I see you are a fair person and so am I. I want solar and wind to get their fair chance, so I hear you that the extra cost is unfair, but it's a one time cost, so it's not like it's a deal breaker. They should separate transmission costs and profits from generation costs and apply feed in tariff just to generation costs. And get rid of the $3000 cost. That would make the number fair. Hawaii citizens unite. Make it a campaign issue, force the hand of the politicians. Protest. The interesting challenge is once Hawaii runs over 50% from solar and wind, it will mean overproduction during the day. What to do with the surplus energy ? Do they have viable pumped hydro sites ? Ultra expensive electrical batteries ? Those are challenges that have only been fully solved on much smaller grids that migrated from diesel generators to solar+wind+battery storage, considering ultra high electricity to being with (much higher even than oil thermal plants, due to small scale demand). Germany is mostly doing it with pumped hydro and selling their overproduction to their neighbors and buying it back when it needs to (selling cheap and buying expensive, they are selling unplanned overproduction and buying surplus energy at peak demand times).
Fact one - Germany's CO2 emissions have gone up since they shutdown nuclear reactors after fukushima, and they still haven't managed to offset that.
google "germany co2 nuclear 2014"
Fact two - Too much electricity in the grid is just as bad as too little. Solar and wind are unpredictable energy sources, each cloud passing over then leaving a solar panel is changing electricity production, wind gusts are way worse. Plus you have the problem of what to do if they have a few hours in the winter without wind or a windless summer night. In the peak of winter solar PV is producing 5% of what it produces in the best day of the year, so solar is next to useless all day long in the winter at Germany's latitude range. I know they have some pumped hydro, some peaking fossil fuel sources, and can import electricity from its neighbors, but that's where the fun begins, if they need their neighbors to have lots of baseload nuclear, hydro, coal, natural gas, the bottom line is they are kind of preventing their neighbors from doing the same, since wind patterns affect large areas.
The Germany clean energy plan is a one trillion euro plan. For a 65GW peak demand grid, and to shift about 40GW worth of fossil fuels and nuclear to renewables. 40GW is 10 full sized nuclear reactors (1333GW each), even using the crazy anti nuclear numbers, that's 10 billion euros each, or 100 billion euros using the crazy inflated numbers the anti nuclear nuts use. One tenth the trillion dollar Energiewende plan.
If the rate is less than 1% more cancers than normal, then you just proven my point.
It will be really proven by the time Fukushima is some 10 years old, and we can show with statistics that cancers among even those most affected by the accidents radiation caused a small extra cancer and a tiny extra death rate. Like Chernobyl, the nuclear community learned very little from Fukushima, cause the mistake was disregard to common nuclear safety knowledge, rather than the need for fundamental redesign of state of the art reactors. The real problem is the reluctance of replacing all Gen II reactors with Gen III+ or Gen IV reactors. Not that I'm a big fan of AP1000 and similar designs, but they are safe enough to have two miles from my home.
Such a finding would both show that the anti nuclear community are very wrong on all of their predictions and should be ignored. Most people are unaware that there are 435 operational nuclear reactors in the world with an output around 400GW electrical. My contention is that if nuclear fission were really that unsafe, we would have many more accidents over the decades. If France and USA can do safe nuclear for 30 years (top 2 users of nuclear fission today) why can't the whole world do safe nuclear ?
You need to look no further than Germany renewables plan, flush with hundreds of billions of euro in funding has stalled. They can't add more wind or solar panels to the Germany grid. The problem isn't money. Every extra solar panel and wind turbine added to the grid increases grid instability a little more. When are you environmentalist nuts start studying how the electrical grid actually works instead of having fantasies about how it should work. If solar and wind were so great, Hawaii would have shutdown its oil based thermal plants already. They have very expensive electricity, making renewables cheap, yet it doesn't quite work, cause it's just not that simple. Get a grip. Without nuclear, there's no hope to solve climate change. And nuclear is not the boogeyman your environmentalist friends have convinced you it is. Zero Fukushima deaths, zero confirmed radiation related cancers. Its been three years. It's already becoming another Chernobyl (as in the environmentalists overblow the problem about a thousand times). Until the environmentalists show they understand the actual impact of nuclear accidents, accurately predicting the effects of nuclear accidents, in my view they are a bunch of looney tunes alarmists that should be given ZERO credit when the subject in nuclear power.
