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Slashdot Asks: Do You Support Nuclear Energy? (gallup.com)
Reader mdsolar writes that for the first time a majority of Americans have told Gallup they oppose nuclear energy. Support peaked at 62% in 2010, but "as Americans have paid less at the pump, their level of worry about the nation's energy situation has dropped to 15-year-low levels," Gallup reports. Their latest poll found 44% of respondents still supported nuclear energy, while 54% opposed it, a trend which could eventually affect the future of nuclear power. The New York Times reports that operating licenses will expire for 36 of America's 99 reactors between 2029 and 2035. What do you think? How strongly do you support (or oppose) generating electricity with nuclear energy?
In light of the incompetance of the company behind the massive gas leak at Porter Ranch, no, I don't trust a profit-motivated company with a nuclear reactor.
Nuclear power remains a critical element to revising our industrial base in a way that can maintain existing demand and power the manufacturing of the equipment for renewable generation. For Solar and Wind to remain cheap requires that the components remain cheap - aluminum requires HUGE amounts of energy to refine from ore, mining itself is horrendously energy intensive even at the level of producing the large trucks and earth moving equipment required.
In particular, that fusion reactor we orbit.
Yes, but only when it is build as safe as possible, in which case it will be way to expensive compared to most alternatives. So in practice: No.
Nuclear energy is entirely too stunted and still uses too many fail-dangerous-by-principle reactors to support it. Oh, and the 10k+ year storage requirements are onerous. I wouldn't mind serious research and fail-safe-by-principle reactors whose spent fuel needs to be stored less than 100 years, probably. Otherwise, eh.
Opposing nuclear energy is very short-sighted and without constant R&D and improvements of existing reactors will let other countries to surpass technology-wise in the nuclear field. Also demand for electricity will only go up especially as the transportation moves away from petrol to electricity. Effort has to be put into creating tight regulation rules and investment into safer reactors instead of bluntly opposing nuclear energy as a whole. We can start talking about abandoning nuclear energy when solar or other safer technologies mature, however we are not there yet and we need electricity now.
If you're asking for a blanket condemnation or endorsement of nuclear power, all I can say is, "it depends".
It depends on what specifically you're proposing to build, how you specifically plan to manage and monitor it, and how you specifically intend to decommission them when they're at the end of their usefulness.
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Yes. No need to build special storage facilities for the waste when there are places like Detroit to dump it.
I support nuclear energy in the short to medium term because it's the only realistic way to replace coal, oil and natural gas - and thereby save the planet from global climate change. That's a short-term emergency - and we're not likely to be able to either cut back our energy use, or replace CO2-producing energy with renewables in time.
So we're left with the lesser of three evils: No energy, Rising CO2 levels, Nuclear accidents.
I'd hope that modern reactors (ie not Chernobyl era junk), intelligently placed (like not in the middle of a city, and not near a Tsunami-prone coastline like Fukushima) and carefully run (like not Chernobyl and not 3 Mile Island) could reduce the risk of accidents considerably. But even with the rate of severe accidents we've seen so far, the damage we do is far less than with coal/oil/gas.
I'd hope that we'd get fusion power running - and add smarter solar/wind/tidal sources (hydroelectric dams are starting to look like a bad idea) before too long - but we need uranium/plutonium power sources until that happens.
-- Steve
www.sjbaker.org
they try to sell it as a safe clean energy but it is anything but. nobody wants to admit the gaping hole in the nuclear option...what to do with nuclear waste. well, there is nothing to do with it, except store it indefinitely and hope nothing bad ever happens. hope that no accident, no attack, no natural disaster ever happens at a storage facility or at a power plant itself. as long as nothing bad ever happens to any of these places between now and the time our sun dies then nuclear energy is clean and safe!
Nuclear power remains a critical element to revising our industrial base in a way that can maintain existing demand and power the manufacturing of the equipment for renewable generation. For Solar and Wind to remain cheap requires that the components remain cheap - aluminum requires HUGE amounts of energy to refine from ore, mining itself is horrendously energy intensive even at the level of producing the large trucks and earth moving equipment required.
Nuclear is part of a comprehensive energy solution, but is not quite as good as it used to be because renewables are currently even cheaper. Still, it turns out most people are too uneducated to support nuclear and some of the remaining otherwise pro-nuclear people with find the difficulty in securing nuclear waste too problematic to overcome or have given up on educating everyone else.
Oh, look, another anti-nuclear story from mdsolar. @EditorDavid - are youbnew here?
Seriously folks, the only way to stop these demagogues is if we only ever post meta anti-story comments and keep the engagement minimal on these, so the story becomes unprofitable. If you argue the issue, it empowers mdsolar by encouraging the staff to post his crap.
Didn't think so. If I can't cast a vote that matters on any law then FUCK OFF. How can I support or not support something if their is no ballot for said support? Your shell game I refuse to play.
Gallup interprets this as being about better alternatives.
Nuclear energy is not just fission but also fusion!
Nuclear energy is supposed to support me and everyone else who uses it...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
We all saw what a country turning capitalist did to nuclear power in Ukraine, and how much bullshit TEPCO emitted after Fukushima.
So, yeah, I trust nuclear energy, but I do not trust businessmen to run nuclear power plants. Social democracies I'd trust with nuclear power - the neolibs and the state capitalists, two sides of the same coin, can stick with toys that don't have such sharp corners.
We don't update reactors to newer, safer generation, because we don't feel safe about them, and we don't feel safe about them because we don't build new safer reactors. Moreover, given the high density of the byproduct once the spend fuel is recycled (something that only France is doing IIRC), storing them deep, vitrified, for a long time isn't a real problem. FWIW, I'd be much more worried about a waste with a 100 year half life rather than 1 millions year half life. There has been natural reactor byproduct stored for millions of years in the ground which weren't bothering anyone...
At cricket, yes. At rugby I prefer Neath.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I think there's too much waste as it's used now. There is a reactor design (can't remember the name) that can use already spent fuel rods to the point where they are much less radioactive, and if it were put into use there is already hundreds of years worth of fuel rods available that are currently just sitting in drums buried somewhere. The powers that be needs to get their heads out of their asses and use this kind of technology.
We should ban bananas !
'nuf said
We'd (literally) be in the dark ages without it.
Yes.
Unless we figure out fusion power quickly (which I'm doubtful of), fission power, combined with existing hydro and thermal solar is our best bet for stable baseline power in this country.
Renewables like PD solar and wind power, as well as power storage solutions, are best left to cover demand peaks.
The problem is that so few people know anything more than "nuclear = bomb" and "radiation will kill you", that it's created this vast climate of FUD around nuclear power.
And all they say when you mention nuclear power is "Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima".
None of these were failures intrinsic to the reactor.
Chernobyl: Idiots disabling safety equipment and fucking around with the reactor.
TMI: Human error compounded by bad control indicators.
Fukushima: A company cheaping out and not listening to civil engineering with regards to a sea wall meant to stave off large waves.
We're also talking about reactors based on decades-old technology and Rube Goldberg systems to stave off every possible problem an engineer could envision.
Rather than just designing a reactor with a default state of "off".
More modern reactor designs take this sort of thing into account.
Additionally, people gripe about the amount of nuclear waste being produced. Never mind that most reactors based on this older technology consume, at best, 5% of the actual "fuel" in the medium (rods, pellets, etc) before the medium is removed from the reactor.
With reprocessing, that fuel can continue to be used for extended periods of time. Resulting in far less long-lived waste, and the remainder being waste that is only being radioactive in the short term.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Also yes. Fear and hysteria abound; serious risk does not. Rather than NIMBY, I'm all about PIIMBY. Put It In My Back Yard. And pay me accordingly. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Meaning I'm fine with it existing, but don't have any particularly romantic notions about it either.
Nuclear power necessarily comes with a long list of downsides. The enormous expense of building a powerplant, the amount of care that needs to be exercised to properly run it, the problem with waste disposal, the problem with that a dismantled powerplant still needs maintenance, the problem that disaster preparation is absolutely essential, the problem that the critical parts of the infrastructure are so highly radioactive it's not even possible to have a camera in them, which means any work on that is enormously expensive...
And then there's the problem of that if things go wrong it causes the evacuation of a huge amount of the population. Now I know this isn't instant death of course, but it still means that accidents are enormously expensive and insurance is difficult.
Then there is that all of this critically depends on people, who in many cases have reasons to cut corners in dangerous places.
Once you take all of that into account, I think it becomes considerably less amazing than it is in theory. IMO, current nuclear power is something that will go away eventually. Many of its downsides aren't going anywhere, so it may well happen that we'll find a way to run a grid purely on solar and wind power, and just accept the downsides of that in exchange for not having to deal with radioactivity.
That said, I'm all for improving the tech as far as possible and looking into thorium and of course fusion research.
I support keeping reactors that already exist running where its safe to do so. But I also support building new nuclear reactors. Not the ancient technology PWR and BWR reactors but modern 4th generation reactors. Ones that can burn the waste products from the old PWRs and BWRs and dont produce waste that has to be stored for thousands of years. Ones that can operate in ways that mean they cant suffer the kind of catastrophic release of radiation that happened at Fukushima.
4th generation reactors absolutely need to be part of the energy solution as the way to replace the world's dependence on digging dirty black ancient rocks out of the ground and burning them for electricity.
I'm more a fan of Thorium as a bandwagon than other kinds, but really you can do more with current fuels than we tend to, reducing the waste significantly (though not saving much for weapons). Thorium seems to have less of those issues, just needs to be shown in practice.
Seriously though, I would love to have a tiny thorium reactor in my neighborhood. Power all our electric vehicles and whatever else. Just don't ask me to replace my gas cooking range.
This forum Sig is licensed under the LGPL.
Yes I support nuclear energy, it is the only viable solution to meet the world's energy demands and the need for clean energy. Burning coal releases more radioactive martial into the environment then any nuclear plant has. People are scared of radiation and it's unfounded, we are bombarded with radiation on a daily basis from the sun. People are also scared that nuclear plants can blow up like a bomb, but this is complete impossible. The waste they produce can be managed, in fact it can be recycled to produce more fuel. We need to figure out how to harness fusion into a viable solution.
I've seen it argued that any "indirect" energy source, such as coal burning to boil water,
nuclear to boil water,
and then steam --> electrical,
is going to lose out on cost to any "direct" energy source,
such as solar-->electrical,
wind-->electrical,
natural gas turbine-->electrical.
The argument is that the extra capital involved in the intermediate steam conversion step is going to price "indirect" power generation above all direct means.
This seems to be borne out somewhat in the real world, in that in the USA all new electrical generation capacity is overwhelmingly in "direct" conversion. This is largely driven by inexpensive natural gas, but there's plenty of solar and wind capacity being installed, too.
By this argument, both nuclear fusion and nuclear fission aren't going to be economical, ever.
Check out this report from the US DOE:
http://web.ornl.gov/~webworks/...
It forecasts the cost of nuclear, either fission or fusion, to be higher than pretty much all alternatives. I'm not sure whether this includes externalities such as environmental damage from CO2 emissions, but that would seem to favor wind/solar even more, and these were already the winners based on cost.
Maybe nuclear power might still make economic sense for baseload applications, but if energy storage options become cheap enough (battery technology is being worked on feverishly worldwide), then nuclear plants will be relegated to niches where solar/wind/gas can't work....
The "killer app" for fission/fusion might be for energy in space, not on earth. Can't use solar very well out past the orbit of Mars, and if you're mining asteroids, there isn't going to be any wind either.
--PeterM
I especially support research in nuclear energy, Thorium reactors are a great place, right on the edge of practicality.
Also, I support nuclear fusion research, and I think we should fund more of it, and this graph shows why.
