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US Freezes Nuclear Power Plant Permits Because of Waste Issues
KindMind writes "The U.S. Government said it will stop issuing all permits for new plants and license extensions for existing plants are being frozen due to concerns over waste storage. From the article: 'The government's main watchdog, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, believes that current storage plans are safe and achievable. But a federal court said that the NRC didn't detail what the environmental consequences would be if the agency is wrong. The NRC says that "We are now considering all available options for resolving the waste issue, But, in recognition of our duties under the law, we will not issue [reactor] licenses until the court's remand is appropriately addressed." Affected are 14 reactors awaiting license renewals, and an additional 16 reactors awaiting permits for new construction.'"
can't we just pump it into the air. its probably not half as bad as the stuff that a coal plant releases.
Uranium sealed in massive lead cans, encased in concrete, and stored deep underground in an area free of earthquakes.
Of course they should have also built other sites too. It makes no sense to dump all your waste in the same spot. Spread it out.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Store it in Washington, D.C. with the rest of the waste.
Analysts feel the agency can conduct its research relatively quickly without having a major impact on nuclear plants currently seeking license extensions or utilities seeking permission to build new reactors.
A technicality, no significant impact to anything.
Then next mother fucker who says anything about global warming to my face, I'm going to fucking punch his lights out.
Seriously. Bitch about CO2 generation, close down coal plants and now kibosh Nuclear. These fucking morons don't want a solution, they want everyone living in caves.
So when the lights go out because their isn't enough generation capacity, I'm going to break some windows and set shit on fire and find some hippies to shoot just for the fucking hell of it.
The world would be in a lot better place if you couldn't burn it until you'd removed an equal or greater quantity of CO2 from the atmosphere.
The fact is, that if we would add a couple of GE PRISM at all of the nuke sites, either running, shutting down, or shut down, we could burn up the vast majority of the 'waste'. From there, what would remain in 100 years, would fit easily in a corner of WIPPS and last only 200 years. Oddly, this would make loads of money for the plants while pretty much using up all of the 'waste'.
In addition, all of the new sites should be switched to a thorium cycle. Very safe to run and at a fraction of the price.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I wasn't aware that they were planning on building several new nuclear plants. I had heard of one or two, but sixteen is quite a few more than I expected. What caused this shift in new building versus how new plants were basically put on hiatus after three mile?
/* TODO: Spawn child process, interest child in technology, have child write a new sig */
In Asimov's Caves of Steel, all the nuclear fuel is pulverized like dust, and the sucked by giant pipes from the city into the ocean where it's buried deep, deep underground. Of course sinec Earth long-ago ran-out of uranium, they are mining Mars and the asteroids to get it.
Anyway: There isn't enough NG to fuel all the ex-coal plants. And yes driving-up coal/nuclear prices would be a way to get us to use "green energy". The one thing they never tell us is that using green energy means using one-quarter as much energy as we use now.
There's no way to produce enough solar energy to fuel current consumption levels. We all need PassivHaus buildings that don't require any heat and very little A/C.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
The court decision that forced this was actually written by a conservative Reagan appointee. The 3-judge panel overall had 2 Republican and 1 Democratic appointees.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
They're upholding the law, as a judge should. Anti-nuke activists filed the suit.
Coal mining is down in my state due to slowing demand, and some coal plants are due to be dismantled and replaced with nat gas plants in the near future.
I'd prefer a nuke plant though, less meth involved in extracting fuel for it.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
The question ought to have been asked 60 years ago; not today.
The half life of some of the waste is hundreds of thousands or millions of years. We're stuck with it for that long -- complete with storage facilities and, if necessary, security.
The real question is who pays. The nuclear plant operator (talk about a liability...) or the public (that's quite a liability too, and not one you can readily default on)?
