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New Mexico Nuclear Accident Ranks Among the Costliest In US History (latimes.com)
mdsolar quotes a report from Los Angeles Times: When a drum containing radioactive waste blew up in an underground nuclear dump in New Mexico two years ago, the Energy Department rushed to quell concerns in the Carlsbad desert community and quickly reported progress on resuming operations. The early federal statements gave no hint that the blast had caused massive long-term damage to the dump, a facility crucial to the nuclear weapons cleanup program that spans the nation, or that it would jeopardize the Energy Department's credibility in dealing with the tricky problem of radioactive waste. But the explosion ranks among the costliest nuclear accidents in U.S. history, according to a Times analysis. The long-term cost of the mishap could top $2 billion, an amount roughly in the range of the cleanup after the 1979 partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. The Feb. 14, 2014, accident is also complicating cleanup programs at about a dozen current and former nuclear weapons sites across the U.S. Thousands of tons of radioactive waste that were headed for the dump are backed up in Idaho, Washington, New Mexico and elsewhere, state officials said in interviews. "The direct cost of the cleanup is now $640 million, based on a contract modification made last month with Nuclear Waste Partnership that increased the cost from $1.3 billion to nearly $2 billion," reports Los Angeles Times. "The cost-plus contract leaves open the possibility of even higher costs as repairs continue. And it does not include the complete replacement of the contaminated ventilation system or any future costs of operating the mine longer than originally planned."
Maybe they should just let these go to town on the cleanup?
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/09/140909093659.htm
You can say what you will about it's existence, but when the drum blew, the walls collapsed on top of it, severely limiting the spread of radioactivity.
while we may not be able to use the facility any more, this is a structural problem, not a design one. The facility worked to specification in the event. The problem was the event took place in a connecting tunnel and not a storage room.
also the amount of radioactivity that leaked was less than than you get from sleeping next to an infant. They didn't mention that.
Just when I thought we might be done with mdsolar spam, this article shows up. He's a biased and intellectually dishonest submitter who will do anything to try to make nuclear energy appear awful. Can we ban mdsolar from submitting more stories and spamming the queue?
Because someone has to pay for the mishap. And that is in this case the feds.
So, essentially a $2 billion subvention for nuclear technology.
From the link "The problem was traced to material — actual kitty litter — used to blot up liquids in sealed drums. Lab officials had decided to substitute an organic material for a mineral one." Tim S.
Nuclear energy is the crazy hot girlfriend of energy. She may be nice, kind, and wonderful for days, months, or years - maybe decades. But someday, somehow, she's going to go berserk on you. 100% chance. And cleaning up the mess at that point will leave you with a very long term scar.
It's a damn good thing that Harry Reid and Obama was able to stop an investment in containing things like this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... - or so I am told.
Me? I think it was stupid to stop it.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
It should be noted that the waste was from nuclear weapons production not nuclear power. It is disingenuous to compare them because they are not the same.
No outside contamination and a badly written cost plus contract.
If that's as bad as it gets, it's pretty damn good.
To be fair it looks like we are going to subsidize any type of energy production though; by allowing climate change we are collectively giving a much bigger hand out to the fossil fuel industry. Don't misunderstand, I'm not saying let people off the hook for actually causing problems like this or trying to be dismissive of the actual problems, but realistically, since it looks like we're already dealing with the externalities of energy, $2 billion dollars is still less than we will be paying for fossil fuels over the long run. It still sucks, but before anyone jumps on the inevitable anti-nuclear soapbox, don't forget that we're all subsidizing energy in one way or another.
This has nothing to do with energy, this is waste from nuclear weapons production.
Enigma
How did anyone even notice that there had been a nuclear accident in New Mexico? It already looks like Fallout 3. I'm pretty sure there are already feral ghouls and radscorpions there.
But anyway, any excuse to play this:
https://youtu.be/GFfaR3I--zI
You are welcome on my lawn.
They used the wrong kitty litter in the drums causing the drum material to heat up and pop it's top.
If only we had a place to put the waste. Something that wasn't closed because of politics.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Three Mile Island has been operating since 1974 generating on average 6645 GWh of electricity each year (yes it's still operating). At the U.S. average of 11.5 cents/kWh, that's $764.2 million/yr worth of electricity. Over it's 42 year history, that would be $32.1 billion worth of electricity generated by the plant.