If we can make energy cheaper by an order of magnitude compared to how it is today, that opens the door for some great things.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
If we actually kept developing reactors instead of shutting down and holding up progress we would be at the point where they would be safe by now. It's only because of Luddites that we are so far behind our potential. It would be as if we still had to fly on Comets because as everyone knows planes are dangerous. Well no shit if you are flying around in first generation designs.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Every type of power plant has a role to fill.
Nuclear, alongside geothermal and hydroelectric, is well-suited to handling base load. It "throttles" very slowly - you generally want to keep it at a consistent power output. It pairs quite well with hydro (you can use the reservoir for "free" energy storage, letting it fill when load is below what the nuke plant provides, then let it drain when you need peak power), but it's also something that can be used for sole base load pretty much anywhere, whereas geothermal/hydroelectric don't work everywhere. The pollution of nuclear fission can be managed, and even "green" power has an environmental impact.
Solar and wind serve a purpose as well, handling the peak load (which is often quite substantial - for rough estimates, peak power consumption can be treated as 2x base load). You can work with just solar/wind, but that requires either a lot of long-distance power transmission, or a lot of power storage, both of which have both infrastructure costs, and power losses. It's also inherently risky to be too heavily focused on any one generation system - diverse ecosystems can withstand stress better.
Oil/gas/coal also have their niche. They're good for on-site emergency power, because they scale down well, and require little space. They're also good for off-grid power, where demand exceeds what portable solar can provide (eg. welding). And they might be good for "emergency" power for the grid as well - if conditions are temporarily bad for other forms of power (a drought in a hydro-heavy region), or even just a long-term high demand, a mothballed coal plant could be brought online relatively quickly, and will function for as long as fuel can be supplied.
do you support nuclear research? As it is, there are numerous aging nuclear plants, and not really much to replace them with except theoretical models and tired designs.
The worst part about the anti-nuke crowd is that they have effectively shuttered research, which means several plants are operating well beyond their intended lifespan. Even if you support going 100% wind and solar, it will have to be implemented piecemeal, which means at least some new nuclear plants will have to bridge the gap. Would you prefer something modern like a pebble-bed reactor, or something based on a 70s design like Watts Bar 1?
I would love to see lots more focus on nucleair energy for multiple reasons. First, it can be a safe and clean energy source for many years to come (think Thorium, MSR). The 'oh it will blow up' folks are hampering progress with outdated arguments. Most current power plants are the Ford Model T of designs. If their arguments would have been lodged against cars then we'd still be driving those. Modern nucleair reactors are inherently safe and can fix many of the waste issues we have from outdated installations today.
Second is removing the dependency on fossil fuels. Not only will this have positive environmental effects, it will cause a paradigm shift in geo politics. Can you imagine what happens to the Middle East if their stronghold on oil supply becomes irrelevant? When organisations such as Al Quaida and IS see their money supply dry up? It will be a much, much better world for it.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Ask me instead if I support yet another of mdsolar's endless anti-nuclear, pro-solar postings to Slashdot.
I get it, mdsolar. Nuclear = BAD! Solar = GOOD! Except for the fact that the sun is a giant nuclear reactor that kills tens of thousands of people every year from radiation-induced cancers. But hey, never let facts get in the way of anti-nuclear diatribes.
Yes, I am a nuclear zealot.
(Not American)
Nuclear energy for generating electricity is technically a viable concept, many years ago I was even trained to work on it.
Yet I don't believe disadvantages like security, safety and especially the very long term storage of the left overs makes it a good proposition for large scale deployment.
Nuclear energy has a place, but only in the form of fail safe generators and for very specific uses like aircraft carriers and submarines.
Once stationary there are plenty of sustainable alternatives that are already competing on price providing you consider the long-term costs of the present type of nuclear generators.
After installing PV nearly a year ago I've calculated that with a €15,000 - 20,000 investment I could for the next 25 - 30 years be totally independent of any other energy, that includes road transport.
The cost of maintenance consists of saving for a replacement and some battery changes.
Sustainable or renewable energy sources are sufficiently mature to shy away from the real problems surrounding present day nuclear, the remaining cost issues for renewable are mainly distribution and storage.
Distribution is a NIMBY problem so it can be solved near-instantaneously, storage is to be split in smallish scale local (your 1st and 2nd hand Tesla batteries) and large scale central solutions.
Safe central storage could be molten salt and the use of ammonia to be made of excess electricity and when demand requires it to be burned in conventional turbines.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
And I don't even live in soviet russia
Just needs better oversight. Nuclear can be done perfectly safely. The only danger with anything is politics.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Your question is simplistic because it assumes equivalent amounts of "radiation" can be treated as the same thing. If we're talking about just exposure per se then I'm fine with occasional exposures totaling in the range 100 mSv/yr if it's relatively uniform over that year. Over the course of a day I'd be fine with 20 mSv or so, as long as it was a once-or-twice-a-year kind of thing.
If we're talking about inhalation/ingestion it's a whole different depends on the biochemistry of the source of radioactivity and the form it takes. Sr-90 and Cs-137 are similar in radiological half-life, so if we're talking about but very different in terms of biological half-life. Half of ingested Cs is excreted in 30 days. Estimates for time to excrete half of an Sr dose vary from three years to as long as 50. Clearly being exposed to similar levels of Cs-137 and Sr-90 are very different propositions in terms of lifetime risk. For the same reason I avoid working on restoring radium pigmented watches; radium's in the same column of the periodic table as strontium and calcium, and that means it's not something you want to make a habit of ingesting or breathing, even though Ra-226 is not particularly radioactive.
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I couldn't care less about it as an energy source, solar will win that war. But, I think one of the greatest things that the prior generation has done is put a market around a very dangerous metal. Best to deplete all known deposits of uranium ASAP.
It never ceases to amaze me that whenever the price of gas goes down for a while Americans assume that the price will stay low for a long time. Then they run out and make long-term decisions, like buying cars, based on that assumption.
However, I would add that the poll doesn't seem to prove or even really suggest that the cause for the decrease in support for nuclear energy has anything to do with the price of gas. The article only appears to assume that that is the case, so it's no better.
Indeed, there is nothing to fear re. renewable energy.
Once you've done your up-front investment it becomes very cheap and especially reliable.
But yes I agree that 'up-front' is a really difficult or even alien concept for people that live on credit and 'buy' a cell phone as part of a contract.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Has anyone here heard of SMRs or Small Modular Reactors? They represent the technology which has been safely used on American naval vessels for many decades. Here's some info:
http://www.energy.gov/ne/nuclear-reactor-technologies/small-modular-nuclear-reactors
http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-power/nuclear-power-technology/small-modular-reactors
Also, the fuel rods do not appears to be waste" but, rather can be reused and repurposed simply by changing their polarity by alternating the solution their are processed by from fresh-water to salt-water ...etc.
http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-power/nuclear-power-technology/small-modular-reactors
Which states:
"When used fuel comes out of a light-water reactor, it’s in a hard ceramic form, and almost all of it is still just uranium – about 95 percent, along with one percent other long-lived radioactive elements, called actinides. Both of these can be recycled as fuel. The remaining four percent are fission products, which are truly unusable. Pyroprocessing begins by chopping the ceramic fuel into little pieces and converting it into metal. Then it’s submerged in a vat of molten salts, and an electric current separates out uranium and other reusable elements, which can be shaped back into fuel rods."
Weigh the risks of current nuclear technology, versus the risk of our ongoing coddling of vile Islamist regimes, like the Saudis. I know which one I would choose.
I cordially invite all pro-nuclear folks to move in right next to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.
Any takers?
turns out most people are too uneducated
That's kinda the problem. The public is so uneducated that they make it hard to fund nuclear, which leads to engineers becoming less educated as old-timers retire and universities shut down their nuclear engineering programs because nuclear engineers can't find jobs (unless they go into the Navy, or are some of the very very few that make it into Los Alamos).
So, nuclear gets caught in a Catch-22 where it doesn't get enough funding to support the advancement of technology that would make it safe and reliable enough to compete. Instead, our collective knowledge of nuclear slips as, again, old-timers retire and youngsters pursue something more likely to pay those hideous education loans.
It's good that the stars have aligned to invest R&D into solar and wind. But it's not a good thing to allow nuclear to slip away... there's a lot of research yet to be done, with potentially great payoffs, if it wasn't so politicized by way of a public where a high-school education is becoming more and more worthless, again because of politics. A dumb electorate can be convinced of anything, like how supersonic transport causes skin cancer, and that was back in 1975. Today, politicians earn their pork-fat living by dumbing down science education, I figure to better guarantee re-election by the time the kids turn 21. These are the people who'll turn on Fox News and see "nuclear... bad ; fossil fuel subsidies... good", all because of fancy wine and caviar shared between the Koch brothers and Roger Ailes on a yacht in the Mediterranean.
The problem with nuclear is it requires smart people not only for design and build-out, but also for for day-to-day operation and maintenance. A poorly educated public is bad for all of this. But fail to keep educating and innovating in this technology, and it slips away (or goes overseas), and that sucks for us all.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
I'm usually not one to call out trolls, but I can't help but notice that mdsolar seems to be repeatedly spamming Slashdot with anti-nuclear stories and pro-solar stories. Look at his history... Can we please not use slashdot as a podium for grandstanding?
Nuclear energy is perfectly safe and clean, as long as the plants are run correctly.
The problem is that many of these plants are run by managers who believe minor deviations are acceptable if it means more profit.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
In principle, yes. And in practice, also yes. Sure, there are serious difficulties; but as with almost everything else, the problems are people problems, not technology problems. How can you stop some people from cheating, skimping, cutting corners, profiteering? (I like the Chinese solution: shoot every proven offender "pour encourager les autres". Seriously: anyone who takes unnecessary risks with nuclear power deserves to be shot).
I'd like to suggest that our willingness (or otherwise) to accept nuclear power is a benchmark of our collective intelligence and competence as a species. If we cannot crack this problem, we deserve extinction. Two analogies that come to mind:
In "Swallows and Amazons", Arthur Ransome's novel of childhood life in the Lake District, the children want to go sailing on a lake without adult company. Uncertain, their mother telegrams her husband who is working abroad. Back comes the immortal reply: "Better drowned than duffers. If not duffers wont drown".
In "The Fourth Profession", one of Larry Niven's short stories about the alien Monk species, the Monks give the human species a limited time in which to build a launching laser to send their spaceship to the next star on their route. If we can't, or won't build the laser, the Monks will detonate our Sun instead, and that will give them the shove they need. Asked if that isn't unnecessarily cruel and inhumane, they reply that a species that either can't or won't perform such a simple task isn't sentient, and so its extinction doesn't matter. http://www.obooksbooks.com/boo...
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Yes. My favorite reactor design is the one that uses gravitation-stabilized fusion. It's really easy. You just position the reactor core approximately 93 million miles away. Energy is produced mostly in the relatively benign electro-magnetic spectrum and can be used directly for heating, or stored in various media and released later. This system is proven to be relatively safe, although technicians have an increased risk of certain types of cancers if they don't take adequate precautions. The biggest risk is melanoma.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Solar > Nuclear > *
Solar is energy democratized, it's pretty great thing.
Nuclear is great, except its terror threat now. Nuclear should be limited to large cities that can't have solar everywhere and super scientists laser weapons.
I might have consumed the koolaid, but I am a Navy Nuke. I already supported Nuclear Power before I joined.
After going through the program, it makes a lot more sense. It is incredibly safe and there is very little to actually worry about.
Imagine, the Navy has gone 60 years incident free, for a reason.
Nuclear power makes more sense than trying to alter the environment to harness it, like solar and wind.
In short, current technology - no. I have high hopes for thorium reactors, if we ever put the money into making them viable.