The limited molten salt reactor research was conducted for military interests (nuclear powered bomber in the 60s). After ICBMs were perfected USAF lost interest in bombers capable of staying in the air for weeks. Oak Ridge National labs managed to get a few more years of molten salt research funding, eventually running a 5MW research reactor for 22000 hours. But since Thorium doesn't produce plutonium, U-233 is bad for bombs and the political interest was in plutonium fast breeders, funding was cancelled and molten salt research was restricted to theoretical work, even after they showed the solution that was proven to work and had none of the drawbacks of fast plutonium breeders (even lead cooled reactors have the problem with fast neutrons degrading internal reactor materials much faster than a thermal reactor).
There are even White House tapes from the Nixon area that document talks between Nixon and California congressman showing there were fully vested in the fast breeders.
So of course the answer is right now zero molten salt reactors operating, but my point is, we don't have LFTR (an advanced molten salt reactor) because its the right solution for civilian usage (99%+ burnup, core materials non reactive with oxygen or water, have all advantages of fast plutonium breeders, plus Thorium is essentially free, and uranium spent nuclear fuel could be diluted at 3% concentration to slowly burnup all spent nuclear fuel, freeze plug, catch pan, negative reactivity coeficient resulting in a truly walk away safe reactor with the sole risk of contamination in case of a precision military strike or a precision comet/asteroid hit).
Then why is GE still proposing a Sodium cooled fast reactor instead of a Lead one ? How many civilian lead cooled reactors in operation in Russia and former USSR states ? Just because something works well for subs doesn't mean they are great for civilian needs.
If something was designed for military needs, gets no respect from me, cause it's the same reason we're mostly stuck with LWR and AHWR reactors.
Awareness that we got the light water reactor exactly because it was the solution decided upon for military usage, and since the US govt had no honest interest in fully funding civilian oriented nuclear research, we're so far stuck in LWR reactors that only use 0,65% of mined uranium, that is riddled with required safety systems, overall too expensive exactly because of the insistence on ignoring the simple, efficient solution, because it wasn't seen as good for military usage (molten salt reactors).
If you are only interested in criticizing then for you it's just videos on you tube. There are many more resources. But since you are clearly not interested in studying the available materials and producing a consistent criticism of the vision around molten salt reactors, I don't see much of any point in trying to debate with you. I'll reply solely for other's to understand why you are soooo wrong.
There are discussion forums. And even many of the videos on you tube are deeply technical. If you aren't interested in watching them, then please don't criticize, you are just not interested in new technology.
If you are unwilling to understand the simple fact that large corporations are EXTREMELY RISK AVERSE, they only invest in something AFTER GOVERNMENT funded at least 90% of the basic R&D on that technology (typically more like 95+%), they expect to get that tech for free and do minor refinement and offer that as something great. If you are inside the GE, Westinghouse,... corporate bubble, it will likely be impossible for you to see outside your sanitized view of politics and economics. The basic issues I'm trying to show you have nothing specific to nuclear power. Its the same reason only Tesla came up with a real, revolutionary electric cars, instead of GM, Ford, Toyota.
You need to look no further than GE S-PRISM. They got all the basic research for free from the US government. The US government put billions towards fast U-238/Pu-239 breeders, then GE invested a few millions, and are unwilling to make the first one happen out of its own pocket. Instead its shopping around the world for the first guinea pig govt to pay for the first reactor, to pay for any mistakes in its design. If GE was anything like the company that would be interested in thorium, GE would already have the first S-PRISM reactor being built somewhere to put its money where its mouth is. But it doesn't. I rest my case. Westinghouse, AREVA, Toshiba, Bechtel,... Are no better. They are only interested in investing on absolute sure things, zero balls, zero willingness to take large risks.
Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors are a "breeder reactor", as in they produce more U-233 from Th-232 than they consume. U-238 -> Pu-239 fast breeders are trouble, because of the Sodium, because of the fast neutrons wreaking havoc inside the reactor, and because Plutonium is probably an even dirtier word than nuclear in the minds of the general population. If Fast Breeders were a good idea, Russia would be filled with them. They have been operating a few for almost 40 years. If they were economical, they would have super seeded their light water reactor fleet. The gossip is they always build them in pairs. Two reactors for a single turbine. The maintenance is so heavy, you don't even plan to have both operational at once. Just lookup sodium fires on youtube. I can't be OK with another reactor that uses materials that want to spontaneously explode / catch fire with water or oxygen. A really bad idea. Even though they could probably be engineered to be safer than current light water reactors (big pressure cooker at 150 atmospheres / 2500 psi internal pressure). We need a reactor that is safe because it uses the laws of physics smartly instead of trying to defy physics. That's by far the most important feature of molten salt reactors, walk away safe. Impossible to contaminate the surrounding environment unless hit by an asteroid or a precise military strike.
I'm against funding fusion because it's not really meant to work. It's meant to be a glimmer of hope to take the heat away from coal and gasoline burning, a way to tell the public "we have the future covered". If the government was even half serious about cheap nuclear energy, they would have reinstated molten salt research back in the 80s when most knowledge base on the subject was still alive (versus today where all experts from the 60s and 70s are either dead or too old to work on this). The reality is that GE, Westinghouse,... are lobbying behind the scenes to prevent this from happening. No, I don't have any real proof of that, but they would be really stupid if they aren't, because they would be the first ones to loose billions in yearly revenue if molten salt reactors materialize. The NRC has zero interest in moving from a prescription based regulatory model to a performance based regulatory model. Since they work based on how you must work, and they have zero regulatory framework for molten salt reactors, hence that's an enourmous entry barrier to molten salt reactors. Even if the US government don't want to actively invest on molten salt nuclear development, they could at least mandate the NRC work with molten salt startup to develop a molten salt regulatory framework without charging them the usual US$ 300/hr fee they charge the light water reactor industry. Just that alone would be enough to create investment interest in the area, since the current implied message from the US government on molten salt reactors is "No way Jose !".
It would take 40 billion to do it the GE / Westinghouse / Areva / Hitachi way of doing (the complete opposite of the startup way). There is already a credible effort to produce a DMSR (KISS version of the Thorium LFTR) in Canada. Terrestrial Energy Inc, Dr. David LeBlanc is working on this. They already have the funding for the next year's work. And due to the far more sane Canadian version of the NRC regulation, they are promising to have the first DMSR in commercial operation in 10 years. Lookup DMSR (denatured molten salt reactor) in youtube. Instead of using Thorium in a breeding configuration, the reactor will startup with a mix of spent nuclear fuel + thorium and will get some extra enriched uranium yearly (about 20% of the uranium required per MWt of a regular water cooled reactor). The problem is there is zero interest in the USA to invest public money on non military nuclear research, unless the party getting the money is already investing millions on republican / democrat politicians. Startups without well connected DC backers are out of the game. The reality is that today green peace has far more political clout than the nuclear industry, they have so much clout that anything remotely related to nuclear gets zero interest from politicians. Its a "radioactive" subject, pun intended. And there we go slaughtering the goose that is laying golden eggs every week.