So the $2 billion to clean up the partial meltdown of TMI reactor #2 amounted to an extra 11.5 * 2 / 32.1 = 0.72 cents per kWh.
Now consider that TMI was the only major commercial nuclear accident in U.S. history, and nuclear power in the U.S. has generated 24,196,167 GWh between 1971-2015. Then the $2 billion cost to clean up TMI works out to just 0.0083 cents per kWh.
Now consider that mdsolar's favored solar receives a subsidy of 96.8 cents per kWh. Or in other words, per unit of energy generated, the subsidy for solar is 11,711x more expensive than cleaning up TMI was.
https://news.slashdot.org/stor...
Bitch your ass is subsidized by the fucking NUCLEAR FURNACE in the sky.
You claim to know of subsidies but refuse to acknowledge that your very own subsidy is provided by multiple things.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
So the amount of radioactive material is comparable to amounts commonly *lost* due to carelessness in the early 20th century (see "Radium Lost and Found" by Burbidge Taft), and we've freaked out and spent $2 billion on it even though the contaminated area was inherently limited. Isn't the lesson here that government is grossly inefficient and irrational reactions need to be kept in check?
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
Since uranium runs out, the subsidies for nuclear never tend to zero the way the do for solar which can produce energy without bound long after subsidies end.
Uranium doesn't "run out" if you use breeder reactors. They effectively have fuel indefinitely.
Solar panels are good for about 20 years. That's what the three major Solar sales companies in the Bay Area said, when they visited my house, and we talked about it. Sadly, on the lease program, Solar City was not willing to install updated panels when better panels became available: I was stuck with them for the "full lifetime of 20 years". Also on the lease programs, all three companies owned the panels on my roof, which means that they, not I, got the tax subsidy for them.
Basically: none of them produced quite enough power for both my house and my cottage tenant, they all wanted me to use PG&E as a battery, but admitted that the Nevada PUC decision to disallow net metering was probably going to happen soon in my area as well, since the electric companies really dislike net metering, and they agreed, that because the Smart Meters(tm) required to have Solar in the first place allowed differential rates of payment at different times of day, that I would likely get paid less during the day when my panels were generating electricity, and have to pay more in the mornings and evenings (when I was actually home from work, duh!).
Their suggestion was to put all my appliances on timers so that they ran while I was at work; I asked for their advice on where to buy a robot to move clothes from my washer to my dryer, so that I didn't have to run the dryer at night, either. They had no answer.
With the nuclear waste problem, subsidies for nuclear likely increase without bound. You've misunderstood the situation.
What nuclear waste situation? Oh. You mean the one Jimmy Carter created on April 7, 1977, when he ordered support cut for the Barnwell reprocessing plant or the construction of the Clinch River Breeder Reactor.
The one we could make "go away" pretty easily by reversing his executive order.
That nuclear waste problem, right?
Seriously? The Japanese with what looks to an outsider like ridiculous amounts of infrastructure to deal with tsunamis didn't understand?
It's been mentioned frequently elsewhere that the initial design would have dealt with it but to save costs it was done in a different way.
"When a drum containing radioactive waste blew up..."
I about dropped my jaw when I read that. "What!?" I said to myself. Then poking around, I found that it was the Kitty Litter accident as I call it. The drum did not "blow up" in the sense of explosion, either chemical or criticality, but the kitty litter used expanded and burst the container. Ok, that was pretty stupid (the kitty litter).
What exceeds "Dumb as a box of rocks with all the smart rocks thrown out" followed that trying to clean it up.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
This.
Just reprocessing fuel from ordinary reactors and putting the unburnt plutonium and U235 back into new fuel rods greatly increases the years of proven reserves we have of uranium. Breeders ups it another order of magnitude. Beyond that, ion exchange processes have demonstrated extraction of uranium from sea water. This was demonstrated by the Japanese back in 1970something, at a cost of a few hundred dollars per pound. Not economical now, but at some point it would be.
Not to mention thorium. My CRC Handbook says that the available energy in the earth's crust from thorium is greater than uranium and all fossil fuels put together; thorium is about as common as lead.