Like the Toshiba 4s, which is completely self-contained and doesn't even need a "control room". It only gives 10Mw, but doesn't need refueling for 30 years. Of course this is far too small for a modern city, but Toshiba said they are working on one at 50Mw. Still, this would need 10,000 to run a city the size of Dallas (with the 50Mw), but self-contained no-maintenance is the way forward. These would especially be useful combined with renewables that are dependent on sunlight, wind, etc.
Travelling Wave Reactors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor are perfectly safe. There is no reason to stop using nuclear power, we just need to start being smart about it.
If we put half the effort we put into solar or wind into developing molten salt reactors like liquid fluoride thorium reactors and small modular reactors, we'd be much better off.
But, I put the blame for climate just as strongly at the feet of Green Peace and similar ignorant environmentalist who cry louder about nuclear energy than they do about coal and NG plants. If they actually supported Nukes rather than throwing years of lawsuits at them, then we wouldn't still be talking about climate change, we would have converted huge swaths of our power generation to nukes, gone through a few growing pains/generation of technology and by now the resulting economies of scale and control systems would have been worked out to the point where buying electric cars and such were a no brainier.
Instead we are still having this conversation, and in 5/10 years when gas is back at $5-8/gallon and NG prices spike back up, we will be experiencing rolling blackouts as we fight to stabilize wind/etc or still wondering why the air quality sucks and we still haven't' cut back on our greenhouse gas emissions.Likely a bit of both if the wind farms in TX are an example.
A couple of years ago the government of Ontario put out a request for a couple of new reactors and the lowest cost was $26B. I have no problems with the technology but when reactors are coming in at over $10B each there's no way these can be affordable. (Especially in Ontario where the salaries of people working at power production plants are extreme!)
You could buy the equivalent in wind and solar production for much, much less, then spend a pile of money on used car batteries for storage and probably have the same capacity without spending $26B.
Meaning I'm fine with it existing, but don't have any particularly romantic notions about it either.
Nuclear power necessarily comes with a long list of downsides. [...]
All good points. However, one question needs to be asked: what's the alternative to nuclear?
We certainly want to get rid of coal. But with fossil fuels, that leaves oil and natural gas, the latter of which is generally preferred. On the renewables side, there's wind and solar. (Hydro is basically "done" at this point, as we've probably dammed everything that can be dammed.)
I generally look favorably on the renewables, but I think we still need to work on storage (either residential or industrial-scale) before we can really rely upon it. They can be built, but in addition there needs to be backup capacity for windless nights.
There's not much choice left after all of those considerations.
Good response. My question was purposely simplistic, as a primary factor in most peoples opposition to nuclear power is a highly skewed risk perception. How much was put in there to make sure that was considered. I was trying to get people to think about the why. People accept much greater risks almost everyday than are posed by even greatly higher than normal exposures, be they external or internal. Safety limits are set way below significant risk levels, and so those safety limits can be exceeded greatly with little chance of effect. Many people simply don't realize that.
Even ingesting a small amount of material that is biologically 'sticky' is only a tiny risk adder, and is overshadowed by many other risks factors for the same cancers.
Bananas are going extinct unless new edible varieties are developed due to the TR4 fungal infection. Problem solved!
An even better "better question" is, "Why is the current nuclear industry eating its seed corn?"
Almost all existing nuclear power plants consume Uranium-235. Once it is gone, it will be exponentially more difficult to manufacture Plutonium 239 from U-238, and U-233 from Thorium 232, than it is currently easy to make those other fissionable substances from vastly-more-common resources. If one is going to support fission power, then one must either support breeder reactors, or recognize that fission power for civilization will have a rather short lifespan, just like fossil-fuel power for civilization is having a short lifespan.
If one is going to support nuclear power for the long term, then my personal vote is that we need fusion reactors even more than we need fission reactors. Fusion reactors are expected to produce only a fraction of the radwaste that fission reactors produce, be less risky to operate, cannot be a good source of materials for making terror weapons, and have much-less-expensive fuel costs, for just four reasons why.
There are two problems with nuclear power: waste and disaster risk.
The solution to both is careful controls, high engineering standards, strong oversight, and expensive maintenance. Those cost money. The Fukushima reactors were built to much higher standards than most US reactors, but still suffered a catastrophe. You can't reduce the risk to zero, but you have to be willing to pay to mitigate those risks.
To the extent people are willing to pay for those things, I support nuclear power... which means that practically I'm highly skeptical about it in the US.
Myopia = burning through the ~100 years of remaining carbon based energy without a replacement. All of human history after will curse the worlds stupidity for such action. Human history has spanned on the order of 10,000 years, and so without an apocalypse it is plausible that it may have the option to span another such period. I would prefer that humanity's grandchildren and all remaining perpetuation beyond does not curse the name of this generation for its gluttony and folly.
Solar does not now and without orbital reflectors never will have capacity. It doesn't compete with carbon. Wind does not have it. Hydro-electric is at capacity. Geothermal has limited room for growth. Dirty biomass as strong environmental consequences as well as limited capacity.
Either we give up current technological civilization and descend back into the darkness or we find a decent clean nuclear option. That is the only choice on the menu. IMO the best transitional option is using nuclear to pull fuel out of air - converting CO2 and H2O into ethanol or octane. This allows us to use our trillion dollar fluid-fuel infrastructure.
Jimmy Carter, chief f the fear mangers. He killed breeders and reprocessing by imperial decree.
I support the ongoing development of new reactors, particularly 4th gen designs which can eliminate many, if not most, of the potential problems.
The problem with Nukes is not all the technically difficulties, its that the time to build a nuke plant is prohibitive to doing any good in our current situation. We would have to bring a new plant online every week (after the years long planning phase) to make a significant dent in our energy production in the next 20 to 30 years. Isn't going to happen.
The amount of money that we would have to spend to do that could be better invested in a variety of alternative engird production systems and research into new systems and achieve much more "bang for our buck".
I am NOT against Nukes, I worked at one for a few years as a Project Manager, and I found it to be safe and reliable. It just isn't practical to think we can build enough of them fast enough to help.
Nuclear energy (from fission) has a very large number of disadvantages. Here are just a few:
- It's inherently and obviously risky --- even its greatest proponents know that, but they just choose to minimize the importance of that risk and its deadly consequences. There have been more than enough nuclear reactor disasters already, yet some people just don't learn. Even with better designs, accidents will happen from geophysical causes and through human failure, as well as by deliberate action. You can't prevent this from happening, so don't create such deadly installations (and juicy targets) in the first place.
- Radioactive waste from fission accumulates a massive liability for future generations. It forces our own chosen risk onto our descendents without giving them any choice in the matter. This is unethical even in the best of cases, but in the worst case it's downright criminal because some of those radioactive stores will unavoidably release their contents (even explosively with human help) and result in human casualties and suffering --- maybe your own descendents. Don't gamble with the lives of others.
- Nuclear energy is out of step with a world that is rapidly converting to clean, inexhaustible energy harnessed from the environment. Nuclear is not just unclean but deadly unclean, and it's very demanding on the planet's resources as well. It adds to our debt on the planet instead of reducing it.
- According to a growing number of climatologists who are witnessing first-hand the unfolding climate disaster in the Arctic and Antarctic, our existing several hundred nuclear reactors could quite possibly be the direct cause of our extinction in the decades ahead, after the indirect cause (CO2 and methane) lead to death by starvation of billions and make the world's economies collapse. Nuclear reactors can't be rapidly turned off and made non-radioactive --- the full process of decommissioning takes some 50 to 60 years as an industry average, and it takes a LOT of money. There will be no money available under conditions of economic collapse, cooling will be interrupted, and many will go into meltdown. Even if you choose to disbelieve the warnings of specialists, the risk remains. Knowing what we already know about rising sea levels and epic storms, we should not be adding to the risk.
Dr. Brice Smith of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research summarized this very well:
The whole idea of adding more nuclear power is hazardous and ill-considered, and it's also unnecessary.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
It is not that much about radioactivity, but that nuclear has hopelessly high capital costs and can't compete commercially even when provided legislated liability insurance subsidy as in the US.
This also leads to: 1. Very long pay off period lasting decades. You giving up all your options for many DECADES as you already wasted all money building nuclear plant, and you must buy that hopelessly expensive nuclear electricity as somebody assumed it will cost that much when plans were made decades ago.
2. It isn't really dispatchable. You may stop it, but most of the costs are capital costs, fuel is just small fraction. So you run it at 100% or capital is wasted. Worse, it may come down unscheduled at any moment and you will need to provide full gigawatt level backup immediately to avoid grid failure anyway.
3. 1 & 2. also means that it doesn't stick with intermittent solar/wind power at all. Bigger nuclear power share leaves less space for solar/wind.
Conclusion: Nuclear power is dinosaur of nuclear weapon development era. Leave it to submarines if they still want it.
yes
Nuclear is the cleanest option. Nuclear releases no pollution it the atmosphere and represents 63% of U.S. clean energy. User mdsolar wants all of the nuclear power plants in the United States to be decommissioned. That would increase US CO2 emissions by 20%.
Nuclear is the safest option. The number of people who have died in the United States from nuclear power is zero. ZERO!!! The number of people who have died from radiation at Fukushima is zero. The only place people died was at a warhead factory in the Ukraine. The total deaths is less than 60 which includes all cancer deaths. To put it in perspective if Chernobyl happened every hour, it would kill less people than coal.
I still think mdsolar is the stooge of koch bothers and the fossil fuel industry. The opposition to nuclear power was created by the fossil fuel industry. A person would have to be stupid to think the fossil fuel industry was telling the truth about nuclear power while they were lying about climate change. User mdsolar does not seem to realize that we need to replace coal, oil and gas. Unfortunately, solar and wind can not do that alone.
1. A long payoff period true, but a very big payoff to society. Does society abandon everything that has a high capital cost and long payback? 2. Renewables are not dispatchable for the most part. Nuclear certainly can be. The only other choice is CO2 producing gas or coal. I guess you prefer those. 3. Wind and solar technologies are actually 'older' than nuclear. You can choose which ones you want to quit developing, but the fact that a technology exists for a certain time period is a stupid reason to discontinue it. Nuclear is still the greatest success story when it comes to actual clean air MWH production.
I see you also have a propensity to link nuclear power to nuclear weapons. That explains your response to a large extent.
I am against nuclear power for the same reason I am against the death penalty. Both require a level perfection and infallibility that humans are incapable of reaching.
Wind and solar power are now broadly price competitive in the United States and many wealthy countries. The United States needs to upgrade its electrical grid to take advantage of wind from the Great Plains and elsewhere.
The problem with nuclear power is not the technology - it is humans. Humans make mistakes and every once in a while those mistakes lead to big accidents. Storage of nuclear waste is also a problem for a very long time.
The cheap price of nuclear power often does not take into account government subsidies. After decades of frustration the USA still lacks of a long-term nuclear waste storage facility. That does not mean nuclear power should be shut down immediately in the USA. Indian Point should be closed; it is an old leaky facility near NYC. Other nuclear power plants should be slowly replaced by wind and solar with an upgraded power grid over the next 20 years or so. Germany is more or less doing this, although on a rapid schedule and without as much available wind and sun as the USA has available.
The pollution from coal and gas literally kills people, and I'm not talking about hypothetical deaths from global warming. Many (if not all) of the bloodiest wars in recent history have dovetailed with concerns over the control of the petroleum supply. Fossil fuels kill. They kill directly, they kill indirectly, and the sooner we abandon them the better off the world will be.
The problem with abandoning fossil fuels is that renewable energy sucks. Solar sucks, wind sucks, hydroelectric power is nice where you can find it but sucks by way of scarcity everywhere else, geothermal has the same issues... Does this even need to be said in 2016? These are marginal sources of power and will be for the foreseeable future. If you want to drop fossil fuels without cratering your economy and your standard of living, you have to replace that energy. We needed stable, reliable, so-called green energy decades ago. History does not give credit for late work.
As for fusion power, sorry - it's science fiction. The only steady-state fusion reactor capable of producing useful work that you're ever going to see in your lives is the great big one up in the sky. Terrestrial, man-made fusion energy is nothing but a hippie pipe dream that just breeds complacency. (Non-power fusion reactors have plenty of potential uses, but that's a whole other story. Oh, and we can already build those.)
The only source of energy on earth that man can harness affordably, in quantities necessary to satisfy our energy demands now and into the future, while abandoning fossil fuels, and also while using mature, proven technology, is fission power. Nuclear energy is, has been, and will continue to be the solution to our energy problems - and a solution that nobody will ever implement, if radiophobes continue getting their way. How many more broken promises from green energy promoters are we going to endure, and how many lies from the anti-nuclear movement are we going to have to uncover, before society finally gets wise to this?
... environmentalists.
"Renewables are not dispatchable for the most part. Nuclear certainly can be"
The term dispatchable is usually used in the context of adjusting load to demand in real time. Nuclear is NOT that in any way. It's useful for base load only.
Nuclear power is a stable, clean source of power as we transition to renewables. Its medical uses are well documented. RTGs are useful in remote locations. Yes, there are negatives but, if nuclear were so negative, why would China have built 26 plants with 25 more coming on-stream to eliminate the pollution from coal?
Sorry "load to generation".
...the developers, builders and operators have comprehensive plans for the life-cycle of the radioactive components and waste.
In this era of the 1% (I'm including YOU, Duke Energy) feel their effluent is a "public" problem to be solved by somebody else, I will remain opposed. Fukushima was a wake-up call, especially when TEPCO (The Tokyo Electric Power Co.) tried to stonewall their obstructionism, and destroyed vast tracts of Japanese farmland. And, now, we see, an atomic facility North of Manhattan is about to (or may already have) fouled the waters in the vicinity to 10 Million people. Until they are personally and corporately responsible for ALL side-effects of their adoption of atomic energy, I am opposed to it. I'd rather not see us go back to the stone age, but renewable sources are better options, even though they have environmental costs, too.
Life is about trades-off. It not about getting rich, and leaving everybody else behind (yeah, I talk 'bout YOU, coal companies).
Anonymous Coward indeed. You think ENVIRONMENTALISTS are the problem. Where do you get YOUR air to breathe; YOUR water to drink. Environmentalists care that ALL of us have adequate resources for a happy, peaceful, long, healthy life.
Frankly, I wish /. would abandon the "Anonymous Coward" option; all it does is invite inane, thoughtless comments like yours.
I'll accept them when they can get an insurance company to cover them for damages, like all their other power generating methods have.
And obviously as a taxpayer I don't want to pay for armed guards to protect the ashes for 184000 years from terrorists.
If those problems are fixed, I don't care if they boil their water that complicated and dangerous way.
I don't really support the current nuclear reactors were using, which were designed what, almost 60, 70 years ago?
I wholeheartedly support new reactor designs that are much safer and have a nearly zero risk associated with operating them.
Using nuclear fusion for power is AWESOME, and almost completely safe, too. It's cheap, plentiful, and we are bathed in its energy whether we'd like to be or not, and bear the same risks from it, whether we use it or not.
The safety comes from the fact that the reactor is located far enough away from any populated areas, at a mean distance of one astronomical unit, or roughly 93 million miles.
I refer of course, to the sun.
All other currently economically viable forms of nuclear power, that are also technologically feasible are stupidly expensive and insanely dangerous.
Only a moron would choose the filthy, or dangerous and expensive over the cheap and clean. Nuclear FISSION power, like coal, and diesel, are OBSOLETE.
I am deeply concerned about global warming. Therefore I support some increase in nuclear energy production, at least in the medium term. I think that there are new modern reactor designs that should be built, ones where a meltdown is highly unlikely and where the reactor consumes most of its worst waste for energy production.
That said, the long term source of energy has to be solar. It is the one form of renewable energy that has practically no limit in terms of scalability. The area of solar panels that would meet all of America's energy needs is surprisingly small, and the cost of production is dropping quickly. Storage will not be an issue in the future, as battery tech gets better and less expensive. Even today's lithium battery tech is good enough for many transportation applications, and the tech will only continue to improve. Modern lithium cells are not environmentally harmful. There is a lot of lithium that is easy to extract in dried lake beds in places like South America. The cells will almost certainly be recycled, and not end up in landfills, for the simple reason that the chemical components will be valuable. To add to this, lithium will not be the only solution. There are likely other storage mechanisms that will be both cheaper and more reliable for bulk storage applications.
My background is in theoretical physics, and I have considered this for quite a while. I am convinced that solar energy is the ultimate solution to supply our modern technological civilization with all the energy it needs. I believe that in a couple of decades, gasoline engines will be on the road to becoming boutique fashion items, like Harley Davidson motorcycles. Internal combustion engines will be perceived as loud, stinky anachronisms. If you want to experience this today, drive a Tesla model S for a month. You'll never think of your ICE the same way again.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
My early undergrad study was targeted to work in nuclear power. (Way back in the early 70s). By the time I graduated, I had a very bad opinion of the nuclear power field. It was later confirmed by working in related industrial fields. Storage of spent fuel and the downside of nuclear accidents has been graphically illustrated by accidents that have occurred over the last 50 years. Nuclear power should be abandoned! fos
Poll the solar users in Nevada... where the PUC just eliminated net metering, and so you get paid less for the power you generate than the power you consume all the time. There are proposals into the California PUC, which are almost always supported by PG&E, since it would force Smart Meters on places like San Francisco, and PG&E could charge a lot more for night time electricity than day time electricity (when you are using solar).
That's most of my answer, but they also need to do something about radioactive waste. Preferably recycling as power, but at least finding some useful purpose for it rather than just stockpiling it.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
We need to support ~7 billion people at the level of modern convenience and infrastructure that we would not endure to lose. Anything else is unethical.
CONFESSIONS OF A SLASHDOT ENERGY AND LFTR FANBOI
Updated for 2016! All original unless noted! Browse! Engage! Plagiarize!
It's fun to discuss nuclear energy on Slashdot... It's time for Elmo to Grow Up!... A brief history of nuclear energy fear in these United States... You should fear everything besides nuclear energy... Solar drives California towards cannibalism, or your money back... There's a fire, and people pushing intermittent sources are blocking the exits... Hiding wonders of the modern world from the kids...Some energy priorities... 2016: The Year in energy... Meet the folks of TBA, a city willing to store spent nuclear fuel... Nothing is as patriotic as mining... A move to LFTR may be the only way to preserve modern society in the face of disaster (volcanism, Maunder minimum)... Can the grid 'black-start' after a disaster?... Sometimes you just have to point things out... some confuse Weinberg's '300 year best-fit for waste' two fluid design for other single fluid designs... or using solid fuel Thorium, which is pointless so long as uranium is available... yes it's full of dangerous glop, but it is useful and happy glop... yes, I think a LFTR could be developed and built within $4B... every path to biofuels leads to scorched-earth disaster, Thorium energy gives us the surplus to generate synfuels... Decommissionining of nuclear plants promotes an ugly 'vulture culture'... One way to do it: ThorCon, a thorium burner not breeder... Aside from your own yard or roof, solar and wind are losers... With LFTR surplus we could begin making diesel and fertilizer... Do it for the children... No-Plan-Stan tries to derail another discussion about Thorium... EVOLUTIONARY DEAD END COOKIES (serves 7 billion)... AND YOU MY FRIEND -- you would look especially good in Space ...
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
No more privatizing the gains and socializing the risks. Let the free market determine the true costs of insuring against another Three Mile Island, another Chernobyl, another Fukishima. The premiums on nuclear liability policies would be, shall we say, interesting. In our present situation the government backstops the operators beyond a certain level of damages and it's not entirely clear that the operating utilities have sufficient reserves to meet their liability commitments even within those limits. Price-Anderson was supposed to be temporary but it keeps getting renewed like a Disney copyright. Now most people simply assume it's a permanent part of the US nuclear industry.
You are mixing up risk with chance.
The chance to get hit by a truck into the rear of your car during 50 years might be 2%. ...
The risk you have is:
- neck injuries (with a chance of 80%?),
- total loss of the car (probably 50%?),
- death (probably 0.5%?)
- death/server injury of rear passengers (probably 50%?)
Living near a nuclear plant your chance during 50 years is that it goes boom, perhaps 0.00001%?
You risk:
- evacuation and loss of all your property (chance 100%)
- death or injury in the mass panic or evacuation (chance probably 5%?)
- contamination with server health issues (chance probably 50%?)
Even ingesting a small amount of material that is biologically 'sticky' is only a tiny risk adder
No it is not. The chance might be low. The risk if you "catch it" is extremely high, close to certain death. The only question is: do you care if you die due to cancer 50 years after such an incident caused by digesting/breathing radioactive material? Or the other question is: do you die before that because a truck hit you? Or do you die before that because you get lung cancer for no apparent reason?
Or: do you die to the same radiation exposure after 3 years already? As the time frame for cancer or if you get cancer at all, might look pretty random from the outside.
I suggest to read up what the lethal dose of e.g. plutonium is, and how it works.
In medicin they usually talk about a "50% death dose", which means: the amount of "poison" you have to give per kg weight of the subject to each subject that 50% of the subjects die.
The amount of plutonium to kill 50% of the test subjects is so incredible low, you won't believe it: go google.
What you do is wagering the chance, not the risk.
In simple words: ... the chance to lose and to win is the same. Only the payoff is higher if you win
You place 10 bucks on the number 13 in roulette: you risk 10 bucks. You have a chance of 1:37 to win 360 bucks and a chance of slightly higher than 35:37 to lose your money.
You place 1 million bucks on the number 13 instead: you risk 1 million bucks
In other words:
Both bets have exactly the same chance to win or lose.
The second bet has a much higher risk.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
And for every Megawatt of Hydro-electric capacity you have you can match it with a megawatt of wind/solar and it doesn't matter how intermittent the wind / solar is because you have the hydro as back-up.
It's not really hydro power you need but pumped storage schemes to act as a backup for wind/solar. This is not the same as hydro because you need a lake at the bottom to pump the water out of when you are running the system in reverse to store energy. On the plus side you do not need to worry about water replenishment for the upper lake which means that you can have a larger height difference that with ordinary hydro. There is no point in backing wind/solar with ordinary hydro because you might as well just use the ordinary hydro and forget the wind/solar.
However this is still not enough. There was a study done a few years ago in the UK which showed that you would need to convert every body of water over a square mile in size in the UK into a pumped storage scheme to provide enough backup for the wind and solar stations that you would need to power the country....and even then you need to find sufficient area to build all the wind and solar stations you need and since there is not much solar in the UK that was a huge area (IIRC equal to Wales).
Wind and solar can certainly be improved and should be an important part of energy generation but if we really want to go carbon neutral then the only current technology which will let us do that is nuclear which comes with its own, but different risks.
Ooh. Look, a 6 digit user number whining about stuff that pre-existed his arrival on Slashdot. Reminds me of the move-in NIMBYs near a Air Force base who whine about the noise. When you grow up, maybe you will research that time when Slashdot was still a one-man show (Hi, CT!). I've never registered as user because I still don't need another username and password to remember. But that is not related to the moron at hand (the OP AC).
The OP - the AC that CAOgdin so happily castigates - is almost right. They should have said "Greenpeace" instead of "environmentalists." Environmentalists are the ones who make the environment around us better - figuring out how to automate cleaning up from an oil spill, designing redundant systems to prevent the oil spill in first place, creating wildlife preserves by rebuilding wetlands devastated by over-development, protecting the watersheds through careful planning of 2nd and 3rd growth tree harvesting, mitigating the impact of roads and houses, planting trees and building habitats where none existed - instead of just hanging from a bridge to protest a drill-rig and shitting/peeing directly into the Willamette River because they want to make a "point" about oil drilling. Basically, an environmentalist is the exact opposite of the LA planning commission or just about any city in California south of Redding. But human stupidity is such a powerful force.
Back in the early years of Greenpeace, the environmentalists that saw pro-nuclear power as a pollution solution were kicked out of the organization because the uneducated masses of that organization could not understand how nuclear power was different than a nuclear bomb. A nuclear bomb is incredibly hard to build, because the conditions have to be just right for it to go "boom." A nuclear power facility is incredibly hard to make go "boom" without direct human intervention, corruption, or bean-counterism (TMI, Chernobyl, Fukashima (sp?) respectively). Also, those coal fired power plants release far more tonnage of radioactive particles per year into the environment than have been ever released by every nuclear power plant accident ever.
If Greenpeace had stuck with nuclear disarmament and actually improving the environmental laws in a way that made them work, instead of supporting NIMBYism and BuNAE (Build Nothing Anywhere Ever) ideals or creating terrorist organizations like the Sea Shepherds (that's a different rant all together):
- Nuclear power would be common place and installed reactor designs would be much safer due to oversight caused by Greenpeace instead of being protested by Greenpeace.
- The "half-life" joke would be even funnier, because everyone would understand it. Yes, short-half life materials are much deadlier radioactive agents on average than long half-life materials.
- Solar, Wind, and likely Hydroelectric Power would be 30+ years farther advanced than it is now, because had Greenpeace gone after the smoke-stack powerplants - the ones actually causing most of the pollution - alternative energy would have exploded on the market.
- China would be shutting down a coal fired power plant every month instead of bringing a new one on-line every 10 days.
- Electric cars would probably DOMINATE the roads, with only a few "weird" people insisting on using fossil fuels, simply because battery technology would had made more sense.
- The Exxon Valdez probably would not have happened. Heck, the oil field up in Alaska would probably be under developed.
- Unfortunately, Chernobyl, TMI, and Fukashima probably would still have happened - only because human stupidity is a great source of reliable accidents.
Now, strangely:
The areas around most nuclear power plants have turned into unofficial nature preserves.
The areas inside most US military bases have more (counted individuals) endangered species wildlife than the areas surrounding them.
The area around Chernobyl is healing faster than believed. There's still areas that are ridiculously "hot", but most of the surface is less rad
We'd be out of uranium in your scenario.
Thanks for the pointer to Dusty Plasma Reactors: never heard of the concept. At first blush, I don't think it can be made into a practical large scale energy generation source, but that's a mostly-uninformed opinion, I'll admit.
All of the aneutronic fusion reactions you point out have a difficulty. Perhaps surmountable, but a serious one.
It's this: someone's proven that:
1) for any plasma below a certain size (not optically dense), if the plasma contains species with atomic numbers > 1 (i.e., helium on up),
2) and if the plasma is in thermal equilibrium, it will cool faster by Bremsstrahlung than it is heated by fusions.
What this means is that unless you have a really big plasma, if it's got anything higher in atomic number than hydrogen in it, it can't have a self sustaining reaction if it's an equilibrium thermal plasma, because it radiatively cools itself (photons escape carrying energy) faster than it heats itself via fusion reactions.
OK, so how about a NON-equilibrium plasma (like two counter- or co-propagating beams)? You ever heard "nature abhors a vacuum"? Well, nature ALSO abhors a nonequilibrium/nonthermal particle distribution. There are powerful instabilities that like to thermalize such distributions really quick. Maintaining a nonequilibrium plasma is likely to take a lot of energy--maybe more than you can get from the fusions. Just look at how hard people at LHC have to work to keep their beam nice and clean.
All that said, it'd be awesome if someone conquers the difficulties and makes either sort of direct conversion nuclear practical. I even support using tax funds to research toward those goals. But I see them as long shots and in the meantime, the market is going to vote with its dollars and go with what works today and is cheap!
--PeterM
Military propulsion at sea is a great use of nuclear power, and in addition to the navy starting to use biofuels, it may use its reactors to synthesize jet fuel.
We have a huge ongoing research program in nuclear energy, including participation in ITER. Lots of money for fission too even though uranium won't last.
Turn off the fucking sun as we don't need the nuclear lighting anymore. Solar and wind is good enough for everyione
I support breeder reactors, but it should be pointed out that (as long as high-tech society does not collapse in the mean time) there are other ways of jump-starting production of isotopes like Plutonium-239 and Uranium-233.
All that is really required is a large neutron source; a deuterium fusion reactor (even one that can't produce net electrical power) or a very efficient particle accelerator could do the job easily enough. Once enough feedstock is acquired for a single fission reactor run, cheaply breeding more becomes possible again.
It would be a shame to waste all the Uranium-235, but it's not like it would be impossible to recover from that mistake.
That would be a nice state if it existed, but it does not exist.
Nuclear reactors have two states after they've been brought into operation, "on" when generating power, and "hot" when down for planned maintenance and not generating power. The reactor is not just mildly radioactive when powered down, but massively so, and utterly deadly in close proximity or if it makes contact with the outside environment.
The powered down reactor is so extremely radioactive that it takes some 50 years for a complete plan of safe decommissioning to run its course, and that costs a huge amount of money. During all that time it's an extreme risk to workers, wildlife, the water table, and to populations both near and distant. And it had better not lose its cooling.
I don't know how fans of nuclear can say with a straight face that nuclear is safe because it can be turned "off". Unfortunately the radiation in nuclear reactors does not reside in removeable fuel rods alone, and it refuses to obey your PR.
Nuclear Power, in current form, is an expensive and potentially dangerous hot water heater. ( Hahaha the nuke folks hated it when we called their toy a hot water heater :) )
Go with Solar, Hydro, GeoThermal or Wind instead. If a turbine blows apart it doesn't render the immediate area uninhabitable for the next 500 years.
The tech is safe enough, just not the people and / or policies running them. One f*ck up or short sighted vision and we end up with another Chernobyl or Fukishima.
After being very anti-nuclear in my youth, I've moved rather in response to global climate change.
I think that nuclear power (and waste disposal) can be done safely and with much lower environmental impact than burning fossil fuels.
However 'can be done' is not the same as 'will be done'. The knowledge and technology to avoid Fukushima was there, but wasn't used. The sea wall could and should have been higher (another power station up the coast survived because their safety engineer fought upper management to build a higher wall.) The backup generators could and should have been above the flood level. Provision could and should have been made to safely vent hydrogen, which would have greatly reduced the impact of the accident. Avoiding very rare high impact events is hard, because there is always the temptation to do less because what you've been doing seems to have been working fine so far. There are many cases of airlines which cut back on maintenance and it seemed to be working fine until the crash happened.
Also 'can be done' is not the same as 'can be done economically'. Nuclear power seems to have a big problem here, but I don't know enough to judge how much is real economics and how much is politics.
I think the way of the future will be intermittent renewable sources (wind, solar, perhaps tides) combined with large scale power storage. It is not clear whether this will happen soon enough that we don't need nuclear to bridge the gap.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Nuclear gets a lot of subsidies. Loan guarantees are needed to build plants. Rate payers have to pay for the construction in advance as well, a strange double dipping. The liability insurance is carried by the government, and during the recession, an accident at Indian Point would have caused a default for the federal government. Nuclear is also getting a free ride on waste disposal. And, our largest energy research effort is devoted to nuclear power. Seems like kind of a mature technology to be so decrepit that it can't walk without the government holding it up.
A long time ago my castle in minecraft was run on coal from huge mines that destroyed the landscape around me.
Now everything runs on nuclear power, the power plant takes up a lot less space and uranium is usally found way below sealevel which lets us run much smaller mining operations. Our plant is also equipped with a safety switch and reinforcements to protect the surrounding area in case something would go wrong but this is highly unlikely with both computer and mechanical switches.
I support nuclear.
If you believe in cleaner energy, then nuclear is the only energy that is carbon neutral with the output to rival gas and coal. Despite almost 50 years of fearmongering by the environmental Left, China and France have developed very advanced reactors that are meltdown-proof and produce zero waste. The only reason it is as expensive as it is, is because of the enormous initial outlay in capital required and an overly-complex regulatory review. As for waste disposal...maybe the Democrats shouldn't have made it a priority to shut down Yucca mountain after billions spent on it. Jus' sayin'.
Risk = probability x severity, not just the latter. Do some reading.
Nuclear energy has the highest energy density of all currently known electricity production methods (produces the most electricity per square meter). This means it is highly efficient It also does not produce any carbon emissions. While solar and wind are nice renewables in theory, their lack of efficiency in their current state makes them unable to supply the power demands of customers. Until other clean energy methods are found, nuclear energy is probably the best hope.
Both are complex technologies which need a detailed regime of control for safe operation. We fly knowing that about once a year we lose a plane load of people, 200-300 at a time, at least once somewhere in the world. Aviation has been around long enough that we know the chance of our next flight being this year's fatal one will be vanishingly small. Nuclear power should be subject to the same calculus, but with one 'crash' of 51 dead in its entire history.
The difference between the two is pure politics. If you insist on our eliminating carbon, you're going to have to accept changing our baseload over from fossil to nuclear.
Safe, clean, reliable, cheap to operate, and, if regulators would f off and settle on a couple of standard designs and refuse to allow interest groups to intervene, they would not be that difficult or costly to construct.
Or have car or house payments. I see you're like everyone that lives around me... That is, you have a trust fund, or daddy's money. I'm ready for my solar panel, so I can assume your check is already in the mail to me? I'm sure your yacht won't miss it.
I support nuclear 100% and by the way, the more anti nuclear propaganda I see from shills like mdsolar the more I support nuclear.
You can't handle the truth.
... I'm starting to like this mdsolar dude. While we defend from the stupid trolls saying "unclear" is safe, he just goes for their throats.
Solves the issue and saves time. Great guy!
I've had the opportunity to work as a cyber security assessor for a nuclear power plant that is part of a fleet. I have never seen such a concentration of deliberate, careful, and conservative people across so many skill sets. There are plenty of times where they fall into the "too smart for their own good" category, but they know EXACTLY forces they are dealing with every-single-day. I haven't met a single "Homer Simpson." I even had the opportunity to meet some of the engineers from Fukushima Daini (Daichi's neighbor 5 miles south) to hear first-hand accounts of their harrowing story and their lessons learned form the 2011 Tsunami. If they are flying these guys around the US to discuss lessons learned, they are taking their work seriously in a way few others can really appreciate.
That doesn't mean that the don't have their own problems. The industry is extremely insular. It's a mix of both intentional reasons and unintentional consequences. These power plants are pretty far out of the way from major population centers and they can be easily mistaken for other power plant types if you don't know what to look for. There are ONLY 68 running Nuclear Energy Sites in the country and, because of 9/11, they have surveillance and buffer zones that make it hard for casual onlookers to even get close. Essentially, they become out-of-site/out-of mind. Case in point: NONE of my New Orleans neighbors realize there is a nuclear power plant less than 10 miles away! (Waterford 3 is not the one I've worked at).
The next problem is the US's abysmal investment in infrastructure in the last 40 years. The last site's construction finished in 1990 (started 1978) in the US. The new AP1000s just started construction within the last 5 years... and there are only 4 of them! MEANWHILE, Canada, China, the UK, Japan, and the like have been regularly innovating and investing in nuclear power that makes our old system look broken and decrepit.
Finally, the biggest failure on the commercial side of nuclear energy is the whole-stock abandonment of Breeder Reactors. Because the Navy had plenty of water to cool their ship reactors and there were increasingly more availability of uranium, these safer and more efficient reactors never made it to market. But little was done after the 60's to push the tech and it is only now being rediscovered This is tantamount to you driving a brand-new car with only 1970's technology under the hood (no computers, catalytic converters, etc)... you may have a nice shell, but good luck getting the power, fuel economy, or dependability (100k mile warranty anyone?).
Then there is the elephant in the room: FUSION. Lockheed Martin claims that they will have a fusion reactor by 2024. Germany has this freaky-looking stellarator that, by the test conducted in February, will be able to sustain the 100 MILLION Degrees Celsius heat needed for fusion to occur with its next upgrade. China apparently did something with something to ensure people knew they were in the race.
The bottom line is that renewable energy will not whole-stock replace our needs for a consumable fuel given any of our current scientific knowledge. It will not replace our needs in space exploration nor in deep water. Nuclear may take a long time to get places, but it is consistent and predictable and transportable in a way that no other energy generation currently can be. We have the most good science on how to make nuclear energy work for us in a way other fuels cannot and we should not leave it on the side-lines because we have limited ourselves to an in-the-moment mentality about how to save ourselves and the world around us.
Mod me down, I shall become more off-topic than you could possibly imagine.
All of the aneutronic fusion reactions you point out have a difficulty...
Interesting. I had heard about that issue for proton-boron, but was not aware that it applies to Helium-3 as well.
All that said, it'd be awesome if someone conquers the difficulties and makes either sort of direct conversion nuclear practical. I even support using tax funds to research toward those goals. But I see them as long shots...
I don't know that I would call direct conversion nuclear power (collectively) a "long shot", but certainly there is little reason to expect cheap net power from any of these schemes in the near term.
I did find the early Pollywell experimental results revealed by Jaeyoung Park's recently rather exciting, though. Of course, even if it gets fully funded and turns out to be fundamentally workable, that's still probably at least 15 years away from a commercial product.
and in the meantime, the market is going to vote with its dollars and go with what works today and is cheap!
Most of major the Generation IV fission designs have been proven workable, and I think some could be cheap enough - if the regulatory and political environment actually allowed them to be built in the West. But instead, we'll probably just keep extending the life of the existing decrepit Generation II installations, with their dubious safety and economic record...
I served in the US Navy Submarine Service and I am very confidant that nuclear reactors can be run in very safely and in very hostile environments. The Navy is currently operating way more reactors than most might believe. There are about 50 on submarines alone, 20 more on the Nimitz class aircraft carriers, many more on cruisers and destroyers. The Navy is also good at shutting them down, both boats I served on (USS John C. Calhoun SSBN 630 and USS Flying Fish SSN 673) were decommissioned in the 90's.
The US should use the Navy S.O.P. on all concerns regarding a nuclear reactor.
The concept is good but building dinosaur 1970s tech and declaring it good is just a drain on whoever puts up the capital. The banks are not that stupid so it's going to be the taxpayer footing the bill.
R&D, pilot plants and actual progress before building plants that are good enough to justify themselves is the way to go. US civilian nuclear technology is decades behind even South Africa (pebble bed) and Australia (Synroc) for fucks sake. Part of that is due to the nuclear lobby eating it's own children by spending a lot of money to lobby AGAINST thorium research in the 1990s - it challenged the sunk costs in Uranium.
I'm a fan of thorium. I know it ain't ready yet. But it could be with additional research.
Where the fuck did that Prester Fucking John they do magic in far away places utter fucking bullshit come from? You should be utterly ashamed of trying to fool the kiddies with that. France had a LOT of hydro, coal and even a fucking 240MW tidal generating plant by 1970.
I agree that "enthusiasts are the real problem here". Anyone arguing an energy monoculture is in my opinion either a sleazy salesman or a deluded fanboy that has been tricked by one. With your obvious lie you are looking a lot like the sleazy salesman - so why are you doing it?
I do not support nuclear power plants being built anywhere and I believe that all existing ones should be closed as soon as it is economically feasible. If you want to pretend that Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island aren't a big deal, please look up Hanford, San Onofre, and all the other times nuclear power has proven itself to be dangerous without making headlines worldwide. Sorry, but the media is not blowing it out of proportion, if anything, they're under-reporting. Chances are there might even be an decrepit time bomb of a facility near you staffed by incompetent people who don't simply give a crap. And no one's talking about it.
Do not interpret this as an endorsement of oil, coal, dams, fracking, natural gas, corn or any other red herring you may want to pull out of your ass. You can be opposed to something without being a shill for a competitor. There's no conspiracy here; nuclear energy is just not safe.
So none of that sweet, sweet taxpayer money for nuclear? Great. How about all the other taxpayer money subsidizing every other source?
Perscriptio in manibus tabellariorum est.
Sadly, the US killed the IFR program just as it was about to be completed.
Quotes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
IFRs use virtually all of the energy content in the uranium fuel whereas a traditional light water reactor uses less than 0.65% of the energy in mined uranium, and less than 5% of the energy in enriched uranium.
In 2001, as part of the Generation IV roadmap, the DOE tasked a 242-person team of scientists from DOE, UC Berkeley, MIT, Stanford, ANL, LLNL, Toshiba, Westinghouse, Duke, EPRI, and other institutions to evaluate 19 of the best reactor designs on 27 different criteria. The IFR ranked #1 in their study which was released April 9, 2002.
Despite support for the reactor by then-Rep. Richard Durbin (D, IL) and U.S. Senators Carol Mosley Braun (D, IL) and Paul Simon (D, IL), funding for the reactor was slashed, and it was ultimately canceled in 1994 by S.Amdt. 2127 to H.R. 4506, at greater cost than finishing it. When this was brought to President Clinton's attention, he said "I know; it's a symbol."
Bill Clinton announces cancelation of nuclear power research and development https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It is safe until the waste has to be stored...
People don't realize the power density of uranium. The weight of a single tree, in uranium, replaces 5,000,000 trees needing to be burned for fuel. Coal and the rest aren't much better.
Nuclear power, it just generates heat, which is used to make steam, which powers turbines.
Don't be against nuclear power, be against unsafe nuclear power, as in, don't allow shortcuts that compromise safety, and need better redundancy for emergency shutdowns.
Hello from France.
Yes, were stll here, and yes, you happen to be wrong.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Don't be dim, how do you think large scale generation is financed?
If you want to do it on small scale, in most major currencies interest is historically low.
Or with a bunch of like minded you could form a coop, etc.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
While our gigantic nuclear furnace of a neighbor may be the ultimate solution (before it destroys us), at least one of two following criteria must be met: Either a large enough network for power distribution that compensates for the lack of optimal sunlight (Here's looking at you, Michigan), or far superior storage. If you're shooting for the storage angle, those regions with less than optimal generation would have to overcome even more of a barrier to entry due to needing far more.
So if we can somehow transmit power with minimal losses on a more global scale, sure, solar looks great for everyone. If we can store it an order of magnitude more efficiently, it looks great for most. If you live in a cave, well, you're just screwed.
"In medicin they usually talk about a "50% death dose", which means: the amount of "poison" you have to give per kg weight of the subject to each subject that 50% of the subjects die."
Many people will know of this as LD50.
But you can still have a self sustaining reactor which captures those photons, uses some to reheat the plasma and outputs the rest as energy.
Cheap to the investor, not necessarily cheap to humanity as a whole. Unaccounted externalities are slowly but surely making capitalism itself a problem.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I don't support the dirty fission reactors, but I support solar energy (which comes from the Sun, a fusion "device") and R&D on direct Fusion power plants.
The only working type of nuclear power we have is fission, and that's a mess. In more ways than one. It's only doable with heavy subvention by taxpayers, completely ignoring the waste problem and not factoring in real insurance policies for disasters. On top of that it turns out reactors aren't running nearly as long and cheap and frictionless as people have dreamed back in the 60ies and 70ies. All that turns fission into an expensive and dangerous 70ies techno-romantic pipe-dream.
There's a reason Germany is moving away from it - and we've got some of the best reactor-tech on the planet.
I do support research for nuclear power like jet and iter and perhaps that travelling wave stuff Bill Getes is investing in, but fission as we have it today needs to be decommissioned. Now and globally. The numbers just don't add up. That's a simple hard fact.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Todays nuclear-plants are less than 1% efficient, leaving more than 99% of the fuel unused.
New reactors that we could build are more than 99% efficient and leave less than 1% of the fuel unused. And we could feed those reactors with the spent fuel-rods we have to store producing power from the nuclear waste we otherwise would have to store for a really long time.
There is "4,000 megatonnes (8,800Ã--109 lb) of uranium contained in sea water." We are not going to run out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
One solution is traveling wave reactors like Terrapower back by Bill Gates
From their site: Conventional reactors capture only about 1 percent of the energy potential of their fuel. The traveling wave reactor (TWR) represents a new class of nuclear reactor. It is a near-term deployable, truly sustainable, globally scalable energy solution. Unlike the existing fleet of nuclear reactors, the TWR burns fuel made from depleted uranium. This substance is currently a waste byproduct of the enrichment process. The TWR’s unique design gradually converts this material through a nuclear reaction without removing the fuel from the reactor’s core. The TWR can sustain this process indefinitely, generating heat and producing electricity.
- evacuation and loss of all your property (chance 100%)
No, not even slightly. TMI for example was a very well designed plant in that it was designed with the idea it might melt down and so the meltdown path was made to mitigate anything really bad. It did melt down and the mitigation worked exactly as planned. There's no contamination outside the plant.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Anonymous Coward indeed. You think ENVIRONMENTALISTS are the problem. Where do you get YOUR air to breathe; YOUR water to drink. Environmentalists care that ALL of us have adequate resources for a happy, peaceful, long, healthy life.
Frankly, I wish /. would abandon the "Anonymous Coward" option; all it does is invite inane, thoughtless comments like yours.
If those "ENVIRONMENTALISTS" had not of poisoned the nuclear power well then we could very well be much more advanced in nuclear reactor design and having a module in history regarding those barbaric ancestors who were burning coal and oil to generate power while completely poisoning the environment. Instead we are stuck in our current "we need more power then we can afford to produce with solar, hydro and geothermal so we are still burning coal and oil" while, despite being the bogey man, reactor design is generations ahead of what we are using...
Uranium reactors won for the wrong reasons.
... http://www.scientificamerican....
that one actually describes the issues...
And with nuclear-plants it because of people like you that we are stuck with decade old nuclear-plants instead of newer plants that would increase safety and reduce the amount of waste.
even if only to annoy mdsolar.
It is a national embarrassment that Oak Ridge National Laboratory would publicize such piffle. You've been had.
Most dams are for flood control, they keep property from being destroyed. Hydro-electric is an add-on for these. Fish ladders have helped in reviving salmon runs, but reservoirs also boost habitat for others species, so it is a mix.
> But you can still have a self sustaining reactor which captures those photons, uses some to reheat the plasma and outputs the rest as energy.
No. At the high temperatures required for fusion, the Bremsstrahlung photon spectrum is going to be high energy, think X-rays and gamma rays. You can't "catch" those in any efficient way. You need to use a lot of mass, which is probably going to be near room temperature and then thermally convert their energy back into something you can feed back into heating the plasma--via a steam cycle. So you get 75% of the energy is lost to the plasma when it radiates energy as photons.
The upshot is that an "optically sparse" aneutronic fusion plasma isn't really self-sustaining--it requires massive energy input to stay hot. Note that this is for the aneutronic reactions, not for D-T.