Proponents of advanced fission products state that advanced fission will be a hundred times safer than current fission (which is already arguably the safest energy source available). The are asking for a pawty 2 billion USD not for research, but to engineer a proof of concept Thorium Fluoride Molten Salt Reactor (LFTR), including the cost to actually startup a mass production line. They state there is zero research involved. Its strictly development/engineering of well understood engineering challenges, mostly chemistry engineering challenges instead of nuclear research. If we stop chasing after unicorns (fusion), we can fix our energy crisis in 15 years (10 to develop and 5 to mass produce enough reactors to replace the first 10% of coal thermal plants with LFTR reactors). The production line would produce one 300MWe reactor every week, enough to replace every coal and gas power station in 30 years or so. There's zero reason not to know about this, there are extensive videos on this in youtube. If you tell GE or Westinghouse to make LFTR happen, then it will cost tens of billions. But if you fund only startups that don't have the typical big inefficient corporation way of thinking this can be done for less than the cost of a single AP1000 nuclear reactor.
That's right, continue to strangle the goose that laid the golden egg. Nuclear power in the USA is already beyond too expensive and all the anti nuclear pundits are hell bent on burdening the industry with evermore cumbersome regulation. Prove the risk exist, beyond any reasonable doubt. Without lots and lots of new nuclear power, the world is doomed to the worst of climate change. Germany's renewable energy plan has only showed us that there are serious limits to how much a country can replace nuclear and fossil fuels with solar and wind. I'm not a fan of current pressurized water reactors, but they are better than any other energy source available right now, except for hydro, geothermal and biomass. Instead of making current nuclear operators life a living hell, why isn't the atomic scientists pushing for public funding of revolutionary new reactors that will be far safer and should be far cheaper than current nuclear, molten salt reactors ? Is it justified to force the industry to prevent accidents that never, ever happened ? This sounds like a fundamentalist ideal, no risk is ever acceptable article. First get rid of all coal and most of natural gas utilization in the world, then prove we can get rid of nuclear as well. But the actual plan seems to be coal is more acceptable than nuclear, which is downright "looney tunes" stupidity.
300k SMS in five hours ? That's just 18 SMS / second. Add three zeros and you're still not making even the oldest GSM network in the world sweat. Sounds like a big bowl of boloney mixed with a lot of malarkey. Perhaps the explanation is since everything is censored in Cuba, perhaps the govt minders were overwhelmed trying to censor that much SMS, that would actually make some sense.
At sea refueling trivially easy ? Yes, it's done often, and it works, but the important aspect isn't if it's a safe/common operation, but rather cost. It's fairly well documented that the cost to deliver jet fuel to a destroyer/cruiser/carrier in the middle of an Ocean is anything but cheap. "trivially easy" utterly disregards the cost of the task at hand, which is high. Just operating oilers to transport fuel is a high enough cost. In the long run, this technology could be perfected to cost less to produce jet fuel onboard a carrier than it would cost to purchase jet fuel on land. Specially if Oil spikes to US$ 200 and above. Energy independence is particularly important to the Armed Forces. Solar energy for the Marines and the Army. Nuclear producing jet fuel for the navy, the kinds of solutions a modern army needs to avoid having your enemy artificially increasing the price to fight a war, by cutting oil supplies.
Yeah, right, before religious groups could brainwash people and it was hard to verify the validity of the crap they were being fed, now it's easy to understand the bible was written 300 years after Christ, by a bunch of politicians that called themselves the Catholic church. Humm, yep, religions are doomed.
Nuclear waste getting recycled is much more practical than energy storage in the scale of a day's electricity production of the the world. I need to look no further than the fact that you don't really understand nuclear technology, just enough to attack it, while I do understand solar, wind, thermal gas/coal plants and nuclear.
Yes, you are fabricating dire predictions. My analysis is in a few years people will be allowed back into Fukushima. Your dire prediction is that Fukushima will be no man's land for decades. And living there right now would be just a slight risk of cancer.
Finally, the German clean energy plan is quoted to cost one trillion euros.... That's a huge JOBS program. It is uneconomical, and even at that astronomical price it's kind of frozen, since they can't add more unstable renewables to the grid like solar and wind, even with all the advantages of Germany's neighbors helping use the excess electricity and supply them energy back when they have short falls.
