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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.
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
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.
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 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...
which level of fear and paranoia protection are gonna be needed to satisfy your definition of "safe" ? Especially given that nuclear power already has been proven responsible for the fewer death all energy source considered...
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.
Humanity will be long gone when the sun dies...
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.
As safe as possible.
You realize there are roughly 100 nuclear reactors going in the US. And the majority of them have had not one major safety issue in their entire lifespan right?
And that newer reactor technologies are far simpler and have a default state of "off".
Adding the kind of safety precautions you require for current solid-fuel reactors to such devices is largely pointless.
And, believe it or not, physical security for such plants is usually not that expensive.
The expense in nuclear power comes from the hostile regulatory environment that's been created. And all the NIMBY legal challenges brought up for each and every reactor commissioned.
People need to stop thinking about nuclear reactors as bombs.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
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
how can you support something you don't understand, 95% of the population (to be generous) doesn't have the intellectual background to understand it...
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."
did you consider the waste triggered by the ~80 millions barrel of oild consumed every day ?
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
Yup no viable commercial reactor exists to use current "waste" as a fuel source. Please actualy do 10 seconds of google foo before repeating the anti nuke mantra/boogy man. We have reactor designs that can use everything from mildly refined uranium ore to high level waste as feedstock.
If it's emitting serious amounts of radiation it's a viable fuel source.
No sir I dont like it.
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.
Apples and oranges. Nuclear is only lower in deaths because it is massively over engineered for safety and thus massicle more expensive. Coal wouldn't kill many people if the exhaust was properly filtered.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
I'm sorry but this is exactly the uninformed hyperbole that hampers progress in nucleair energy. Modern nucleair technology uses what we call 'waste' today as very usable fuel and thurn it into much less hazerdous waste. It is people like you who stand in the way of fixing nucleair energy and actually *dealing* with the current waste problem.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
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."
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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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.
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.
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...
The fusion reactor we orbit has supported almost all life on Earth from the earliest times until now, and can do so for the indefinite future. (As long as Earth and Sun last in their present forms).
The problem is that our consumption of energy has grown bizarrely in a handful of years. The Sun gives us adequate heat, drinkable water, and food in many forms. It doesn't give us central heating at the flick of a switch, transport, or TV - yet. It's questionable how much energy we can practically collect from wind and sunshine, and how sustainable it will be.
Incidentally, coal and oil and gas are also gifts from the big FRITS. They're just packaged to keep - sort of frozen energy. Apart from geothermal, nuclear and thermonuclear power are about the only type of energy we have that isn't ultimately derived from the Sun. (Although they, too, depend on elements that could only have been created in stars).
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
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.
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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.
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.
First of all, many of the deaths and injuries are due to mining and transporting the coal, not just burning it.
Then too, you can't just make the pollution problem go away with some magical "cleaning". As of 2006, 125 million tons of coal combustion solid byproducts, including fly ash, were produced annually in the USA. If you use coal, you can't will that away into nonexistence. You HAVE to PUT it somewhere. You can disperse most of it into the atmosphere, or you can try to trap it in filters, but where do you put what the filters trap? In 2005, 34 million cubic meters (42 million tons) of fly ash from USA coal power plants were land-filled over and above the amount recycled into various products.
You can't burn up fly ash, because it is already the irreducible leftover of burning in the first place. About 10% of all the coal burned turns into fly ash.
Fly ash contains such toxic substances as arsenic, barium, beryllium, boron, cadmium, chromium, thallium, selenium, molybdenum and mercury. Makes you wonder how safe those products containing recycled fly ash are, eh?
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.
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.
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
which level of fear and paranoia protection are gonna be needed to satisfy your definition of "safe" ?
Whatever it takes to make it impractical.
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
The really cool thing about fusion is that we have improved confinement times faster than moores law!
We have also learnt that international collaborations are hugely expensive due mostly to politics. People think ITER is really expensive. It is true it is not cheap, but a new gas plant with ZERO R&D is still a cool billion dollars and takes a few years to build. A billion dollars a year for a few decades is really not much money in the scheme of things.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
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.