Or maybe not: http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/2012/08/01/generating-companies-are-shuttering-coal-plants-at-record-rates-eia-reports/
Granted, I'm not sure about the politics of this site, but it looks like a lot of capacity will be going off-line in the near future.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
http://www.energyfromthorium.com/
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Actually, until the Ford administration there was a highly effective recycling program in place. But the end of building weapons and the collapse of the price of newly mined uranium make it cheaper to just buy new and let it sit... with 95% of the available energy still in place.
BTW That's one reason why Yucca mountain was chosen over the salt domes in New Mexico: You can easily retrieve the waste for reprocessing at Yucca, but if you bury it in the salt it will be much more difficult down the road.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
But the deal is, whoever owns my house gets free electricity, in any amount they want to use (as a Minnesotan, I can see the value of a heated driveway & sidewalks).
I always thought they should have done something like that when building a new nuke plant. To make nice with the neighbors, all residents within an X mile radius get electricity at a sharp discount (aka wholesale prices).
Come on, how is he dishonest if he says he takes both sides the ends up on one of them.
Too bad this didn't happen 3 months ago, in time for everyone's power bill to go up before the election. However, I'm not sure the blame would be his as this is a result of legal authority and court action. I guess maybe he could ignore the law like with a lot of other things.
I think it has arisen now because the "plan A" Yucca Mountain in Nevada have been abandoned, states are suing the NRC over on-site waste storage and nuclear power plants are reaching maximum capacity in storing of waste. The solution the NRC has is for power plants to use above ground dry cask storage.
BM3
Apparently people moderating don't know how dirty Chicago politics is. They make washington politics seem plain, and happy as the sun rising up on a beautiful day. Obama is a political hack, hell if people even bothered to look at how dirty his own senate campaign was, they'd wonder how he became president. Ah that's right, by "disqualifying registered voters and other opponents" CNN no less, not exactly a bastion of "evil right-wing news."
Om, nomnomnom...
I'm not sure why all the sudden whoever appointed a judge is somehow any indication of the political affiliation of the judges. When Reagan was in office, they appointed judges based on their merit and qualifications, not phony support for some party ideals. Reagan had a democrat congress, there was no rubber stamping biased appointments.
Burial of Radioactive Waste under the Seabed
You have to transport the waste to these deep-sea sites. Underwater recovery in the event of an accident becomes a very expensive and dangerous business.
The worst that can happen to a shipment that moves by rail to a site in Nevada is a routine derailment.
You clear the site, bring in a crane, reload the containers onto another car, and move on.
[And this is why...] We'll continue to burn lots and lots of coal for the foreseeable future.
Actually, coal plants are being shut down to the tune of ~8.5% of total US generation capacity this year alone. Google it.
With nothing planned to replace the lost generation capacity.
I, for one, welcome our skyrocketing-energy-costs-and rolling-blackout/brownout Overlords.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Don't worry, "Environmentalists" are already mounting legal challenges to stop modern methods of Natural Gas extraction and will force us back to coal fairly soon. The worst thing for the environment always has, and always will be hippies.
Has their been any significant progress toward Breeder reactors? Reactors that use existing spent fuel and can tap energy from our rotting nuclear arsenal always sounded lucrative to me but progress towards reactors of this sort has been slow. What are the challenges of producing reactors like this?
Yes, you ACs get so brave. You scream to not do something to your face, while at the same time hiding who you are. Brilliant.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Yeah, an administration that approves arctic drilling sure is towing the left-wing agenda...
Yucca Mountain was shut down because the anti-nuclear panic-mongers kept protesting and suing to stop the *transport* of waste from reactor sites *to* Yucca Mountain. The irrational fear of radioactive materials, even being properly stored and handled, has prevented the proper storage and handling of radioactive materials. Talk about irony.
It is not responsible to operate a reactor if you don't have a solid plan for dealing with the waste.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
All the Old reactors need to go away but we also need to use safe nuclear power. We have to stop using old fuels like coal and petroleum. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power
Actually, we CAN get plenty of solar as well as other AE to power us at 10x where we are at. The problem is not one of capabilities, but of economics. AE is still expensive. That is why we need a MIX of energy.