Nuclear is the safest energy source out there. That is based on hard data, not one the FUD (your dire predictions about the risks of nuclear so you state).
Please show me the cancers or deaths from Fukushima. Until then, all of your "it's a catastrophe", is all HYPE ! Yes, TEPCO was terribly irresponsible, that's their incompetence, not the rest of the world's. Japan has a terrible lack of whistleblower culture that leads to a culture very permissible to those absurds, this isn't a nuclear problem, it's a Japanese problem.
You really need to watch Pandora's Promise, see how the anti nuclear environmentalist movement never takes the time to validate it's assumptions, they aren't interested in asking themselves the hard questions, their movement would crumble if they looked back at their predictions and compare that with reality.
Nuclear waste from water cooled plants is still 99% fuel. We'll need that to startup molten salt reactors. BTW, MSR's can't melt down, the fuel is already molten, they operate at atmospheric pressure, so they have zero tendency to try to spew stuff into the atmosphere, and worst case, they will use around 90% of the fission potential of the nuclear fuel (over 99% in some design choices), so it will produce between 10% and 1% the total waste per unit of energy produced.
The fission products from an MSR can be partitioned before putting it into storage, with 83% of the fission products stable at 10 years, the remainder 17% will take 300 years to become stable, but that's around 0,1% in the best molten salt design (Thorium LFTR) or a light water reactor, or 1% DMSR vs LWR.
You need to learn electrical engineering, transmission systems to understand the crap that you are being fed that wind can power the UK alone, wind alone will give you an essentially useless GRID. It's not a matter of improving the wind turbines. Until those pro solar and wind pundits start talking logically, discussing issues, instead of sweeping it under the rug, they aren't very credible. Germany halted it's renewables plan, even with the advantage of being able to stuff their neighbors when they overproduce and the ability to buy nuclear power from their neighbors when they underproduce electricity, still they can't add more solar to their grid.
The electrical grid has ZERO energy storage characteristics, too much electricity is just as bad as too little. It's the generators jobs to adjust production to demand. Solar and wind can't adjust, they produce variable power, with the solar criteria being the strength of the wind or the available sun light at that second.
Again, look at the actual numbers, deaths, cancers, not your side's fabricated dire predictions. Nuclear is the safest energy source in the world. That is a fact.
Peer review means you don't have the freedom to say whatever you want without scrutiny. Peer review means other must be able to duplicate your conclusions. Even without peer review, there's no documentary that shows an actual one hundred thousand deaths from Chernobyl. There's just predictions. It's been 25 years, show me the deaths, show me hospitals filled with Chernobyl cancer cases ! The reality is the predictions of one million deaths were caused by taking 3% additional chance of cancer on a one million people population and turning into they will all get cancer ! The kind of absurdity that would be exposed by peer review. The anti nuclear shills must do a rebuttal of Pandora's Promise. We're all waiting for you to put your money where your mouth is. If Pandora's Promise is such a bold faced lie, it should be easy to do a low budget rebuttal. You need to look no further than the type of anti nuclear videos on youtube. Every single one of the has been totally rebutted with hard scientific data, that's a kind of peer review.
> How many Fukishimas, windscales, three-mile-islands and chernobyls do we have to have before we say enough is enough. We CAN power this planet on renewables.
Sweet dreaming my friend. Not possible on current technology. Hawai, Arizona, Germany is showing there are LIMITS to how much solar and wind can be added to the grid before destabilizing it. You say solar and wind is cheap, but you only account for the cost of the wind turbine and solar panels, and ignore the cost of redesigning the grid and implementing extremely costly energy storage solutions.
If you are unwilling to expose yourself to any risks, just give up and kill yourself. Life is full of risks. The issue is nuclear is being put against an idealized, impossibly perfect solution. More solar panel installers and wind farm maintainers are killed worldwide every year than nuclear workers, although the 435 operational nuclear reactors in the world produce enough juice to run the entire Europe electricity demand. Nuclear is safer than solar and wind will ever be. Because nuclear is a dense power source, making it economical to adopt the extreme safety attitude it currently enjoys. Just because Japan was irresponsible in it's nuclear regulatory system, doesn't mean North America and Western Europe is.