"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.
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).
That Homer Simpson is safety officer and the plant hasn't, so far, wiped Shelbyville downstream off the face of the map demonstrates the overall fool-proofing that goes into a nuclear plant.
I'm more concerned about a plant's management. Monty cutting corners on proper maintenance, dumping waste into a local water supply, having piles of cash to bribe officials and an army of lawyers on standby is the worry.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There exist failsafe designs if we would get off our butts and build them. If we extract the actinides from the waste, we can use the mix to fuel a reactor. The remaining 5% or so would need to be stored for 200-500 years. Not quite your criterion, but close compared to 10k years.
Risk = probability x severity, not just the latter. Do some reading.
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.
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'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...
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.
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?
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.
It's entirely possible to completely filter the exhaust of basically anything to be as clean as you'd like. What this isn't, is feasible or remotely cost effective - which is my point.
The vast majority of deaths from coal are due to the emissions, not the fly ash dumps or the mining of it. They are certainly issues but not the majority of the fatalities.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
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?...
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."
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
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
- 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.
Reprocessing and reuse? Less than 1% of the fuel has been used in the fuel-rods..
Build new plants (Breeder-reactors?) that can use the existing spent fuel-rods as fuel and reduce the storage-time to ~300 years? (instead of ~100000 years)
We can plan and build something that would be safe for 300 years.. We could probably build that on-site instead of having to transport it to some remote location.
... 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.
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.
You can disperse most of it into the atmosphere, or you can try to trap it in filters, but where do you put what the filters trap?
You use it as building material, e.g. for roads, like we do in germany.
About 10% of all the coal burned turns into fly ash.
In your country? Really? And you do nothing against it? Sorry, that is a political problem not a technical one.
Makes you wonder how safe those products containing recycled fly ash are, eh?
Pretty safe, as it is more or less transformed into "concrete".
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
> 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
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.
Nope.
*Organ Sting*
But there's a zillion to one chance it could!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
You're thinking current solid fuel reactors.
I'm talking about molten salt reactors. Drain the fuel into a dump tank and the reaction shuts down.
Yes, you have radioactive byproducts that need to be removed. But it's a matter of removing parts that are already meant to be replaceable as part of normal operational cycle.
Basically the reactor vessel and the dump tanks are all contained inside a containment vessel that's dropped into a concrete well.
When it's time to service the reactor, you simply swap the entire containment vessel out for a new one, with the original being shipped back and refurbished. Decommissioning is the same process, without dropping in a new component.
This also allows reactors to be upgraded during normal operational lifetimes as technology points to a better way to do certain things.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
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!
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.
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.
When you make claims like that please back them up with a source.. If not it's just your opinion that you are pushing...
I will support nuclear power as soon as it becomes too cheap to meter. Not a day sooner!
It's just math.
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"
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.
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.
"Lots of money for fission too even though uranium won't last."
Yup, mdsolar has spoken: we're at *peak uranium*.
Dude: it's nice having a hobby, but try not to get the planet fried with your bullshit.
Seems a little silly to subsidies a dying industry.
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?
Then post the math-proof.
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....
“I have answered three questions, and that is enough,”
Said his father; “don’t give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off, or I’ll kick you downstairs!”
https://science.slashdot.org/c...
Turns out he's innumerate. http://100.org/
Then maybe it is not that important.
If you don't understand it, it's not important?
Laws being passed without a general populous vote is a load of crap. I don't care what the reason is. It may seem ludicrous in the here and now, but if we started our laws in that manner then we might re-evaluate what really needs a law and what is just common sense. Besides, if they don't understand the law then they don't know the law and cant follow it anyway. Try again ;)
The US is not, nor should it be, a direct democracy. You want everyone to vote on all the laws, and you'll get exceptionally ill-informed voters who suffer from voter fatigue. Election turnout will be so lackluster, that the participation rate in your Participatory Democracy will be far lower than we have with our Representational Democracy.
