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Decommissioning San Onofre Nuclear Plant May Take Decades
gkndivebum writes "Southern California Edison has elected to decommission the San Onofre nuclear plant after a failed effort to upgrade the steam generation system. 'Nuclear economics' is the reason stated for the proposed decommissioning. Other utilities operating nuclear power plants in the US likely face similar decisions when it comes to weighing the costs of upgrading older facilities. Allowing the reactors to remain in 'safe storage' for a period of up to 60 years will allow for radioactive decay and lower radiation exposure for the workers performing the demolition."
for 50 years, the federal government has taxed nuclear fuel to build a permanent waste depository. where is it?
weasels.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Other utilities operating nuclear power plants in the US likely face similar decisions when it comes to weighing the costs of upgrading older facilities.
Yeah, my country unfortunately has a 60,000% idiot tax. We get massive amounts of food poisoning because people fear irradiated food. We pollute so badly that we've managed to kill large lakes and entire biomes in Africa because we're burning fossil fuel as our primary energy source when we were the ones that first created nuclear power. 4% of my fellow countrymen believe that shape-shifting reptiles are trying to control the government through political manipulation... another 7% "aren't sure". And we're reporting record numbers of people joining the Flat Earth Society, and have one of the lowest rates of acceptance in the theory of evolution of any industrialized country on Earth.
In short, we're morons. That's why nuclear power is so expensive here, and why we're letting these plants rot... it's stupid, pathetic, moronic fear of technology, science, and progress. And it's killing the planet. Literally. We are literally dying of stupidity.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany
In 2012 The German electricity sector increased its coal usage by 4.9 percent over its coal consumption value of 2011.[43] This increase in coal usage was largely due to a power gap in Germany created after the nation shutdown 8 of its 17 nuclear power plants.[44] The shortfall in electricity supply from these 8 power plants, is primarily being filled by building more lignite coal burning power plants.
Yeah, real good job Germany, thanks for the CO2 increase...dicks.
The licencing for nuclear reactors in the US, the UK and a few other countries requires that the site be returned to greenfield status after the reactor(s) on site are decommissioned. That means total demolition of the structures including the metre-thick reinforced concrete containment buildings.
In some cases if the site is to be reused immediately then the reactors are demolished quickly with special handling of the slightly radioactive pressure vessel which has suffered neutron activation. It costs a little bit less to wait a few decades for that radioactivity to decay at which point the demolition can go ahead with no radiation-specific problems. The real problem during demolition in either case with older (1970s vintage) reactors is the presence of asbestos in pipe lagging, tank insulation etc.
I believe in making the world safe for our children, but not our children's children, because I don't think children should be having sex. -Jack Handey
"I thought they originally went with uranium, because you could build nuclear weapons from the waste."
Oh dear, The Lie That Will Not Die.
A uranium-fuelled reactor like a PWR works by stacking a lot of uranium fuel pellets in close proximity to each other and moderating (slowing down) the neutrons they emit so they cause fission in nearby uranium atoms, producing heat and yet more neutrons. That's it, steam-engine simple. Sure there are complexities of design and engineering but they're dealt with at the drawing board, not while the reactor is running. In the 1950s and 1960s that what was possible and cost-effective to design and build.
Breeding plutonium for nuclear weapons was carried out virtually everywhere in the world in specialised reactors, almost all of which never generated a watt of electricity since they were optimised to turn U-238 into Pu-239 without producing much Pu-240 which screws up the functioning of a nuclear weapon. There were a couple of dual-use reactor designs like the British Magnox and the infamous Soviet-era RMBK-4 reactors of Tchernobyl fame which could be tasked with short-exposure fuelling cycles to produce nearly-pure Pu-239 but they were not popular and in most cases they were never actually used to make weapons-grade Pu-239, in part because by the time they came on stream the countries building them had produced as much nuclear weapons material (a few tonnes) as they would ever need from their military reactors. Since then the number of weapons has gone down, not up and the decommissioned weapon cores are stockpiled until they can be burned up in uranium reactors as mixed-oxide fuel (MOX) elements.
Thorium reactors of the liquid salt type require continuous processing of the fuel to remove assorted highly radioactive byproducts in a chemical plant while the reactor is running. Thorium itself is not fertile, it needs to be transmuted into U-233 which is fissile and can be "burned" in the same way U-235 is in existing reactors. It's the dark secret of the LFTR design that it needs a sparkplug of enriched uranium and even some plutonium to start up from cold to begin the transmutation process and the only place that can come from at the moment is the conventional nuclear reactor industry. In addition any unburnt U-233 they produce can be extracted from the fuel stream and used in nuclear weapons after processing.
Ah but the US built a thorium reactor in the 1960s! Yes, it was a 5MW thermal experimental prototype which never ran continuously for more than a few weeks at a time. Conventional 1600MWe PWR reactors being built in China, France and Finland (the EPR 1600 design) produce nearly 5 gigawatts of heat, a thousand times as much as the prototype LFTR did and they will run for 18 to 24 months at a time between refuelling operations and produce no weapons-grade plutonium.