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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.
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
The idea being the the South makes money from them by taking on the risk (perceived or otherwise) of running them in their backyard. Either in increased employment (so local growth) or increased tax revenue for the county, or cheaper electricity for the locals.
Just like France makes good money selling electricity to the UK and Germany (as those two countries have somewhat of a nuclear-phobia, that seems to be increasing). The electricity prices in France are 10% of what I pay in the UK, and I'm on a cheap UK tariff provided by a French electricity company! I'm sure the money goes somewhere...
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
There is a renaissance of manufacturing going on in the American south. Look at all the foreign auto makers that have built factories there. Wages are affordable for the company, there are no union entanglements like those which have ravaged Detroit, areas where good paying jobs are few and far between receive them - everyone wins.
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
(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
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
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?
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
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.
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)
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?
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.
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.