Most people can't even name their state representatives. Local issues are similarly ignored. You expect them to vote up or down on every issue? Because... uhhh, somehow that reflects the will of the voter?
You're not going to get much of a credible counter-claim from mdsolar. He's a paid shill.
Pros & Cons are all around. High risk High return still be valid. Still believe that Human can control and manage it.
Yucca Mountain would be a fantastic place to stick stuff that we'd like to forget about for ~400 years. It's even already built.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
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.
what is delusional about stopping fossil fuel, esp. coal, and replacing it with a mix of renewables and nukes? Coal is one of the most expensive form of electricity going. As such, it strikes me that keeping coal going is by far the most delusional. It is also why a number of utilities ARE shutting down their coal and switching to things like Wind.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Sure, that would be a fine place to put it.
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.
50 years? I guess pulling numbers out of your ass is fun, but I prefer reality: the Trojan Nuclear Generating Station had it's first criticality in December 1975. Other notable dates:
1992: reactor was taken offline
1993: chief operator announced it would not be restarted
2003: final fuel rods from cooling pools transferred to dry cask storage
2005: reactor vessel removed from containment dome, barged up the Columbia River to Hanford, and buried.
2006: cooling tower imploded
Now, I was never an advanced student at math, but that seems like 31 years from the beginning of operation, to not having a reactor vessel or cooling apparatus on site anymore. And that includes 17 years of operation, generating 1130MWe.
Yes, it takes a while to decommission the plant once it's done. But just like the uber-proponents of nuclear power around here, the uber-detractors don't need to lie and make shit up in order to sound smarter than they are. Decommissioning has been done. It didn't take 50 years. It was absolutely no risk to "the water table" or "populations both near and distant" in any sort of way - they barged the damn reactor core through the middle of a major metro area and nobody noticed. And major cooling efforts are only a concern for the first week or so after shutdown, as the extremely lively stuff decays rapidly, as it's extremely lively. At the moment of reactor shutdown, decay heat will be about 7% of the previous core power if the reactor has had a long and steady power history. About 1 hour after shutdown, the decay heat will be about 1.5% of the previous core power. After a day, the decay heat falls to 0.4%, and after a week it will be 0.2%
A week. Not 50 years. Not one year. A week.
So stop with the FUD. Call nuclear power expensive - it is. Call nuclear power a massive disaster when companies cut corners, or operators cock it up - it is. But don't make shit up because you just look like a fool.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Yeah, and technically solar won't last either - the sun will eventually die.
That doesn't mean that we should just stop using it. We've got plenty of Uranium to bridge us to better technologies and get the fuck away from coal and oil. Stop with the drive-by FUD.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
There is not enough uranium to replace coal and gas and have the plants we build reach there design life. There is only 80 years left without expanding nuclear power. Your point about solar is mistaken. The Sun will still give off light as a white dwarf.
* 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.
There is more than enough U238 to be bred into fissile material to last for hundreds of years, and even without breeder reactors the current "known" uranium deposits are based on surveys that stopped being done due to having a known 80 year supply. We find more Uranium today while looking for other things than we do purposefully looking for it - Uranium is more common than Nickel.
Why explore for more material that doesn't need to be found because you already have decades worth at any anticipated usage rate?
Just stop with the easily disproven FUD already. It's why nobody takes you seriously. Point out the actual problems with nuclear power, instead of this nonsense.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Red Book estimates account for undiscovered reserves. So, the 80 year estimate is pretty solid. Reprocessing poses a weapons proliferation risk so we don't do it.
1) loan guarantees are not subsidies. They are loans. They have to be repaid. 2) federal research into making cleaner nuclear energy is minimal - less than 150 million.year. There are TRILLIONS in green subsidies (and they aren't loans). Besides, it is only because the regulations on nuclear are so tight that the govt has even taken over all research. If the private sector was encouraged, the govt could stop research altogether.
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.
Loan guarantees. They are subsidies. What do you mean by private utilities? Not publicly traded?