This is not from nuclear energy. This waste is from our nuclear weapons program, so bill it against the DOD.
Just how many operating commercial breeder reactors are there? Exactly, just two, both in Russia. There are other two, in India and Japan, but these are just research reactors. Even the reactors in Russia are still considered prototypes. Breeders are very difficult and expensive to build and operate. Solar power is cheap as dirt compared to the cost of operating a breeder reactor.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
There's the whole heat death of the universe to worry about as well. It's just as much of a problem to is as uranium running out.
Any energy source has a better ROI than the nuclear weapons this waste came from.
They make it sound like there was some sort of big explosion. There wasn't. One drum ruptured, and leaked some radioactive material.
The material wasn't high level, and only trace amounts made it through the facility.
Someone's looking for a lucrative payout.
What we invested into O's solar project: http://m.washingtontimes.com/n...
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
We missed you mdsolar. Was your summer break good? Slashdot just wasn't the same without your alarmist contributions.
Most solar PV panels are guaranteed for 20-25 years, but should last much longer than the guarantee. We have 40 year old panels still going strong.
The problem with breeders and thorium reactors is that they are unproven on commercial scale. Every time anyone has attempted them, there have been many serious and expensive problems. Thus no-one wants to invest in such a risky proposition, except governments where cost isn't the primary motivating factor.
In any case, even the current reactors are way too expensive. In the UK the new one we want to build, or rather we want the French to build for us using Chinese investment money, is going to cost about twice as much per MWh as renewables the day it is switched on, and only get worse from there.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Just how many operating commercial breeder reactors are there? Exactly, just two, both in Russia.
OMG, Russian? - We're All Gonna Die!
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Uranium will never run out. We have enough depleted uranium sitting around unused as by-product of enrichment process to power the entire earth for 10,000 years if utilized in fast reactors. That is just the uranium sitting around in barrels now. Not including all known uranium deposits, all unknown uranium deposits, uranium recoverable from spent fuel, and uranium distilled from seawater. And not to even mention thorium, which is much more abundant than uranium.
> Not to mention thorium. My CRC Handbook says that the available energy in the earth's crust from thorium is greater than uranium and all fossil fuels put together; thorium is about as common as lead.
The problem appears to be that you can't make plutonium from thorium.
And plutonium is the military industrial's buy in.
Otherwise it's just relatively inexpensive, safe energy. Clearly nobody actually wants that.
On point, the explosion in question was waste from nuclear weapons production.
Need safe reliable rockets and just blast the waste into the sun rather than leaving it here on Earth to waste taxpayers money....
How often...does the EPA inspect these sites?
Inspector: "Hey, this badge lets me go thru this door!"
Engineer: "And this badge will tell you that you are going to die as soon as you do. Have a nice day." (Runs away!)
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Not if we will quit trying to buy this before we use it all up. Then the remaining 5 % would be cheap and trivial to bury. Best of all, by combining nuke with solar, we can solve the co2 issue.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
What's another paltry couple of billion dollars when they can't account for that they did with 6 Trillion dollars
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Reprocessing it in that fashion is worthless. Far better to enact trans atomic and flible and burn up the waste.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Baloney. Ft st vrain ran fine except for the back end. The reactor was perfect.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Look, it is good that we have solar and wind. But when a volcano erupts, esp one like Yellowstone, solar/wind fail right when you need them. So, if we add geo-thermal, hydro, AND nukes to the mix, we then have decent baseload power.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
No. Wind is not bad, but solar still does not approach nuclear for ROI.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Sure. And it's being stored away in casks, rather than being reprocessed.because of silly laws by people who think that somebody's going to make bombs out of it.
Also, it's being stored away in casks, rather than being used in reactor types that could cook it down into a form of waste that's far less long-lived.
Also, it's being stored away in casks, rather than the byproducts being dumped into the environment at large the way fossil fuel power production does.
So how cheap would fossil fuel-based power be if you had to treat the waste the way you do nuclear waste?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Fort St. Vrain is a great example of why no-one wants to build reactors like that. There were a lot of expensive problems with a design that produced 330MWe. It's likely that there would be more if the design was scaled up. Decommissioning anything that uses thorium is a bugger too.
