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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."
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
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.
There's no such thing as nuclear waste. There's just stuff you haven't configured your *other* fast breeder reactor to burn, yet.
Which is why we should be investing in public transit.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
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?"
Yes much better to keep drilling in the gulf - that's never been a problem...
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?
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!
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.
I believe France is the only country that currently reprocesses spent nuclear fuel. Another environmentalist hangup.
Those issues were brought up in 2009. It was stated in this article (http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/business/s_738220.html) that they can't get licensed until the safety issues are addressed. And now they're licensed. So a little more transparency would be nice, but according to the letter of the law, they've complied with the USNRC's concerns.
Mark Anthony Collins
You should probably learn about all the things Carter tried to do.
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)
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)
But that doesn't mean that we won't still need more energy. Hell, developing countries alone will need it to reach anywhere near what we have right now.
And this is their opportunity to become the next big energy suppliers as oil runs out. Many of them are lucky enough to have vast renewable resources. A single North African nation alone could power all of Western Europe easily with solar thermal, and the EU is actively trying to get capacity built there (I knew there was a reason we helped Libya).
The only problem is that they need help with the technology, which is why they are still building nasty coal powered stations.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC