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Expansion of Comanche Peak Nuclear Power Plant Suspended
mdsolar writes in with news that plans to build two new reactors at the Comanche Peak nuclear power plant have been put on hold. "On Friday, Luminant, a subsidiary of Dallas-based Energy Future Holdings, suspended its application to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build two new reactors at the plant. Its partner on the project, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, said it was focusing on getting its nuclear reactors in Japan back in operation. The majority of Japan's reactors were shut down because of safety concerns following a 2011 tsunami that caused a radiation leak at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex 150 miles north of Tokyo. Mitsubishi 'has informed us that they will materially slow the development of their design control document for their new reactor design by several years. In addition, both [Mitsubishi] and Luminant understand the current economic reality of low Texas power prices driven in large part by the boom in natural gas,' read a statement from Luminant."
A slow economy and depressed energy prices due to shale gas have certainly delayed plans for new nuclear. As we shut down more coal plants and when the economy picks up, we will be faced with the choice of becoming heavily dependant on gas, or building more nuclear. Shale gas prices will rise as our dependency increases. some dream that solar and wind can fill the huge gap but as most if us know it simply can't. Meanwhile, the worldwide expansion of nuclear continues, and appears to be picking up steam.
Side note: The reactors at Fukushima are GE design, not Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, as some readers might conclude from the author's attempt to tie the two together.
ya, i mis-read the title on the first pass...
There's a section with that information, in this book on the prospects for clean energy, here: http://www.withouthotair.com/
The ideal situation would be to re-process used fuel. In that scenario, fuel supply would be plentiful for about as long as you want to project. Under the existing structure, with little re-processing, the known Uranium supplies are plentiful, but I don't know what the amount really is. I feel comfortable saying we could go for centuries, but again, I have not looked up the number.
If you allow the price to increase, estimates for useful recoverable Uranium with a once-through cycle are ~1000 years. Multiply by 100-1000 if you allow for reprocessing. Add in Thorium and get possibly another factor of 2. Bottom line: Nuclear offers many orders of magnitude more available power than oil/coal/gas.
http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/uranium.aspx
Here is a link that confirms my reply.
Obviously nuclear power is technically non-renewable, so how long would it be expected to last, assuming no refinements to extraction or fission methods?
One answer is here: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last. The short version is that with current techniques, and usage levels, the available uranium will last a couple hundred years. However, there are methods that we expect would increase that by multiple orders of magnitude.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Worth noticing that the availability of thorium is around 10 times more frequent than uranium, and liquid thorium reactors do not suffer from "melt downs".
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
I agree that we should fully explore the benefits of thorium reactors. Note that there are Uranium based fuels that also do not suffer from melt down. This can be seen in the high temperature gas reactors, such as the pebble bed, for example.
A couple hundred years quickly turns into decades if nuclear is ramped up.
In my experience, that usually translates as: we've come to realize that X was a bad idea.
Sadly, other factors conspire to make thorium less practical. As evidenced by the industry's lack of pursuit. There is no perfect solution...
It would have better if you'd posted this in the topic about RUSSIANS in SPAAACE!!!!!!
In this case it sounds more like, "we've got to put out fire Z first"
This is an ideal time for Obama to support thorium plants and get them going. We have 2 companies minimum that with .5B each could have designs and perhaps small prototypes done within a relatively short time.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
the known Uranium supplies are plentiful
What? Although Uranium is fairly plentiful, the vast majority is U238, which is not fissile. The only Uranium we can reliably "burn" is U235, which is about as plentiful as Gold or Platinum. (That's why we "enrich" the stuff, to increase the portion of U235 over U238.) If we keep going at status quo, the current fleet of reactors will burn out the "usable" Uranium supply in a few decades.
The big "revolution" in the next few years will be the transition from solid-fuel to liquid-fuel reactors. Liquid fuels can be reprocessed on-the-fly but solid fuels cannot. This is a HUGE advantage, because it allows us to burn the fuel completely with very little waste. Whereas the current LWR uses only 0.5% of the energy in the fuel rods, leaving hundreds of tons of long-term waste to deal with.
Furthermore, a molten-salt reactor can be configured to use spent nuclear fuel as a fuel source.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Thorium was dropped from R&D because it didn't produce fissile material for bombs. And once we had working nuclear reactors, that we thought were safe, there was little need to create another type of nuclear plant.
Now there's a pressing need to not have the downsides of uranium based reactors, and thorium may fit that bill if the engineering challenges can be worked out.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
you are of mixed racial ancestry, you're too late
if you don't believe me, tell my what regions each of your grandparent are from, and I will tell you of the racial mixing proven by genetic analysis
Obviously nuclear power is technically non-renewable, so how long would it be expected to last, assuming no refinements to extraction or fission methods? This is a question of curiosity rather than an attempt to criticise nuclear power.