If the plasma is big and dense enough to do its own shielding, as in a star, the Bremsstrahlung isn't much of a net loss, but the remarkable penetrating power of X-rays and gamma rays would rapidly cool any conceivable thermal aneutronic fusion plasma that we could make on our planet with a reasonable investment.
> Cheap to the investor, not necessarily cheap to humanity as a whole. Unaccounted externalities are slowly but surely making capitalism itself a problem.
I mentioned externalities two posts up in the thread. CO2 is a problem for natural gas fired plants, much less so for solar/wind. It's not clear what the real cost of frakking to get your gas is. And the DOE report I cited included the cost of carbon capture in coal plants. They still come out at about the same expense as they think fission/fusion is going to be, and solar/wind come out cheaper--with CO2 externality cost included.
Again, I'm in favor of fission/fusion research, however, someone is really going to have to pull a rabbit out of a hat to beat solar/wind/natural gas economically.
As for externalities making capitalism itself a problem, that's only an issue if Government fails in it's necessary role of regulation of markets. If the full cost of CO2 emission were regulated to be included in the price of using fossil fuels, regulated capitalism would work nicely to account for the externalities. However, capitalist-religionists are incapable of realizing that market failures like externalities exist and refuse to admit that Government has a role in fixing the market failures that are inevitable in unfettered capitalism.
--PM
I support nuclear under two conditions. It must be cheaper than wind/solar/wave/hydro (where possible), and it must be run under competent, responsible governance with long term financial planning. The first might be possible, but the second one never will be.
Nuclear is cool, but unfortunately the cost is too high and the human element is too stupid. That doesn't mean we should stop researching fission or fusion though.
Things look grim for US nuclear power: http://spectrum.ieee.org/energ...
First off, we have 100,000 tonnes of 'nuclear waste', JUST IN AMERICA. Worse, it will be dangerous for 20,000+ years. However, if we use it in new gen IV reactors, we can burn it up, and have less than 5% (i.e. 5,000 tonnes), which is dangerous for less than 200 years. IOW, with digging for any more uranium, we can convert what we have to electricity, and then bury a small amount.
Likewise, if we do NOT do nuclear, then it is almost a certainty that we will use more nat gas to replace the current reactors that will be closed.
The gen IV reactors can only fail by physical laws failing. IOW, they can not. That is exactly the type of reactor that we need.
these are meant to be small (150 MW, instead of large 1GW) and produced in a factory rather than built on-site. By building in a factory, it means that these have the same process and group building them and are easily checked for flaws. That is huge.
Sadly, many ignore science and continue to push their fears on others rather than using a logical mind on this.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It's a stepping stone. The next step is Fusion. But some dumb ass cannot figure out that the source of H3 is on the surface of the moon. I guess we all had better start growing bigger Thyroid glands.
In the same way our generation is facing a carbon legacy from previous generations, future generations will face a radioistope legacy that they will be forced to solve. Consider these facts:
Right now peer reviewed science shows us that the current Nuclear power industry does not provide a Net Energy return simply because of the energetic inputs from mining and the energetic inputs to decommission the reactor. Peer reviewed science surrounding the net energy return of the entire Nuclear industry when viewed from a systemic level is well known and discussed. When examined as a whole more energy goes into the Nuclear Industry than what can safely come out.
Addressing the issue of 70,000 tons of Pu-239 currently stored in reactor sites around America and indeed the world is imperative, simply because it's irresponsible for our generation to foist this issue onto later generations.
There is no geologically sound Nuclear waste dump in operation so it's totally inappropriate to discuss building a new reactor facility until a proper containment facility is available. Even doing that, just the infrastructure project to simply move the spent fuel to a storage facility will probably take 30 years to complete as it is an enormous undertaking. Yucca mountain is not a suitable site because it is made of pumice and geologically active evidenced by recent aftershocks of 5.6 within ten miles of a repository that is supposed to be geologically stable for at least 500000 years. The DOE's own 1982 Nuclear Waste policy Act reported that the Yucca Mountain's geology is inappropriate to contain nuclear waste, and long term corrosion data on C22 (the material to contain the Pu-239 and mitigate the ingress of water - yet another Yucca problem) is just not available. There is some promising work in storing spent nuclear fuels in crystaline strctures that don't leech into water tables but not that works on an industrial scale yet.
Third and fourth generation reactors are a pipe dream because our material science is not advanced enough yet to produce a reactor design that will be in service for thousands of years to avoid using up most of the energetic yeild of the reactor on reactor disposal. I was a big fan of the Integral Fast Reactor, because it burned weapons grade plutonium and DU and we desperately need to stop DU being used as a munition. Maybe one day we will be able to build reactors properly and have appropriate social and management systems that prevent the kind of accidents we have seen but that day is not here yet.
Nuclear power is energy intensive *after* the energy has been produced simply because our technology - especially material sciences - are not adequate to produce a Nuclear reactor that has a life span that matches the geological time frames of the fuel. This exposes to all the issues associated with de-commissioning reactor sites every 4 decades or so. If you look at it realistically the only way forward for the nuclear industry is a well thought out project to redesign the entire industry as a long term solution, a much better legacy for future generations than a long term problem that will last a minimum of 25,000 years for the first half life pu-239 to decay. The would require a re-engineering of the entire economy to achieve a safe nuclear industry that had a safety culture that is embedded and cost hundreds of billions of dollars. That not going to happen because the nuclear industry has demonstrated they can't blame themselves for problems and consistently fail to improve. It's more realistic to beleive that accellerators will be built on the sites and most of the spent fuel destroyed before any breeder or burner reactors are ever constructed.
I support reactor research but not commercial nuclear power. I don't hide the fact that I don't like the constant failure of the Nuclear Industry because their failure
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
If we want to become interplanetary or interstellar, we're going to have to come to peace with nuclear power. Without using it, we won't truly tame it and will lose spaceships instead. On one hand, that's good. Expendable, NIMBY, etc. On the other hand we shut down exploration after setbacks, and figuring out what went wrong from back here on earth will be really hard.
So yes, I support it. I did before that, actually, but realistically we need it if we're going to get off this rock. Let's get good at it.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
I would be all for nuclear power if there was some kind of plan for cleaning up the waste. The people who support nuclear power always claim it is the cheapest power available but nobody includes the calculation for cleaning up the waste because there ISN'T a way to cleanup the waste. At least not right now. Putting the waste in barrels and leaving it inside decommissioned power plants is not a plan.
A for profit has one motive and that's profit at any cost. If they think they can make a profit by cutting safety to the bone regardless of meltdown risk they will. There are meltdown proof designs yet we can't get them built to replace our current time bombs and worse what did get approved recently was an old design.
I'm also against calling it nuclear power. It's just another form of geothermal power. Wake me when we turn nuclear interactions directly into usable power not steam.
Nuclear energy is infinitely less dangerous or destructive when compared to burning coal.
Please note that I did not say that it is harmless.
I simple point out that coal is infinitely more harmful.
I think it is roughly a tie with hydroelectric plants in terms of risk and destruction.
A very dangerous way to boil water.
If solar and wind (and storage capacity) were subsidized at the rate nuclear is subsidized, nobody would be interested in building nuclear plants. Better to just remove all subsidies, including the incredible subsidy represented by freedom from liability. Why does a wind-farm operator have to carry liability insurance, while a nuclear plant does not? It makes no sense.
My support for a properly-implemented nuclear power plan never depended on my budget so yes, I still strongly support it.
I will support nuclear power as soon as it becomes too cheap to meter. Not a day sooner!
We are not talking about such scenarios.
We are talking about scenarios where the outside is contaminated, obviously.
So what is your point?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
No it is not.
That is how an insurance company may define it.
But perhaps the "full definition" convinces you: http://www.merriam-webster.com...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
France is a pretty darned good model of how to nuclear power correctly. Thank you for adding to the conversation!
dreaded scurrilous bit-twiddler from Oklahoma
The cost of burying Nuclear power in regulation is estimated at about $40T - how many lives did that cost us?
$40T works out to about $160k per every person in the USA...
How many died in the mideast - in terror attacks etc because of this irrational fear? How much has the security problems cost us? How much freedom has it cost us ( government monitoring )?
What is the cost in 'LIVES per KWH' of the alternatives??
Which form of energy has the lowest cost in 'LIVES per KWH'?
Which form has the most democratic risk (not just poor workers )?
The title question is implicitly in support of nuclear energy and it is strange that it tops the Slashdot forums now it has been sold to another entity. I don't like it and I don't trust it. Go fuck yourself Slashdot i am closing my account.
All are as avoidable as radioactivity. The dose of each is what matters, and to a lesser degree, your response to it.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
As nuclear power is the second cheapest and least environmentally impacting way to generate large load electricity; I'm quite in favor of more nuclear power plants.
But, the DOE has to be held accountable to their legal mandate. The Atomic Energy Act of 1972 forbids commercial entities from recycling used nuclear fuel. The DOE was mandated to take custody of spent fuel from commercial power plants by fiscal year 1998. The money to cover the recycling was paid by the power plants in an escrow fund so it isn't tax dollars being spent to recycle commercial fuel. To date; the DOE has not taken custody of one stick of spent fuel. It is criminal to not recycle spent nuclear fuel assemblies.
Fukushima - build a reactor on a coast as tsunami bait. Lie about risk and problems. Chernobyl - build a reactor and then do dumb stuff and have a meltdown. We will always do dumb stuff. It's just a matter of time until the next disaster leaves another area of the planet uninhabit able for millennia. We still have no idea how to store these martials safely for a period of time that is a multiple of all recorded history. Donald Trump. The GOP. There is just to much stupid around for this technology to ever be safe. It's just not necessary.
Only boring people are ever bored.
Atomic Energy Act of 1972 - no civilian breeder reactors, no reprocessing of fuels by civilians. Only the DOE to reprocess.
All light water reactors are breeder reactors as they convert U-238 to Pu-239; they just don't yield huge amounts of bomb grade Plutonium that the designed as a "breeder reactor". A fuel bundle becomes unusable due to build up of by products and not from having all the fissile material burned. What so much of the world does is remove the by-products and re-use the U-235/Pu-239 left to make a new fuel assembly (MOX Fuel - Mixed Oxide Fuel).
I agree with Stuart Brand on this one: "I am not so much pro-nuclear as I am pro-arithmetic."
Those who reject both coal and nuclear, insisting that industrial/technological civilization can be powered by "sunny days when the wind is blowing" energy, are engaging in arithmetic denialism.
Pick one: (1) coal and other fossil fuels. (2) Nuclear. (3) Cataclysmic crash of our technological civilization. There is no (4), no matter how much the arithmetic deniers whine and assert and hand-wave.
Because we aren't ready for the next Chicxulib crater event... or even the loss of the moon....
Nuclear is the only real alternative, unless natural gas and coal can find a way to capture carbon and start making it into methanol as proposed by George Olah. As a geologist I have some concerns about nuclear waste but I believe that technology can solve that problem. After all the only reason this planet is not a large ball of ice is that the planet is powered and heated by nuclear energy from radioactive decay inside the planet. We would not be here without nuclear decay and the energy it generates. Never mind that solar energy is just a form of nuclear radiation, and wind is the product of solar energy and the planets orbital rotation and its variants. .
I strongly support nuclear power. It is much better for the environment than fossil fuels, and is closer in regularity to them than solar or wind, both of which can be unpredictable.
If we start ignoring all of our constitutional rights because of terrorism, then what are we fighting for at that point?