Here is a nice company doing thorium. Hopefully, their first reactor will be at a military base SOON.
Here is how we burn up LOADS of 'waste' fuel.
Here is how we convert our 500 years+ of coal into natural gas
Basically, we have plenty of ways to get energy.
Now, with that said, I maintain that the SMART move is to create a national bill that requires that all new buildings below 5 stories to have 90% of their HVAC be handled by on-site AE. With that approach, it would actually encourage new technology for any number of things. This takes advantage of the fact that solar PV is VERY expensive at this time.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The federal government is shutting down coal mines, holding up nuclear power plants, and denying permits for oil drills and pipelines. It seems like every week we hear about another solar power company going out of business because of mismanagement, fraud, and/or because they can't make a panel that works. We've dammed up every river worth a dam. Where are we supposed to get our electricity?
Wind power might actually pan out as cheap and viable if only the federal government would let someone run the wires from where the wind blows to where the people need the electricity. Since the wind blows when it wants we'll still need some sort of storage or backup. Natural gas seems to be booming despite the best efforts of the federal government to stop that too. If we add pumping stations to the hydro dams we got we could store the electricity when the wind blows. Wind, pumped hydro, and natural gas might make for a nice mix for our electricity, each complementing the others. Problem is that at some point we're going to run out of natural gas. Can we build enough dams and windmills to power our world? Can we do it cheap enough to maintain our standard of living?
The problem of nuclear waste is a creation of the federal government. They decided that we cannot recycle the "spent" fuel from current reactors. The so called "spent" fuel still contains large amounts of usable fuel, it's just tainted with the fission products of the fuel that was used up. The fuel waste problem would actually be solved with new, more efficient, nuclear reactors designed to use the "spent" fuel from the old reactors.
We supposedly have a Department of Energy to solve these problems. What are they doing for us?
It's just so frustrating seeing the government foul things up for us. The energy problems we have now are all political. The government is causing more problems than it's solving. Don't get me wrong, we need government. I think the government has just gotten too big. To get a power plant built or a pipeline run a person would have to satisfy dozens of different agencies that often have conflicting goals. We need to trim down the size of government, getting rid of the Department of Energy is as good of a place to start as any.
Rant over.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Disenfranchising is nothing new and definitely not limited to the Chicago machine (which Obama was only minimally a part of). Bush ran a particularly dirty campaign in 2000. For example, Rove's people called a bunch of voters suggesting that McCain had an illegitimate vietnamese child to win the primary (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_poll#Political_push_polls:_United_States ) Then a bunch of paid GOP staffers were responsible for starting a riot that stopped the recount in 2000: http://archive.democrats.com/images/miamirioters.jpg
This has been going on long before Obama: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression#Examples_of_voter_suppression_in_the_United_States
The licensing was shut down because the NRC issued a report indicating that existing solutions are safe and effective, and didn't report what would happen if they were wrong.
This is sort of like the stupidity around "the LHC dragons":
Dr. Arkani-Hamed said concerning worries about the death of the Earth or universe, “Neither has any merit.” He pointed out that because of the dice-throwing nature of quantum physics, there was some probability of almost anything happening. There is some minuscule probability, he said, “the Large Hadron Collider might make dragons that might eat us up.”
Here, let me help them out: "If we're wrong about being able to store nuclear waste, we could all be turned into Super Mario characters. If that doesn't work out, we'll have to reprocess the spent fuel, with the down side that energy becomes cheap and abundant and we have power forever.".
Obama dishonest: 6.7 million results
Romney dishonest: 2 million results
I call that proof that Obama is 3.35 times more dishonest.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
And while we're making uninformed blanket statements, I'll say that "nuke lovers" have never witnessed what happens when sodium mixes with water and have no idea how corrosive steam can be. Add a bunch of plutonium into the mix (radioactivity causes metals to become brittle over time) and you've got a disaster waiting to happen. You don't want to be anywhere near one of these if the sodium/water heat exchanger in a PRISM type reactor develops a leak. And since you've probably never worked as an engineer in the nuclear field, you probably have no idea that we're still learning about the behaviors of materials under these conditions.
