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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
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.
PRISM / IFR designs in general (and Molten salt breeders, in theory) turn that "waste" into enough fuel to supply the earth ... forever, assuming we build pyroprocessing facilities (PUREX generates a lot of waste ... no good).
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
Sorry, but all the disposal problems have not been solved. There is one remaining issue of "environmentalist" obstructionism. I use quotes, because these people are damaging the environment, not protecting it.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
There's no such thing as nuclear waste. There's just stuff you haven't configured your *other* fast breeder reactor to burn, yet.
...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
It's been solved, the waste will be transported to Japan where the natives won't notice the increase compared to the status quo. ;)
Ezekiel 23:20
There is one remaining issue of "environmentalist" obstructionism. I use quotes, because these people are damaging the environment, not protecting it.
This is true. If you oppose nuclear, a coal plant will be built in its place, which is far, far more dirty and dangerous.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
PRISM / IFR designs in general (and Molten salt breeders, in theory) turn that "waste" into enough fuel to supply the earth ... forever, assuming we build pyroprocessing facilities (PUREX generates a lot of waste ... no good).
"In theory". Aye, there's the rub.
We really need more active research in this area instead of relying on experiments conducted in the 1960's.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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?"
Like all energy sources nuclear has its share of trade offs. Wind/Solar still don't quite give the same output that Nuclear or Coal can, Hydroelectric can only be used in particular locations and then there are people complaining about the fishes that get shredded. Coal has a lot of pollution.
Nuclear energy when well maintained is a relativity good energy source. Its pollution for good or for bad is highly concentrated meaning the good means it can be captured and moved to a safer location, the bad is if a little bit leaks out it could be very deadly, and difficult to pick up again. However right now our pollution problem is in extra carbon. Nuclear energy can help reduce our carbon dependence, the combined risk of continued use of Coal even when treated well is worse then nuclear energy being properly respected and governed.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
whoosh
Is that the sound of the GP's post going over your head? Because he's absolutely right. There are many excellent technical solutions to the question of waste disposal, but all of them are rendered infeasible by political considerations.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
(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?
That amount of power is sufficient for approximately 1.81 time-travelling DeLoreans.
I am officially gone from
Yes much better to keep drilling in the gulf - that's never been a problem...
That fracking stuff looks pretty questionable too. Pumping the ground full of mystery sauce...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Personally, I object to burying 95% perfectly good fuel just to dispose of 5% waste. Run that FUEL through an appropriately designed reactor first, then process out the waste and load the rest back in.
Groundwater seepage and the active geology of the region... There are better places to store it than Yucca Mountain. Of course most of the attention was put on the transport of nuclear waste through the state, rather than issues with the long term storage.
All that said, as a native Nevadan I am not opposed to the Yucca Mountain project. It's gotta go somewhere and while there are better places, there are a whole lot worse. At some point you just need to make your decision and act on it. I am however opposed to the regulatory environment that has kept newer, more efficient nuclear designs from seeing the light of day in the US. Land of the Risk Averse!
+1 Disagree
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.
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?
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
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!
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.
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/
I'm so glad the problems in safely disposing of nuclear waste have been solved!
As opposed to global mercury contamination, where now you can't even eat tuna without killing yourself? Or the smog clouds that literally kill 1,000,000-2,000,000 people each year?
Sorry, nuclear waste problem is a TINY issue. We are talking a few thousand tones of material that 95% reusable, if we wanted to reuse it. But then Uranium recycling is not even cost effective until uranium costs at least $120/lb.
In reality, humans over last 50 years have produced about a few hundred barrels of stuff that cannot be reused and should be stored properly for few thousand years. Rest can be recycled. There is no energy producing solution that has lower impact on the environment.
Of course, we can continue burning about 2 train loans of coal every minute (about 200 tons of coal per SECOND every second last year) so you can worry about little problems that are not a problem.
Burning it may be cleaner than coal - but getting it out of the ground in a safe and clean manner is proving to be far less clear-cut.
I live on top of the Marcellus Shale formation - I'd rather have a nuke plant or two open up a mile from me than to have gas drilling anywhere in this state. The drilling companies have an attitude of "it's safe, we're drilling responsibly, trust us, nothing has ever gone wrong, that spill didn't happen, we don't need to change anything because it's fine the way it is". Compared to the nuclear industry - "Even though we already have the lowest deaths per terawatt-hour count of any form of power generation, we're STILL working to improve our safety designs." - This is the thing that earns the most trust from me, the fact that they are constantly striving to improve safety, instead of constantly denying that there could possibly be any problems and refusing to change anything.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
2/3 of those reactors have ALREADY been implemented in the past. It's the anti-nuclearbombmaterial crowd that has killed those designs.
Yes, because that's what is holding up nuclear power. After all, the problem with heavy metals and other pollutants used to manufacture "green" energy such as solar cells and wind turbines have already been solved, as well as the problems with mercury, other contaminants, and even radioactive materials that comes from burning coal has also been solved. Oh, and that whole CO2 thing that fossil fuels tend to emit? Also solved.
I believe France is the only country that currently reprocesses spent nuclear fuel. Another environmentalist hangup.
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
Ironically, coal-burning power plants actually emit more radiation than nuclear plants.
If these fear mongers really want to protest against nuclear waste they should be picketing coal plants.
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.
You're paranoid.
In the US you really have 2 sources that can meet demand:
Coal - known to be the most dangerous deaths/KW of the power supplies. Radioactive waste goes into environment and causes cancer
Nuclear - Waste is sealed up, and even in Fukushima style catastrophes causes less deaths/KW than other energy sources.
You decide
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.
There are over 1800 measurable sources of gamma radiation in space. Just because something is measurable, doesn't necessarily mean it's dangerous.
Which is worse, a few tons of dangerous solid that needs to be permanently sequestered decades from now, or untold millions of tons of CO2 and trace metals being released into the atmosphere continuously?
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)
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?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
because they are
1. safer
2. cheaper
3. can function as baseline power
Instead of asking on slashdot why don't you... you know... research the subject? People have posted links to DOE report on cost (cheaper), to the deaths/terrwatt (safer), and possibly even points about density (baseline). Maybe you don't want to know?
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)
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.
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.
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?
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"
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?
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.
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
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.
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?