In the end, while technically interesting it just isn't a commercially viable proposition. The risks are too high for too little reward, compared to a much safer design based on tested technology.
If you want new nuclear, especially new designs, you have to make the economic case for them. It's more important that the technical aspects of the design, in fact, because no matter how great it is you still have to convince someone to invest billions of dollars and decades of time into the thing.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Hey, quit letting facts get in the way.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Ft st vrain ran great except for some h2o sensors in the back area. The reactor itself was rock solid. The problem was Everytime the sensor went off, they had to scam the system at which point it would take a month before it could restart. And even when Xcel bought our company, they shut it down in the first year so as to move to coal and Nat gas. At the same time, they sold off our Nat gas lines and then bought from companies that the executives owned. Xcell remains a nightmare of a company. Finally, the decommissioning of fsv was the fastest and cheapest that has been done.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The sensors were hardly the only problem. They had coolant leaks and water ingress. Both were pretty serious and expensive to fix. Being down for a month after a scram seems like a fairly major design flaw too, since scrams are not that uncommon.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Wow, that's a lot of hand waving you've got going on there. Nothing to see here, move along!
Except that it was an accident - they didn't plan to have a barrel of waste overpressurize and pop in a transport tunnel, shutting down the entire facility and requiring several billion dollars of cleanup, and the delay of other barrels of waste ready for transport to this location.
Sure, if this would have happened 15 years from now after everything they planned on putting down there was already down there and the place was sealed up - fine. But that was not the operating environment. They were lucky nobody was in the place when this happened, or they would be dead right now.
Oh, but right - it wasn't an accident because it wasn't the absolute worst case scenario. Sell crazy somewhere else, we're all stocked up. And I say this as someone who would be happy to see more nuclear power deployed, but also isn't a fucking lunatic.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Yeah, and all of a sudden that orange has a much better ROI than this club made out of a trunk from the orange tree.
Wait, two vastly different things are vastly different?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Yeah, solar runs out too. I mean, if you're going to talk about things that are thousands of years in the future, I can talk about things that are millions of years in the future too.
You've hyperbolized the situation.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Not discounting the other things you said, but why invent a robot to move laundry between a washer and dryer, when you can just get one unit that does both without inter-unit movement?
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/wa...
There's already a solution for that, and it even saves space.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Good thing you are not one of those people, because you don't appear to be very informed at all.
The executive order killing the construction and operation of the research facilities for breeder reactors was rescinded without reinstating the budget for them. We might as well have said "it's now fully legal to flap your arms and fly to the moon" by executive order, because both were as likely to happen without funding.
Also, all plutonium isotopes are not created equal as far as weapons use goes, and there is no method to separate the one isotope you want for weapons from the others that you don't. This is why we have monitoring systems and such that the UN uses to make sure everyone is in compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Because as it turns out, if you use a PWR to create power, and actually use the fuel load economically, you don't make weapons grade material. If you shut the place down after 6 months and swap fuel in the most costly manner possible, you get weapons grade plutonium inside of a whole lot of other shit you don't want (trans-uranic elements that are amazingly deadly).
However, those spontaneously fissile plutonium isotopes that ruin a bomb still work really good in a reactor, so breeding plutonium that has a higher percentage of Pu-240 and Pu-241 isn't a problem for that use.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
every time nuclear power is touted as the end all be all solution going forward (by people here and on other sites), I shake my head.
I know that the technical problems have all been solved and we have breeder reactors and everything is unicorns and rainbows.. until you involve people and the dollars and cents.
Then corners get cut, the technical people aren't listened to, and we deal with enormous costs (transferred to the public) and with the possibility of radioactivity for thousands of years.
Uhm, Actually, one of the byproducts in a Thorium LFTR design is P-238 (which is used in "nuclear batteries").
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The main expense is trying to actually get anyone from the government to actually talk with you about them in the first place. Because the current political climate runs something like this:
NRCGuy: Hi! What can I do for you!
You: Hi! I'd like to talk about building a small-scale Thorium reactor for research purposes.