Ad hominem is not a refutation.
You are aware that Google indexes web pages, and that web pages can be created by anyone, right?
What you just searched for is not incidents of Obama v. Romney being dishonest. You searched for how many times the term dishonest appeared with each Obama and Romney.
Sorry, can't treat your Ebola ... the drug sometimes causes stomach aches ...
The chicago machine has not existed for over 10-15 years. If you want dirty politics, go to ohio, texas, florida, etc.
// task: can you find the unsafe production practices in this psuedocode? // assume we can create this // important first step: use fissional fuel // might be a while
class ThoriumCycle {
VALUE money;
LICENSE licence;
REACTOR Reactor;
REPROCESSOR ReprocessingFacility;
FUEL fuel;
vector<MESS> wasteStorage;
ThoriumCycle (VALUE &startupMoney, FUEL &Plutonium) : money(startupMoney) {
licence = Government.Lobby(money,influence);
assert(licence.recieved(), "damn protestors");
Reactor = license.Factory(REACTOR);
Reprocessor = license.Factory(REPROCESSOR);
fuel = Plutonium;
}
Running(vector<FERTILE> &ThoriumSupply) {
Reactor.FuelWith(fuel);
(heat, neutrons, waste) = Reactor.Burn();
wasteStorage.push(waste);
forall (Th232 in ThoriumSupply) {
MESS U233_Th232_mixture = Reactor.Breed(neutrons, Th232);
(fuel=U233, residualTh232, waste) = Reprocessor.Mess(U233_Th232_mixture);
ThoriumSupply.push(residualTh232);
wasteStorage.push(waste);
if (not_enough_to_be_critical(U233) or Reactor.BeyondServiceLife() or money<minimum) break;
Reactor.FuelWith(U233);
(heat, neutrons, waste) = Reactor.Burn();
wasteStorage.push(waste);
ENERGY electricity = ELECTRICITY(heat);
money += CASH(electricity) - currentOperatingExpenses;
}
}
~ThoriumCycle() {
wasteStorage.push(Reprocessor.Decommision(money));
delete Reprocessor;
wasteStorage.push(Reactor.Decommision(money));
delete Reactor;
waitFor(wasteStorage.isSafe(money));
assert (money>0,"oops not viable operation");
}
};
Coal is around 38% of our electricity and dropping. By end of this decade, Coal will account for less than 12% of American electricity.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Actually, the coal plants that are going out were scheduled to be gone (they were built in the 30's-50's). They are quickly being replaced by NG plants as well as wind/solar (more wind, rather than solar). Our actual electricity capacity is RISING, not shrinking.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
For all of Romney's self-serving policies and misrepresnetations, I can't say the "not the correct model for the nation" argument should automatically be lumped in with them. Sure, his motivations are probably the same - demonize his opponent, but that doesn't mean the argument itself is flawed - state and federal governments are inherently different beasts, with different edicts driving them, and a policy that makes sense on one level may not necessarily do so on the other. Whether that applies in this case... well that's a whole different argument I'm not going to get into at the moment.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
well done
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Ah yes, the 24 hour news cycle commingled with the gnat-like attention span of the myopic Ritalin user. Toss in the competition for consideration that includes your Olympic games, the latest headline seeking mass murderer, and hell, a forty two hour work week....
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I have never understood why we keep nuclear waste on the planet. Why not send it into the sun? It would be like sending a BB at a freight train.
Here is an idea, start building reactors that have a closed fuel cycle (thorium) or use reactors that can burn transuranic waste into waste that is less long lived (i.e. breeders, and CANDU). I think the biggest mistake that was ever made was the curtailing of nuclear reactor research. We have technology that can do this, but the morons in charge keep kicking the can down the road so it doesn't have to be their problem in the future.
Actually, molten salt reactors such as the liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) could be the solution the our nuclear waste problem.
Here's the issue: besides the spent uranium fuel rods, we also have a large amount of plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapons that need to disposed of. With an LFTR, the spent uranium fuel rods and plutonium can be reprocessed into a form that can be dissolved with molten sodium fluoride salts and used as LFTR reactor fuel. We get a large source of nuclear fuel, and best of all, the radioactive waste from a LFTR only has a half-life of under 300 years, which means very cheap waste disposal by using disused salt mines or salt domes as disposal sites--if the nuclear medicine industry doesn't grab it first!
Yep. Towing it to the right.
I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen...
So they say is right - burning hydrocarbons efficiently leaves you with carbon dioxide and water vapor. "Clean coal" may burn the coal as efficiently as natural gas (i.e. no carbon-monoxide or unburnt ash), but two basic facts remain - natural gas is the "least carbony" possible hydrocarbon (CH4 - all 4 energy-rich carbon bonds link to hydrogen) whereas coal, being basically pure carbon is the "most carbony" possible, so the amount of CO2 produced per kWh is much higher with coal. There's also the catch that coal carries all sorts of contaminants with it, including uranium, thorium, and other toxic and radioactive elements - if there's no ash left after burning that just means all those contaminants have gone directly into the atmosphere where they'll rain down on the surrounding countryside instead of accumulating in waste heaps - whether that's an improvement or not is a matter for discussion.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Actually, the old reactors DO need to go away. But all of them need to be replaced with GE PRISMS. Look, we have a number of plants that are LOADED with 'waste' fuel. Well, in addition, they have cooling, connections to the grids, barriers around them, and loads of equipment on site for dealing with steam power, such as generators. Basically, the PRISMS will not only give us back power, but will massively reduce the waste. All while increasing the amount of power AND increasing profits.
In fact, I wonder if most of the money that was set aside for handling waste, should not be used to buy these PRISMS? Thank about it. This will reduce the amount of waste by 85-90%, and drop the lifetime for the waste (from 20K+ years to 200 years), while providing LOADS of new money for dealing with future waste (which will actually be a fraction of what it is today).
Keep in mind that I support the PRISM for current sites, but not for new ones. For new ones, thorium is the way to go. Likewise, thorium should replace about 1/2 or more of our coal plants.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The AC was simply making threats. There is nothing to refute. I was pointing out the lack of logic involved in that.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The worst thing for the environment always has, and always will be hippies.
Are hippies really worse than rivers catching on fire?
The worst thing for the environment always has, and always will be unregulated corporations.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
The waste stored underground at the closed Humbodlt Bay reactor is ready to be inundated by sea level rise. The court is obviously right that the NRC has its head up a lower orifice granting new licenses or renewing old ones.
You'd probably want the more recent SUPER PRISM design (optimized for betterness; I think it's fewer larger cores for increased efficiency, along with updated calculations of various sorts)... Though that gimmicky name probably doesn't help in convincing people... Too bad we largely stopped doing research on the PRISM based designs in the 90s.
And I suspect thorium/PRISM/etc. have a major hurdle in economics. The US's current fleet of reactors has a ~91% capacity factor (aka fraction of max electricity/year that we're getting). The capacity factor is highly dependent on highly optimized materials science from the past decades. You don't have that for different fuel/coolant setups. Good luck convincing the power company to build the reactor that's going to have 70% capacity factor instead of one with >90%.
yes, expecting them to abide by the laws is a horrible thing.
You shoud be angry at the state's for fucking over their voters, not Hillarry or Obama
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The US is full of 40+ year old nuclear reactors that are still in active use, even though their safety is under debate. I presume that (a) old power plants won't be decommissioned until they have a replacement, and (b) new power plants produce a less or equal amount of radioactive waste compared to old ones. So why do they stop issuing nuclear power plant permits, instead of just requiring each new power plant to replace an old one?
