US Congress Passes Bill To Help Advanced Nuclear Power (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Last week, the House passed a bipartisan bill that originated in the Senate called the Nuclear Energy Innovation Capabilities Act (S. 97), which will allow the private sector to partner with U.S. National Laboratories to vet advanced nuclear technologies. The bill also directs the Department of Energy (DOE) to lay the ground work for establishing "a versatile, reactor-based fast neutron source." The Senate also introduced a second bill called the Nuclear Energy Leadership Act (S. 3422) last Thursday, which would direct the DOE to actually establish that fast neutron reactor. That bill also directs the DOE to "make available high-assay, low-enriched uranium" for research purposes. The Nuclear Energy Leadership Act has not yet made it past a Senate vote. The report also mentions a recent U.S. Court of Appeals ruling to keep older reactors online. "The court said that subsidies for nuclear energy proposed by Illinois don't cause any interference with federal control over interstate power markets, which is prohibited," reports Ars.

"In 2017 the state of Illinois agreed to offer a Zero Emissions Credit that included nuclear energy (PDF). The credit was opposed by fossil fuel generators and by the Electric Power Supply Association, who sued the director of the Illinois Power Agency. But the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and the Department of Justice filed a joint brief in the case several months ago, saying those federal agencies had no problem with Illinois' credit system, according to Utility Dive."

Comments

Re:U.S. only country really fighting climate chang

[tk77]

It's ironic that Trump is derided for leaving the Paris accord, when he's the only one taking actions to significantly improve the climate.

You mean like rolling back pollution rules to help coal plants? https://abcnews.go.com/Health/...

I'm all for advancing nuclear power technology, but I wouldn't give Trump any credit for it. The bill was passed by Congress. The Trump administration was only mentioned once in the article and even that was about nuclear being bundled with his attempts to save the coal plants.

SMR

[JBMcB]

So what you are looking for is a Small Modular Reactor. These are relatively small reactors that can be produced on an assembly line and shipped to the installation site, so they are cheaper than conventional nuclear designs. Most don't require active cooling, which means you don't get meltdowns. Also, you can bury them in a vault for protection from attack or sabotage. They require no maintenance. You run them until their fuel is spent, then you pull one out of service and recycle it. You end up with a few pounds of waste material per unit over the course of it's lifespan, which is a couple of decades.

Russia has been actively developing these things for decades, and are piloting several models.

NuScale has an interesting design ready for licensing, and TerraPower has a design that uses liquid sodium cooling and depleted uranium fuel, which makes it essentially impossible to melt down.

Think of it this way. The expensive part of old water-cooled nuclear reactors is maintaining the elaborate water cooling system. It's also the primary point of failure. Getting rid of active cooling makes reactors cheaper to build and maintain, AND makes them safer.

Re:SMR

[AmiMoJo]

You run them until their fuel is spent, then you pull one out of service and recycle it. You end up with a few pounds of waste material per unit over the course of it's lifespan, which is a couple of decades.

That is untrue. You end up with tonnes of high level waste that needs to be stored for extended periods of time. The rector case degrades and is the main limit on the lifetime of most designs. It can't be recycled.

This kind of hand-waving "we can just recycle it (with currently non-existent techniques that we hope to develop later, maybe)" is why investors aren't interested.

Many are coming around. They compliment each other

[raymorris]

It's no coincidence that Greenpeace has that name, Green Peace. The early environmental movement was very much intertwined with the anti-war, anti-military movement, at a time with nuclear weapons were one of the major issues of the day. The Peace side of Greenpeace was churning out information / propagada against nuclear research and facilities because of nuclear weapons. You couldn't have Greenpeace both promoting nuclear energy and using scare tactics about nuclear research such as creating confusion between the slow, long-lived elements vs the fast ones that release enough energy to be dangerous. That legacy lasted a long time.

A lot of leading environmentalists are coming around, though, such as one of the founders of Greenpeace:

http://ecosense.me/2017/01/17/...
http://ecosense.me/2017/01/18/...

As the parent mentioned, solar and wind compliment nuclear very nicely. Both solar and wind are great - when the weather is right at the moment. When the weather isn't right, at night for example, nuclear is the very best, cleanest way to have your base.

For 70 years now we've been trying to find ways solar electric work on a nationwide scale, particularly working on the storage problem. All the while we've been running
oal burning plants while hoping for a revolutionary discovery in energy storage. It can work fine for a hunting cabin (just a little expensive), but after seventy years of burning coal while waiting for solar, we're still nowhere near the kind of revolutionary discoveries needed for something on the scale of powering the United States or Japan. The amount of energy is just so vast. As an example, pumped hydro storage sufficient to get the US through a large winter storm system would require flooding from the Rocky Mountains to the Appalachians, nearly half the country.

If we want to not only replace the existing uses of electricity, but also power all of our cars and trucks from electricity, and industry such as steel and aluminum, we're going to need a lot more electricity. Dependable power for transportation can come from either fossil fuels or nuclear, because you can't have the entire state shut down due it's cloudy this week. You can use solar electric during sunny weeks, but food needs to be delivered to stores during storm season too, and Seattle's cloudy season.

