have to pay the debt we took out?
When there is added cost (beyond monetary inflation), but no added value, then it is not capitalism. I consider such economics a welfare state for the few at the expense of the many. It is legal welfare, but not capitalism. Corporate Welfare corporate-tobacco/sugar farm and subsidies, Micky Mouse copyrights, Airline baggage fees, loan-shark credit card rates/fees, market/product/service (Comcast, AT&T ...) hostages, many...many more. When it adds only cost it is Faux-capitalism. For US, EU, RU ... economics is not structured as a meritocracy requiring added value; Hence, Faux/Pseudo-capitalism.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Like saying Chernobyl was no big deal because you get radiation standing next to a microwave. Sometimes I wonder how people manage to type something like that and have enough brain power to keep their lungs functioning.....
> 1: It is energy dense, so it doesn't take up valued land. Solar and wind farms are great, but energy losses through wires cause those to become not feasible.
Sorta kinda. Firstly, because modern nuclear power plants are so large (~1 GW) and not located very close to cities, there are tremendous losses in transmission. This can also be true with wind, but not so much solar. In fact, the real elegance of solar is when placed rooftop, both residential and commercial. Transmission losses quickly approach zero, as does use of so-called valued land. Also, nuclear does take up a bunch of land -- Vogtle is 3100 acres. At 5 acres/MW PV, you could do over 600 MW of PV there... not as much as Vogtle, but not as tremendous a difference as many believe. Plus, Vogtle requires 3100 contiguous acres of land... whereas renewables can be built as "in-fill" in underused patches of land or on marginally valuable land.
> 2: A reprocessing, "breeder" reactor can reduce the need for high level waste dumps.
Irrelevant to the nuclear plants approved in the article, and given tUSA's foreign policy situation, this is a long way off.
> 3: Reactor fuel is relatively cheap and abundant. When uranium becomes an issue, there is always thorium (although that is still a research leap ahead.)
The sun and wind and rain are cheaper, and more abundant. Plus it is delivered straight to the US, not requiring trade agreements or transportation. The challenge with both nuclear and renewables isn't the fuel cost, it's the capital cost and, in the case of nuclear, off-shore wind, and concentrated solar thermal, very long lead times (planning, permitting, and construction).
> 4: Safety. The deaths per terawatt figures completely show this.
Relative to what? Relative to fossil plants, sure. Relative to hydro built 50+ years ago, sure. Relative to modern renewables? No data. And no, the one blog post which /. loves to post about it doesn't count -- it's full of holes and is not even reviewed by an editor, no less experts in the field or in academia.
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Nuclear has some real advantages, but don't whitewash the disadvantages. There is no current long term waste storage strategy, and no evidence that tUSA is moving toward solving this problem. There is no short term hope of breeder reactors or nuclear fuel reprocessing due to foreign policy considerations. Additionally, the cost of building a nuclear plant is enormous on a $/kW level, especially when the cost of financing and risk of default is baked in. This is a real killer -- given relatively flat future electricity demand curves, tremendous potential for electrical energy efficiency projects [at a much lower cost per kW (and kWh)], and the reality that there are loads of renewable generation project opportunities today with costs lower on a kW capacity rating and on a kWh basis, there's very little argument for new nuclear right now so long as we're leaving EE and renewable stones unturned.
P.S. The idea that nuclear generators will get cheaper with practice is an attractive idea. It was espoused in the first nuclear power era too. Didn't happen though. On a real dollars per kW basis, prices increased over time. What makes you think the future won't emulate the past?
P.P.S. The "baseload" argument is bunk too. The US grid has plenty of peaking capacity. What we want is cheap energy, not additional capacity for 3am. Besides, guess when load is highest? In almost all of tUSA, its on weekday non-holiday afternoons when it's hot outside. It turns out that the sun tends to shine rather brightly at that exact time, which makes PV particularly valuable -- it generates electricity precisely when the demand for electricity is highest, thereby helping us to avoid using plants with higher operating costs like CT gas plants and oil plants.
Support a few technologists in Washington.