Until you can think outside your eco fundamentalist bubble, it's impossible to discuss this further. Your statements show that you aren't interested in looking at pro nuclear rational data, you are only interested in drinking the anti nuclear eco fundamentalist cool aid.
I'm no FAN of water cooled, solid fuel reactors, for they are wasting 99,3% of Uranium mined. But still, they are way, way safer than even the cleanest coal power plant, because for each ton of spent nuclear fuel, coal produces tens of thousands of coal ash, filled with mercury, cadmium, arsenic, all neurologic agents, that will remain poisonous FOREVER, because they don't decay. At least Sr90 and Cs137 decay into stable forms after releasing their radioactivity, loosing any harmful radioactive effects after that.
I don't agree with the opinion that Fukushima is worse than Chernobyl. I don't believe it will be even 5% of Chernobyl effects. The reasons Chernobyl were so bad were all due to USSR incompetence: 1 - The reactor was astonishingly unsafe. It has no secondary containment building. It had fundamental safety flaws that caused the explosion during a shutdown. It didn't have advanced computer monitoring systems that can predict problems, analyze all reactor safety parameters hundreds of times per second and show anything of concern. 2 - The explosion blew a 2000 ton reactor top off meters away, the reactor graphite moderator caught fire, exacerbating the radioactive release. This is impossible with a modern reactor 3 - Iodine tablets were no distributed to the affected population. Most cancers from nuclear accidents come from radioactive iodine, but it decays fairly quickly, 7 day half life, so in 70 days it's essentially all gone (rule of thumb = 10 half lives it's 99% gone) This won't ever happen again. The main reason isn't the lessons learned, all 3 lessons were already ingrained in nuclear safety people outside the USSR. Only the USSR would be crazy to do that even back then.
Fukushima might even slowly release the same levels of raw radioactivity, but since it's going into the Pacific, and being released in small doses, it gets diluted very quickly, so people aren't breathing radioactive iodine, Sr, Cs.
No, the pacific isn't lost. Even 50Km away, the Pacific is perfectly safe and fine.
If any of those concerns were a real issue, USA and France would be having serious nuclear incidents all the time. Why is it that France produces 75% of its electricity from nuclear and we don't hear of clusters of cancer cases around nuclear plants ? Why is it that the USA produces more total electricity from nuclear than France, without incident ? Where are the radiation sickness deaths from Fukushima ? Where are the real cancer cases from Fukushima ? The reality still is that the anti nuclear community is still doing it's usual overreaction act around Fukushima. The German greens forced nuclear reactors to be shutdown in a hurry, causing German's CO2 emissions to go up from burning more coal. The net effect of all solar and wind installed completely washed by shutting down just 5 nuclear reactors.
I'm sorry, but I can't agree with any of the actions you propose, because your side get attention to your issues by fearmongering the population. I'm not a nuclear industry representative, I'm not even a nuclear physicist or a nuclear engineer. My pro nuclear feelings are a result of the anti nuclear people selling lies to the general public. My interest on studying nuclear power and fully understanding it comes 99% from correcting your side's fearmongering. I'm against lies and in favor of credible information. Until the anti nuclear shills stop fearmongering, I'm against them.
Spreading lies is never a good thing. It makes your movement a fundamentalist one. Nuclear power IS safe. You concerns are not significant, because as it is, nuclear technology is already extremely safe. Everything has risks. Chernobyl killed far less people than one weeks worth of car accidents in the USA. Chernobyl killed less people than coal kills every month worldwide.