At least a thousand years based on easily accessible uranium. And if you are desperate, then you can get uranium from sea water. Costs about $200-$300/lb - fuel costs are then still not important because capital costs dominate in nuclear power plants. So in that regard, nuclear fission is not limited on human civilization timescale.
You also cannot assume "no improvements in fission methods". That's like saying no improvement in steel making processes since 1800. For example, reprocessing and fast neutron reactors become profitable at about $120/lb mark. It is purely a $$$ issue.
Uranium does not suffer from "peak uranium" and does not suffer from lack of resources.
Wind power sometimes puts the wholesale price of electricity down to zero in Texas. http://cleantechnica.com/2011/10/20/wholesale-price-of-electricity-drops-to-0-00-in-texas-due-to-wind-energy/ So natural gas may simply be acting a the medium through which wind discourages nuclear power. This has been the case in the Midwest. http://will.illinois.edu/nfs/RenaissanceinReverse7.18.2013.pdf Wind power has cut off the top of the gas generation price curve and forced a reactor to close down there through the subsequent lowering of the wholesale electricity price. Gas can still be expensive if the less efficient turbines are used. Wind lowers demand for those.
Longer than civilization will be around. If you also include thorium which is far more plentiful.
The resistance to nuclear is patently ridiculous, and exposes what the environmental movement was all about, which is control over technology and society in some sort of quasi-feudal state.
estimates 72 years at the current rate of use. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium#Pessimistic_predictions
It is worth noting that the uranium from seawater idea is flawed by the huge amount of ocean current you'd need to get at the uranium. It becomes a project with climate implication owing to disturbed currents.
If we switch to molten salt based thorium we'll have thousands of years of fuel.
We will all be incredibly fucked as the United states energy portfolio has been shifted to be almost entirely dependent on natural gas. Get another hurricane in the gulf and americans will be shivering in the dark the next winter with massive rate hikes and energy shortages. People will be whining about why we didn't build nuclear reactors. Meanwhile america will be shivering in the dark for another 20 years because that's the lead time to build a nuclear power plant.
CNN has started doing these long-form documentaries and the 2 I've seen have been mind altering. I went from being a total nuclear power skeptic to being 99% in favor. The documentary is done from the perspective of environmentalists who did their own research into nuclear power and were really surprised by their findings. The clincher for me was the milliSievert readings from all over the world; including Fukushima and Chernobyl.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
The chinese will figure it out before us. There is no political will for it in the USA, at least we can buy them from the Chinese when they succeed where we fail to be able to even pass a damn budget.
That should be "we have an EARLY 20th-century energy grid".
It was friggin' amazing when it was built, a time when few could even envision multi-gigawatt cities such as Las Vegas.
It all began with the dramatic and brutal the battle of the currents. Tesla/Westinghouse AC was the right choice for small scale and the subscriber level, enabling the use of transformers to step voltage. The self-synchronizing 60 cycle grid grew, and in the age of miracles (practically) no one objected to corridors of uninsulated cable suspended between power plants, which grew to become the mighty pylons of today. Unlike the trans-continental railroad however, Eastern and Western grids cannot meet without a DC interface. At 60 cycles there is too much span across them to achieve stable synchronization.
Yet Edison's DC is needed today -- for the long haul, to re-configure the grid for greater current capacity and efficiency, better bridge existing grids allow massive direct energy transfer coast to coast. Burying these lines brings protection from natural disaster such as cataclysmic ice storms, Yellowstone or what ever. We'll also be able to reclaim much of the real estate presently allocated to these corridors.
[Faulkner, 2005] "There are different trade-offs for AC versus DC power transmission. For example, voltage can only be taken up to about 500,000 volts (500 kV) for an overhead AC power line because beyond that, power dissipation through dielectric loss becomes severe. Voltage for DC overhead power lines can be taken up to double the maximum AC voltage, to about 1000 kV (one million volts from ground potential; 2 million volts between the conductors); beyond that, power dissipation through corona discharge becomes severe. Underground DC power lines can use even higher voltage, and can be quite large; the main factors limiting size and design details are the need to insulate the conductor and to dissipate heat. Wire diameter is limited for AC transmission lines, whether overhead or buried, due to the âoeskin effectâ that prevents an AC current from penetrating to the center of a large wire, whereas a DC line can be arbitrarily thick. For these and other reasons, underground high capacity power lines are necessarily DC.