No. Where Did Natural Background Radiation Come From? The sum of the natural background radiation at Fukushima plus the radiation leak from the reactor is less than the natural background radiation where I live in Illinois. There was no reason for Japan to shut down their reactors. If the reactors at Fukushima had not been shut down, would they have continued to operate normally? Where did natural background radiation come from? The universe started out with only 3 elements: hydrogen, helium and lithium. All other elements were made in stars or by supernova explosions. Our star is a seventh generation star. The previous 6 generations were necessary for the elements heavier than lithium to be built up. Since heavier elements were built by radiation processes, they were very radioactive when first made. Our planet was made of the debris of a supernova explosion that happened about 5 billion years ago. The Earth has been decreasing in radioactivity ever since. All elements heavier than iron were necessarily made by accretion of mostly neutrons but sometimes protons onto lighter nuclei. Radioactive decays were necessary to bring these new nuclei into the realm of nuclear stability. That is why all rocks are still radioactive. Radiation also comes from outer space in the form of cosmic rays. Cosmic rays come from supernovas that are very far away. There will always be cosmic rays.
Current technology can only make Fission nuclear reactions as safe as is possible today - under perfect conditions. When something goes wrong, all bets are off. The passage of time, the thousands of years we need to keep the reactors safe - makes it Trumpingly short sighted to build any more. We have all the power we need already. The developing world is catching on to the fact that one even cloudy day's sunshine can keep us all going for a year - and - now solar is less expensive than any other fuel source so that's what they are going for. Both wind and voltaic are now such a good deal that soon even a Trumper will catch on too. Fusion - now, that's another matter. That would be great for places far from the Sun, deep space for example. We don't need it on Earth, but I'm happy for research to turn all our waste in to something fusionable.
Nuclear power does not worry me. I am however very concerned with America's tendency to put their faith in the uninformed. The anti-nuclear following have been fear mongering for over 40 years. Do they standing up to take any credit for global warming? I haven't seen it.
As I understand it, thorium powered reactors are inherently safe and cannot meltdown nor are the waste products as nasty as that of uranium or plutonium reactors. India is building one right now. Why is it we in North America do not have such technology..it is because when nuclear reactors were first built, the US wanted that old plutonium to build bombs...huh huh...now plutonium is a problem and needs to be recycled and used up in modified forms of fuel rods. Thorium os cheap and plentiful. It ought to be done...
In junior high, in the early 70's, there was a license granted to build a nuke plant about 20 miles from us. In school, before class we were talking about "oh no! It could "blow up" like the A-bombs that ended WW2". Our science teacher (then, we thought he was just a kooky old guy, in my 30's I realized how SMART he was). came in, heard us yapping about a nuke plant blowing up, and he canceled what he had planned, and spent the entire class explaining what a nuke plant was, how it was built, the safeguards to keep it from melting, or releasing steam with radiation, as opposed to "blowing up" like an a-bomb. By the time class was over, I don't think any of the 25 students in this class were against nuke energy, because it was nothing more than a closed loop steam generator to drive turbines. Yes, the Russian plant blew up, but they used a different method to keep it from going critical. Yes Three Mile Island, even with man screwing it up, didn't "blow up", and most of the radiation was contained. Yes, the one in Japan is a mess, but, because the morons put the thing right on the coast, with the backup generator in the wrong place and it flooded out. MORE people are injured, killed in the back of the late Senator Ted Kennedy's automobile, than the U.S. nuclear plants.
You cannot have a meaningful discussion, in risk analysis terms, for any practical purposes in the frame from which it was brought forth, without including probability. You CAN find definitions of risk that include probability. You clearly don't get the former, and intentionally ignored the latter.
Do I support nuclear energy production. Why, yes. Yes I do. But not the way the military industrial complex has allowed. Thorium reactors appear manageable. Sure, they could upset the foundations of current energy monopolies and decentralize political power, but what are the downsides?
Use of natural uranium: Since CANDU uses heavy water as moderator and also as coolant, it has the luxury of maintaining a very high neutron economy. This means that the subsequent neutrons resulting from fission are used more effectively and there are fewer losses (compared to light water moderated reactors). This allows the use of natural uranium as fuel and saves the cost of enrichment.
It's only about a factor of 4 times more expensive to extract uranium from seawater, and fuel cost is not the dominant cost in running a nuclear power plant (construction is).
And last gen pressurized water reactors are not it. LFTR. Simple to say, easy to build and the correct answer according to the father of nuclear power. Safer by orders of magnitude than Uranium based reactors and requiring far less to build and maaintain, it's also able to burn up a lot of the radiocative 'waste' from the old model reactors. Runs hotter at normal sea level pressures and is walk-away safe.. these things could start being built inside of a few years. There has already been one that ran safe for thousands of hours.. the only thing that would need to be done to start using them is developing a commercial variant from the test reactors. years and we could start retiring coal plants across the world.
As a bonus they could be far more useful in manufacturing, smelting, desalinization as well as artificial fuel creation from carbon 'waste' to make a regenerative cycle liquid fuel that is a drop in replacement for our current gas and diesel fuels. It is the correct answer to the question 'how do we reduce carbon emissions and provide enough power for a 21st century world?'
If I sound stupid, it's not me talking....
https://science.slashdot.org/c...
Turns out he's innumerate. http://100.org/
As long as Thorium based nuclear power is used I have no problem with it. Current nuclear generating systems are unstable and have a major problem with waste disposal. See the following information.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power
Pros & Cons are all around. High risk High return still be valid. Still believe that Human can control and manage it.
Many current nukes are in need of replacement in the near term. Gen III+ nuclear is acceptable. PRISM should be deployed to make use of the current spent fuel stockpiles thereby rendering such "wastes" a non-issue. I fully support the push towards Gen IV deployment within a decade. Regulators need to get their asses in gear especially the US NRC. Also current spot market pricing arrangements put electrical utilities in a bind as they can't justify long-term investments in nuclear.
Yes. That's like asking if we support hydroelectric or natural gas or solar or anything else. They are all workable technologies; some more appropriate than others, based upon the scenarios. Can you actually imagine someone responding that we should stop using nuclear (or coal) tomorrow? Delusional.
Well then it's a pointless comment.
"In the case where your stuff gets contaminated then you have a 100% chance of contamination".
Well, yes, I'll hardly disagree with that. Nonetheless that wasn't clear from your post. Like I said, you can have a plant undergo full meltdown without doing such things.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I support nuclear energy when they have the proper protocols in place, and let's face it, there are plenty of safety mesures to make sure nothing goes wrong. Yes there can be the OCCASIONAL fluke. But with as many safety measures that are in place it happens so infrequntly and usually it's caused my an earthquake or something else completely out of our control. We can't hide in the corner and cry at that. It worth the tiny risk. One of my grandfather's was a rocket scientist, physics professor and nuclear physicist. The other one was also a nuclear physicist. Science runs in my family and we often talked about the pros and cons, the dangers and safties of nuclear energy, and truly, it's far more safe that most people give it credit for. Also people need to learn the difference in the science and concepts between nuclear missiles and nuclear energy
If we can make energy cheaper by an order of magnitude compared to how it is today, that opens the door for some great things.
And the comments below this article provide some insightful ideas about exactly that scenario.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Full disclosure - I work for a nuclear power plant, and because it pays me so fucking well - I support it 100%.
I can spend an entire day inside the secondary containment of one of our reactors and get a fraction of the radiation than I would get from an annual dental x-ray. Not worried about it one bit.
For starters - Chernobyl - shitty reactor design run by morons, TMI - good reactor design - but run by morons, Fukushima - good reactor design located in a high seismic zone by morons. You will never see a Fukushima event here in the US. Even if it did happen - we've blown millions upon millions of dollars hardening our plants to ensure that if Fukushima did happen here - the plants would be kept cool and contained. Again - not worried about it one bit.
Safety - probably one of the safest places you can be is at a nuclear power station. The background / in-processing that we go through are on par with sensitive federal gov't employment. Everyone knows their place and the safety rules would send most people running for the exit doors. That's why we're a small, well-paid community. Christ - I can't even go into a control room without a "what the fuck are you doing in here" look from the reactor operators until they realize I'm there to fix a problem they're having - and for good reason. If you don't have a reason for being somewhere, then don't go there. That's the culture - and it's a place that will chew you up and spit you out if you don't have the right mentality for the job.
Security - heavily armed and they're everywhere... eventually you get used to turning a corner and nearly running smack into someone with AR-15 in their hands. Plenty of physical barriers. Getting inside a nuclear power plant - whether getting through the background process and getting a level of physical security access that not every employee gets - or illegally is very very difficult. Try jumping the fence (that is if you aren't cut to shreds by the razor wire coils first), and you'll be shot dead.
Fuel storage - after the spent fuel has cooled for several years, they're placed in secure dry storage - the bad guys aren't getting anywhere near it, and without the right tools/machinery, they're not opening the casks either. This isn't some smash-and-grab opportunity for terrorists to get their hands on some spent fuel to wreak havoc with. And even if they did - they would be dead in a matter of hours from the radiation anyway.
Ask anyone who's worked at a nuke plant and they'll echo the same. Mistakes - no matter how minor - are communicated to all of us every morning. People who are fuck-ups are shown the door fairly quickly. There's no tolerance for it.
Nuke plants that are profitable will have a lifespan of 60-80 years before decommissioning. Get used to it. Low natural gas prices are putting a lot of financial pressure on the nuke plants - but once you have major disruptions in supply / distribution, all of a sudden the per megawatt cost of nuclear generation will once again be a bargain. Conversely, the pressure for carbon-free generation is putting pressure on the coal plants (which are nearly extinct - at least in my part of the country), what few oil plants are left are used for peak load demand, hydro only works in a few places (like Niagara Falls and the St. Lawrence River), and solar / wind are still a tree-hugger's pipe dream. Without storage - they're worthless in the grand scheme of things - and storage comes in the form of toxic lead-acid batteries - so much for the environmental benefits.
* the running cost should provision for plant recycling and waste treatement and waste storage costs
* in case of radioactive leakage making living impossible, populations in this area should get new equivalent housing from the government/state comissioning the plant
Oh this will make today's way of doing nuclear impractical? Well so be it.
Atari rules... ermm... ruled.
This is like asking if you support cars.
Not all cars are the same, and NOT all reactors are the same, and not all power companies are the same for that matter either.
Give me a suite of appropriate regulations, a power company that understands how to run the reactors and maintain them correctly, and reactors that can't go Chernobyl or Fukushima (LFTRs can't fail in those ways and are very safe) and you have a recipe for success.
But unfortunately, the regulations are too onerous, and the US fleet of nuclear reactors are aging PWR designs which are not being maintained, and are by design not the safest anyways.
Replace and expand the current fleet with LFTRs until we get fusion, and you could ditch making power from coal and natural gas completely.
YES! Without nuclear energy earth would be a very cold place.. in fact earth would be just a scattered amount of quarks without nuclear energy.
About ten years ago I snapped an achilles tendon and, at the time, it wasn't the worst adversity. I was suffering some pretty horrendous pain and during that time I excoriated you ferociously when I should not have been posting at all.
I don't know if you remember or even care, but I do and it's been on my list of consequences to take ownership of by apologising to you. Behind your pseudonym you are a human being and my behaviour was appalling.
It was wrong and I'm sorry Rei.
However, I also want to thank you. At a critical moment you engaged my mind at on something challenging enough to distract from the pain of that serious injury and the surgery that came after. Much of our conversation was while I had a four inch gap where my achilles should have been and a rolled up ball of calf muscle under me knee. It took me two years rehabilitation to be able to walk again and a lot of rather invasive and intense physical therapy since then (of another 23 injury sites) to restore my capacity for empathy, which was lost in the scar tissue I had accumulated.
I know this is clumsy and a bit awkward however I hope I can replace whatever toxicity I put out there with gratitude instead.
Thank you Rei.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.