We need to fund new nuclear alternatives that are efficient in using thorium and uranium, if we do that, we can reduce nuclear fission products by 99%. With just the currently available spent nuclear fu
Neither does nuclear ! People are living in the Chernobyl exclusion zones ! By using the word permanently, you already lost the argument because it's not hard data, it's your wild exaggeration of hard scientific data. Chernobyl dumped 5% of the reactor core materials, one million cancer deaths were predicted, it's been 25 years, why can't the anti nuclear pundits produce a scientific peer review study showing at least one hundred thousand actual deaths ????? You anti nuclear shills, have zero credibility among the scientific community. Stop spreading FUD about nuclear. We have been using it for 50 years. Nuclear is safe. Solar and wind will continuously kill far more people per GWh produced than nuclear, because it requires massive installation and maintenance labor. Yes, the oldest nuclear reactors should be replaced with state of the art new ones, but they can't do it, cause the NRC is making it impossible. It's a chicken egg problem.
Yeah, right, yet, show me cancer cases from Cs137 and Sr90 outside of Chernobyl. Nuclear power is the goose that lays golden eggs, and you are strangling all of them. Until you start giving coal power the treatment it DESERVES by killing about 200,000 people/year worldwide and 13,000 people/year in the USA alone, you have ZERO moral authority to try to destroy nuclear power for its most remote risks. Either you are a fossil fuel shill that is being paid to do your best to destroy nuclear power, or you have been brainwashed into believing that nuclear is two orders of magnitude riskier than it is. The realities is nuclear power is worst case the 3 safest power sources in use, if the the safest. We need more nuclear lots of more nuclear.
Invest that money on DMSR reseach. It's a simplified version of the Thorium LFTR reactor. Burning SNF on a DMSR will use up 99% of the fissionable and fertile material, resulting in real nuclear waste (99% fission products), instead of the current nuclear waste which is still 99% nuclear fuel.
The critical step to make the DMSR extremely efficient is the pyro nuclear reprocessing (to remove only fission products and leave all heavy elements in). Even though this is far from the typical nuclear reprocessing (used to separate plutonium from the rest, pyro reprocessing will keep uranium, plutonium, thorium, americium, curium, californium, inside the reactor), it's considered a nuclear proliferation issue. So instead of designing the reactor with an integral pyro reprocessing facility, it's being designed without one, so it could be brought say every 5 years along with nuclear inspectors. Doing reprocessing more often would make the reactor a valuable and reliable source of Molybdenum 99 and Bismuth 213 and other radioisotopes used for radiotherapy cancer treatments. The reactor is continuously making those and many other extremely valuable isotopes.
Real work is being done on this in Canada. Too much NRC red tape to do it in the USA. Terrestrial Energy Inc. Lead nuclear engineer Dr. David LeBlanc. He has a few hours of lectures and being interviewed in youtube about this. He's promising this will happen in less than 10 years, but I'm sure a few hundred million could speed it up a little. Uranium is more valuable than gold (a ton of uranium can produce much more electricity than it's weight in gold). When will we stop blaming nuclear technology for the century old energy political game player in the USA. Everybody gets tax breaks, subsidies,... That's nothing specific to nuclear. There was a single nuclear related death in the last 10 years in the USA, a Uranium mining accident. Nuclear is much safer even than Solar and Wind (kills a few people due to installation and maintenance accidents every year) ! Stop the BS !
The "cold weather energy cell" has been shown to be some bad 12V batteries in some cars (Tesla have the large li-ion battery pack and a more traditional 12V battery). AFAIK, those have been replace, problem solved. Elon tweeted about this about 3-4 months ago. Somebody will correct me in 1,2,3,4,5,...
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I see you are a fair person and so am I.
I want solar and wind to get their fair chance, so I hear you that the extra cost is unfair, but it's a one time cost, so it's not like it's a deal breaker.
They should separate transmission costs and profits from generation costs and apply feed in tariff just to generation costs. And get rid of the $3000 cost.
That would make the number fair.
Hawaii citizens unite. Make it a campaign issue, force the hand of the politicians. Protest.