NRCGuy: *Holds hand out, expecting money*
*After you pay the fee.*
NRCGuy: Okay! Thanks! Your time is up! *Holds hand out, expecting more money.*
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
No, actually a breeder reactor is a reactor that produces more fissile material than it consumes.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
https://xkcd.com/1168/
However there's even MORE Thorium out there.
And mining thorium would allow places like the US to restart their rare earths mining, and stop depending on China.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
6.5 trillion in adjustments during FY2015, which had a total federal budget of 3.9 trillion. Some critical bit of information must be missing. I guess I'll just read it as 6.5 ka-jillion, it makes as much sense.
Only 80 years of uranium left at the current rate of use. Everything you suggest is wildly expensive requiring exponentially increasing subsidies for nuclear.
Emissions seem to reduce fast without nuclear power. http://m.phys.org/news/2016-08...
Oops, your denominator is showing.
A ventilation system is gonna take 5 years and cost how much???
Maybe I'm missing something....
If their plan is to have this thing seal up, what is the ventilation system for?
And when it does seal up, he equipment cost/time for the ventilation is lost?
On point, the explosion in question was waste from nuclear weapons production.
Actually, the explosion was from cat poop. They bought the wrong kind of kitty litter to put in their barrels.
Not discounting the other things you said, but why invent a robot to move laundry between a washer and dryer, when you can just get one unit that does both without inter-unit movement?
Now have it put the next load in...
So how do you propose to have power then when you want it?
1. Storage. The price of Powerwalls is going down, and we are making progress on grid-scale storage.
2. Long range transmission. The wind is always blowing somewhere.
3. Demand shifting. Vary the price of power to fit the supply. I have a smart meter, and I pay more for day power than for night power. So I run the clothes dryer and dishwasher after 11pm (using the delay feature). My wife has programmed her Tesla to charge at 2:30am. Smarter appliances will make demand shifting easier.
Oh! Storage! Why, it sounds so simple.
I mean, we need to invent the technology first, but that's no biggy.
The adjustments happened during FY2015, but covered many years of operation.
It's beyond mere accounting issues. They have no sense of cost at all. Imagine, spending a million dollars on a smart bomb to blow up a tent in the middle of nowhere when $50k or so in dumb bombs could have done the job.
and yet, it was solid and profitable towards the end. The problem was that a backend expensive part needed replacement.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
fantasy scenarios? You have to be kidding. Volcanoes blow all the time. The west coast has multiple volcanos that are bigger than mt. st. helens and that have been quiet for a LONG time. IOW, they are due. When MSH went, it dropped solar in the west a good 10-15%. In addition, that also lowered our winds.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
This paragraph says a lot about the study:
The UK is a mixed picture. Emissions have been reduced by 16 per cent, bucking the trend of other pro-nuclear countries. However, only five per cent of its energy comes from renewables, which is among the lowest in Europe, pipped only by Luxembourg, Malta and the Netherlands.
They, like you, are more concerned about the energy being renewables than they are about lowering their CO2. That alone makes the study suspect.
The problem is, that our issue today, is the fact that we became dependent on one main form of energy, which is fossil fuels. We need to have a diversified energy matrix. UK is correct in seeking to keep nukes going. They are also correct in pushing solar and wind. With these 3, they can have CHEAP energy, combined with energy security.
Here in the states, I look forward to getting my powerwall on our house. Between a 10 KW solar system, an 85 kwh MS, a coming Model 3, and hopefully, a 10 kwh battery, I think that we shall have energy independence in OUR house.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Yeah, that's still an issue. Except...you're running your laundry on a timer now.
The models you listed on that link do not have start timers. Electronic controls, yes; but without timers, all that means is you can't mechanically set a setting, and then have a timer power the thing on at a specific time. Nor do they have protocol based external management, so you could trigger them at a particular solar generating level that's sustained over a period of time to avoid using grid power, and program a (much smarter) external system to run them.
These appliances are not as smart as they'd need to be, and even if they are, they're not smart in the right direction, nor are the external control management systems there yet for doing things like coordinating the dishwasher vs. the laundry.
Just have it set to run twice each week on different days instead of twice in one day, back-to-back.
Dude or dudette, I totally promise not to tell your SO that you just put their favorite yellow shorts that they've had since college in with your new blue shirt and turned them green. But you *will* be buying them that expensive dinner by way of apology.