The simplest way electric power could be sent coast to coast is to build power lines based on conductors with much lower electrical resistance than any long distance power lines in service today. These âoeelectric pipelinesâ can be either conventional conductor or superconductor-based, in principle. The superconductor approach to electric pipelines has gotten some press and research interest, but is not technically ready to deploy yet. There is also a more pedestrian way to decrease the electrical resistance of a power transmission line: use more conductor..."
Faulkner goes on to describe several electric pipeline projects with projected cost.
___
My letters on energy:
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Thanks - I know the history of the grid, the war of currents, etc.
No matter how amazing it was then, it's badly outdated now.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
The long HVDC connections are only possible with technology using not even thought of in Edison's day. I suggest you look at wikipedia for a far better description than the "flying cars of tommorrow!!!" thing from a guy dreaming of something that's already in use, but he just doesn't know it yet.
It would have been extremely difficult to do without semiconductors but now it is done wherever people have their solar panels hooked into the grid - there's your tens on thousands of power generators in each of quite a few cities around the world.
So there you go, counter evidence to the AC's rubbish that sounds like it came from someone ignorant in the 1980s is probably in your own street.
When that question was asked in the early 1960s it was "it won't last very long, so let's build plutonium fast breeders". Then mining exploration turned up a lot more Uranium in places where it was really just a unexpected extra in the same ore as copper, silver or gold that was well worth mining anyway.
Coming from the other direction newer Uranium reactors (late 1960s) were running on fuel that didn't need as much enrichment so less Uranium would be needed to be mined to run them. So now we are in the situation where Uranium mines have been closed (eg. Niger) or expansion delayed indefinitely pending a rise in price (eg. Australia - Olympic Dam), plus a large number of known untapped reserves, supplying what could be a diminishing market. So that means Uranium is going to last for a while, then you can add to the mix Thorium reactors which can start up on Thorium (of which there is a lot) and continue on higher grade waste than what current reactors can use plus the very large stockpiles of expired weapons material (it's not usable forever). If they are liquid fuelled reactors they can avoid all of the very difficult reprocessing used to make new fuel rods from bits of the old ones.
So that means the answer is a long time even with current experimental technology but depends entirely on how much is used.
An earthquake caused the greatest nuclear disaster in history - a triple melt through. It was locally only mag 7.1 which is just on the edge of design spec. Neutron radiation damaged pipes broke at all afflicted reactors during the quake. Leaks, steam and explosion reported by multiple workers.
The tsunami just came to mop up.
This is why they bag on about the wave, quakes can fuck an ancient, primitive reactor anywhere, any time, especially the 15 identical GE BWRs in USA.
Should be "after construction starts".
As an example consider the AP1000 which is close to completion and consider the date when China was considering what to get and where to site it. Most recent reactors have taken far longer still than that.
Seawater is uniformly contaminated with Uranium. There's a lot of it.
I agree with you at some level. But what I think we need is a DC standard for SOME things and an AC standard for others. For example, everywhere an AC/DC power supply is used (and that's almost everywhere) DC should be available in the home. Lighting is an obvious exception to that unless you recognize that all LED bulbs must convert AC to DC to make use of it and that much efficiency is lost due to conversion.
Some devices are better off remaining as AC and for the transmission of power, AC is just better as well. But we do need more DC at home powering our computers, our lights, our TVs and more. The efficiency would save a lot of money.
Don't forget, also, that Mitsubishi Heavy Industries was a major contributor in the decommissioning of CA's San Onofre plant (providing faulty steam generators that eventually proved too expensive to satisfactorily repair) and So Cal Edison, the main owner of the plant, is going after MHE for all they can get, including lost generation, design costs and a whole lot else.
There are myriad other dynamics involved (NIMBY folks in Orange County, et. al.), but it appears that poorly designed software at MHE was a root cause of the problem.
Well Mr Lying weasel backing away from your strawman attack, here is what I actually wrote - which renders your "assign" bit yet another lie:
In other words a needlessly polite way of asking "why are you lying" instead of stating "Mr D is lying due to his motivation of ..." which appears to be what you are accusing me of now you can't get the solar shill bullshit to stick.
While I suspect you are a clueless fanboy of the 1970s technology the US nuclear lobby wants to stick with to get welfare from the taxpayer, I do not really know, so I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt with your motivation for being a liar.
Since I'm replying to obvious fanboy lies why should I keep all emotion out it and merely stand by and watch the manipulation? Your strawman daily submitter is obvious fiction that is yet another part of your manipulation.
You also don't seem to know enough about nuclear to understand what I was getting at about the 1970s tech, yet you call me pathetic? Learn about your topic before wasting space here screaming about mythical solar shills.