You have to look at what sort of radio element are released and how it is going into human body. What was predominentely released in Fukushima for example, was AFAIR radio element of short half live, and most of it went into the ocean anyway. Tchernobyl had a lot more long lived element, but they mostly deposited on the ground, what you got in coal are very long lived element, *AND* they are released in region of inhabitation all the while in the atmosphere in a trickle. Which is why coal is thought to generate more respiratory problem and lung cancer than chernobyl ever was.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
The contaminated material at the Gore site is 20 million metric tons of source materials in the form of uranium, uranium oxides, uranium fluorides, thorium, radium, and decay-chain products in process equipment and buildings, soil, sludge, and groundwater.
Citation needed. Here's the description of the site: http://www.wise-uranium.org/edusa.html#GORE (11-14 acres) and here's what I could find on the reclamation: http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/facility/gore.htm. In fact that link uses the exact words you used, which leads me to believe you have read it. It also says, in the same fucking article, that "The total radiological and hazardous waste volume is estimated to be 141,600-311,520 m3 (5-11 million ft3)." I leave it as an exercise to get the density of your material using these numbers and find something on earth that dense. The latter site does mention that they have a licence to "possess" up to 20 million tons of stuff including groundwater.
In fact, do you have the foggiest notion of what 20 million tons is? Assuming a density of 5 tons per cubic meter (rough approximation, within one order of magnitude) that's 4 million cubic meters. Since I bothered to google, I know that the area where the waste will be stored is 11 to 14 acres, or around 4.5 hectares. 4 million cubic meters over 45,000 square meters is about 900 meters tall. So tell me, is your claim bullshit or are they building a mountain of contaminated material?
The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures (Junius)
One thing is plants built in the wrong places or run by incompetent people... there's room for improvement there.
The waste is really a non-issue if you just get a bit creative about it.
The safest way to get rid of nuclear waste is to hurl it into the Sun. Of course current launch methods are still far too unreliable to make this a safe option. A waste rocket blowing up will be a truly bad thing...
A very safe alternative would be to drill a very deep hole (20-30 miles or more) and dump it in there, then plug the hole with concrete and rocks, possibly using explosives to collapse the hole at one or more points. Doesn't matter if the waste melts down or even goes nuclear down there. It will never affect or reach the surface in anything but geological time, and on that time scale the stuff is harmless if it ever works its way to the surface.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
Please ignore my post above about the myth of 100% waste reduction which for some reason I attached to your post instead of a post by someone that actually believes the myth.
Actually, the coal plants that are going out were scheduled to be gone (they were built in the 30's-50's). They are quickly being replaced by NG plants as well as wind/solar (more wind, rather than solar). Our actual electricity capacity is RISING, not shrinking.
Many if not most power plants in the US of any design/technology are overdue for shutdown/replacement.The NG plants won't be coming online in time to replace the losses at the current rate/schedule of coal plant closings.
Many of the NG plants are still only blueprints, and the government is not exactly expediting the licensing/permitting process through the various regulatory and environmental agencies. Solar and wind cannot replace the baseline load generation capability being lost.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Not a problem. There is no way to burn it ALL up. BUT, we can burn up most of it and what remains is fairly short lived.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The difference is that much of the Fukashima and Chenobyl radioactivity will be gone in a century, from short lived fission products. The radioactivity from coal (Th232, U235, U238, K40) will mostly still be here in hundreds of millions, and billions of years. Albeit, mostly buried in "our" geological layer.
And yet, the limeys are considering the PRISM for exactly what I am suggesting. It comes down to what makes more sense: simply throwing away all of this fuel and then relying on a mix of fossil fuels as well as AE, OR burning up what fuel that you have, so that your TRUE disposal costs go WAY down. And considering that we currently have more than 70,000 tonnes of waste in the USA, that is a LOT of money. OTOH, if we put in new reactors that make use of the old and current sites (minimal EPA studies), use the same factory produced reactors on these sites, and burn up the 'waste', then we can get down to below 10,000 tonnes on this. Now, costs are feasible.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The engineers knew the site was faulty in many ways, the IAEA knew the Japanese reactors had lots of serious subcode issues, relative to US/European standards. No body could motivate or hold willful TEPCo management responsible. Still can't.