Us laundry ninjas know you can't just throw in anything with anything else. Some things will simply shred if you put them in with some other things, like delicates and thick towels, instead of putting them on a different cycle. What this boils down to is that any given laundry day requires multiple loads.
Put in the next load before you go to work, take the dry clothes out when you get home, no problem.
And forget this, if you have kids: there's no such thing as a small amount of laundry, or two day a week laundry.
---
Look, personally, I want local energy storage: I don't want to have to change everything, just because I'm going to be powering everything with the big fusion reactor up in the sky, instead of the little fission reactor down the coast. At some point, it becomes a quality of life issue, and that point hits pretty hard with solar in a different way.
As soon as there's enough solar capacity, and people aren't home to use it, then it redefined "off peak" and "on peak". The "off peak" hours are during the day, when generating capacity exceeds demand, and the "on peak" hours are during the morning and evening, when you're at home and awake, but the sun isn't shining, so there's more demand on the grid, because everyone else keeps the same hours you do.
One of the reasons the PUC in Nevada got rid of net metering was because Nevada was on a trajectory to eventually hit this "solar tipping point", and it was obvious to the utility company that at that point, they'd be paying spot market prices for energy, mostly in the evenings, and they'd end up pretty screwed.
Unless I can have local storage, and it's got to be able to store everything I can generate all day, assuming it starts out dry, the "grid battery" approach looks to be doomed to jacking my utility bills right back to where they used to be, so the power company can maintain revenue under the pretense of "we have to maintain the grid, but all these people have solar, and aren't paying us enough for us to be able to afford to maintain it".
The only viable alternative is to be able to pull the plug completely. And sadly, solar is just not there yet.
So, no market for nuclear at your place.
That's assuming environmental activists have actual political power and those who get money from rail transport do not - which is really getting things backwards.
Follow the money.
I'm good with having nuclear on the grid. Our house will be able to provide power to help load balance, but in the event of war with China, or a large volcano, I like the idea of being able to get electricity.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"Cook it down" so homey... cooling with liquid radioactive sodium ... mmmmmm ....my favourite kitchen ingredient
Oh look, someone's being an Internet tough guy and using super cool words like "butthurt" and without offering any actual value to the conversation.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Solar and wind, backed by grid-scale battery storage (as China is already doing right now) make getting rid of nuclear a no-brainer. Cested interests in the US are preventing it from moving forward in whole host of areas, from climate change to energy to reducing bureaucracy to improving democracy. The renewable solutions to energy supply are already there. Just open your eyes and see them. Unfortunately, that seems to be more than too many Americans can manage to do.
Only boring people are ever bored.
Sure. But let's subsidise an energy source that isn't toxic for longer than humans have been farming.
Only boring people are ever bored.
Good catch. Thorium can't be used to produce weaponizable plutonium. My recollection is:
P-239 is weapons-grade plutonium.
U-238 is weapons-grade uranium.
P-238 is an alpha emitter, degrading to U-234(5?) (i.e. it skips U-238).
Thorium produces P-238 (and not P-239/U-238), so it is not useful for nuclear fission weapons.
In any case, I recall back in the debate about uranium or thorium reactors, DoD refused to produce Thorium precisely because they cannot be used to produce nuclear weapons.
You can't make U-238 go boom. The isotopes normally used in bombs are U-235 and Pu-239. (Usually plutonium these days. A gun-type bomb is relatively easy to construct if you can get your hands on enough weapons-grade U-235, but acquisition is difficult.) Pu-238 is an alpha emitter, so it loses two protons and two neutrons per decay, resulting in U-234. I seem to remember that U-233 can go boom, also, but getting enough of it together is a big problem.
Also, from what I've read, we don't have enough Pu-238 for NASA's use, so it would be nice to get some more.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Nothing from nuclear power generation goes to New Mexico. That site is dedicated to storage of all the waste and crap from the weapons program.
DOE has yet to take custody of any spent fuel from any of the commercial nuclear power plants even though the Atomic Energy Act of 1972 required the DOE to take custody of all used fuel by fiscal year 1998.
NRRPT/RCT