People are starting to come around. I don't think we'll have to keep using mostly fossil fuels for another seventy years while hoping fot a miracle. We can wait for the miracle while drastically cutting CO2 emissions with nuclear.

PS -
Before you reply, be warned I know the gimmicks of dividing *electricity* usage (not vehicles or any other use of energy) by energy usage. Apple divided by orange is a useless number. I'll call you out on it, so don't bother trying to post a BS stat that conflates energy and electricity.

I'll also call you out on it if you try the propaganda of conflating long half-life elements which release energy slowly, over a long time, like a candle, vs short half-life elements that release it quickly like a firecracker. Energy released quickly is dangerous - for a short time, then it's done.

I was going to list two more propaganda techniques I'll call you out on, but let's just summarize with this:
I've studied for 30 years. I've written a comprehensive energy plan for the United States. I know the tricks, and I'll call you put if you try to use them.

Re: Huzzah

[CrimsonAvenger]

How many people have died from solar and wind power vs nuclear?

Zero. If Joe Blow iron worker slips and falls to his death while working on a wind turbine, that's an industrial accident. Not a failure of wind power. Same as if Joe Blow is replacing an aircraft warning light on the side of a nuclear cooling tower and falls to his death, that's an industrial accident, not a failure of nuclear power.

Hmm, as of 2008, rooftop solar has caused 0.44 deaths per TWh produced. Nuclear is at 0.04 deaths per TWh.

Now, Fukushima has happened since then, so we should probably add the one (1) extra death (NOT per TWh) that happened as a result of Fukushima recently (saw it in the news last week or so). So, ~4500 TWh nuclear, one death, increases nuclear deathrate to 0.0402 per TWh.

Hmm, So, rooftop solar causes 11 times as many deaths as nuclear, even if you include TMI, Chernobyl, and Fukushima.

Well, we all know that nuclear is by far the most deadly form of power ever invented, so obviously, these numbers are fabrications....

Oh, and note for the "but, but, radioactive waste for BILLIONS of years!!!", it should be noted that the short half-life stuff that makes nuclear waste, well, seriously radioactive is pretty much gone a week after shutdown of the plant.

Medium half-life stuff will be useful for a few centuries (yes, useful - it's actually possible to extract usable power from that crap).

And the long half-life stuff? Not nearly so dangerous as airplane flight. When I was in the Navy, I got more dosage flying back and forth between the USA and Holy Loch than I got from spending a couple months in the engineering spaces of a nuke boat between flights....

Re: U.S. only country really fighting climate chan

[bobbied]

How much are you being paid by the nuclear energy industry? Neither solar nor wind power can render an entire state too dangerous to live for the next 10 thousand years.

What are you talking about? The absolute worst accident we've had, where a stupidly designed reactor was literally blown apart and burned for days didn't produce such a unlivable place for 10 thousand years, and certainly not a state sized portion of real estate. Even in Japan, where we blew apart multiple reactors, the situation isn't going to leave the ground uninhabitable that long nor is it the size you want to think.

I'm not going to tell you there are not risks, but I am going to insist on being reasonable about assessing those risks.

There are new reactor designs which are NOT going to catch fire and burn, won't suffer meltdowns and containment breaches even in the worst case dooms day scenarios you can imagine. But because you want to believe the fiction "China Syndrome" Hollywood depictions of what happened at TMI, we are stuck running rickety old 50 year old facilities (Even then with a safety record that is pretty darned good, with only ONE serious accident in the USA's commercial operating history, and that one being of nearly zero effect on the public, with the only negative effect being the hysteria.)

Re:I say this on every nuke thread

[Anonymous Coward]

https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assess...

Lifetime emissions of a nuclear plant are around 100g/kWh. Better than coal but considerably worse than wind/solar+battery.

Every once in a while I see a citation and a fact that challenges what I know. I follow the source. 9 times out of 10 the "fact" is a misleading representation of the citation. This is one of those misleading representations. The document has a table that provides the assessed minimum/median/maximum carbon emissions for a power source. This table gives following values for nuclear (in gCO2eq/kWh):

minimum: 3.7
median: 12
maximum: 110

Suffice it to say that the parent post, by approximately citing the maximum number, is quite misleading.

In comparison, here are a few other sources (in terms of min/median/max gCO2eq/kWh):

Nuclear: 3.7/12/110
Coal: 740/820/910
Gas (Combined Cycle): 410/490/650
Geothermal: 6.0/38/79
Hydropower: 1.0/24/2200
Concentrated Solar Power: 8.8/27/63
Solar PV—utility: 18/48/180
Wind onshore: 7.0/11/56

Based on these numbers (purely considering lifetime CO2 emissions--from your source), nuclear appears to be pretty competitive with wind/solar, etc.

Please help keep /. factual. Mod parent down or this post up. Thank you.