Comments about how "stupid" the operators of Fukushima or Chernobyl were remind me of that story in "The Right Stuff" about how the the pilots always reassure their wives that flying isn't dangerous if you are a good pilot. Every time a good pilot gets killed they deal with the cognitive dissonance by saying it was pilot error and pinning it on his personality in some complicated, technically detailed narrative.
While that would indeed be better than the current fleet of water-cooled reactors, I'm skeptical of sodium-cooled IFRs, given their less-than-stellar track record over the years. IMHO, molten salt is the best way forward. LFTRs have gotten some attention lately, and I'm all in favor. But there's another MSR variant being developed now that is specifically designed to use our existing waste stockpile as its fuel, called WAMSR (waste annihilating molten-salt reactor).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Has there ever been a US nuke plant not given extension after extension after extension by the NRC? Regardless of age, penny-pinching maintenance cutbacks, or operator apathy / incompetence, for all practical purposes they are given permission to 'run to failure' with very little drama involved. Yes, there are upgrades... around the edges, anyway.
A new analysis of pollution data for the Port Augusta region contradicts reassurances from the South Australian Government that smoking can be blamed for high lung cancer rates. Residents of the region have long complained about health problems they link with two power stations, Playford and Northern, which burn highly-polluting brown coal.
The lung cancer rates around Port Augusta are said by medical experts to be double the expected number.
The worst thing for the environment always has, and always will be hippies.
Are hippies really worse than rivers catching on fire?
The worst thing for the environment always has, and always will be unregulated corporations.
What about those volcanoes destroying live land all over the planet and adding nasty gasses to the atmosphere?
The worst thing for the environment always has, and always will be the environment. Corporations step in next, trying to profit from natural occurrences of things. ;)
After reading all of the comments thus far, I see the discussion is stuck in a head-butting stalemate.
Much like religion, mathematics will always have people arguing over the issues of its relevancy rather than actually working to find a true solution. No pun intended.
Fuck you. I like breathing clean air. If you think you have the right to shit on my lawn because you feel like it then maybe I'll pop a cap in your ass. *
* Sorry, I've never held a gun, I don't know the proper colloquialism.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Is it me, or do the vast majority of environmental activists seem to be stuck in an Armageddon scenario infinite loop? To be sure, nuclear energy presents issues, like everything else, but I'm not sure that engaging in maximalist interpretations of all events is helpful.
Consider the United States Navy's nuclear program. Other than the Thresher incident, the USN's nuclear program has had remarkably few incidents or major mishaps (caveat: these reactors are designed to generate power, not weapons material.)
The agency thinks it's safe, but didn't detail what the consequences would be if the agency was wrong?
Come on now, the answer to that depends entirely on which particular item you are asking if the agency is wrong about. If you ask "what are the consequences if the agency is wrong about their belief that the radiation won't drive away Santa Claus", the only answer is that the radiation will drive away Santa Claus.
This sounds like a question asked so the answer can be given a political spin. "You don't think it'll blow up the world?" "Of course not." "But what are the consequences if you're wrong about that?"
Not that I have a specific preference. I just want to know what page the Obama administration is on.
I had not seen that one before. But, I like it. Very Simple. Of course, metals to deal with that molten salt will be even more difficult than molten sodium. In addition, it will take time to get that approved.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Kentucky, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania are very happy with the environmentalist movement - they've been guaranteeing increasing coal orders for decades.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
agree 100% Yet the media loves oboma thus he will be reelected oboma is a cross between used car salesman and a preacher
I was thinking mod up the parent. But thank you any way.