The interesting challenge is once Hawaii runs over 50% from solar and wind, it will mean overproduction during the day. What to do with the surplus energy ? Do they have viable pumped hydro sites ? Ultra expensive electrical batteries ? Those are challenges that have only been fully solved on much smaller grids that migrated from diesel generators to solar+wind+battery storage, considering ultra high electricity to being with (much higher even than oil thermal plants, due to small scale demand).
Germany is mostly doing it with pumped hydro and selling their overproduction to their neighbors and buying it back when it needs to (selling cheap and buying expensive, they are selling unplanned overproduction and buying surplus energy at peak demand times).
Fact one - Germany's CO2 emissions have gone up since they shutdown nuclear reactors after fukushima, and they still haven't managed to offset that.
google "germany co2 nuclear 2014"
Fact two - Too much electricity in the grid is just as bad as too little.
Solar and wind are unpredictable energy sources, each cloud passing over then leaving a solar panel is changing electricity production, wind gusts are way worse.
Plus you have the problem of what to do if they have a few hours in the winter without wind or a windless summer night. In the peak of winter solar PV is producing 5% of what it produces in the best day of the year, so solar is next to useless all day long in the winter at Germany's latitude range.
I know they have some pumped hydro, some peaking fossil fuel sources, and can import electricity from its neighbors, but that's where the fun begins, if they need their neighbors to have lots of baseload nuclear, hydro, coal, natural gas, the bottom line is they are kind of preventing their neighbors from doing the same, since wind patterns affect large areas.
The Germany clean energy plan is a one trillion euro plan. For a 65GW peak demand grid, and to shift about 40GW worth of fossil fuels and nuclear to renewables. 40GW is 10 full sized nuclear reactors (1333GW each), even using the crazy anti nuclear numbers, that's 10 billion euros each, or 100 billion euros using the crazy inflated numbers the anti nuclear nuts use. One tenth the trillion dollar Energiewende plan.
If the rate is less than 1% more cancers than normal, then you just proven my point.
It will be really proven by the time Fukushima is some 10 years old, and we can show with statistics that cancers among even those most affected by the accidents radiation caused a small extra cancer and a tiny extra death rate. Like Chernobyl, the nuclear community learned very little from Fukushima, cause the mistake was disregard to common nuclear safety knowledge, rather than the need for fundamental redesign of state of the art reactors. The real problem is the reluctance of replacing all Gen II reactors with Gen III+ or Gen IV reactors. Not that I'm a big fan of AP1000 and similar designs, but they are safe enough to have two miles from my home.
Such a finding would both show that the anti nuclear community are very wrong on all of their predictions and should be ignored.
Most people are unaware that there are 435 operational nuclear reactors in the world with an output around 400GW electrical.
My contention is that if nuclear fission were really that unsafe, we would have many more accidents over the decades.
If France and USA can do safe nuclear for 30 years (top 2 users of nuclear fission today) why can't the whole world do safe nuclear ?
You need to look no further than Germany renewables plan, flush with hundreds of billions of euro in funding has stalled. They can't add more wind or solar panels to the Germany grid. The problem isn't money. Every extra solar panel and wind turbine added to the grid increases grid instability a little more.
When are you environmentalist nuts start studying how the electrical grid actually works instead of having fantasies about how it should work.
If solar and wind were so great, Hawaii would have shutdown its oil based thermal plants already. They have very expensive electricity, making renewables cheap, yet it doesn't quite work, cause it's just not that simple.
Get a grip. Without nuclear, there's no hope to solve climate change. And nuclear is not the boogeyman your environmentalist friends have convinced you it is. Zero Fukushima deaths, zero confirmed radiation related cancers. Its been three years. It's already becoming another Chernobyl (as in the environmentalists overblow the problem about a thousand times).
Until the environmentalists show they understand the actual impact of nuclear accidents, accurately predicting the effects of nuclear accidents, in my view they are a bunch of looney tunes alarmists that should be given ZERO credit when the subject in nuclear power.
The limited molten salt reactor research was conducted for military interests (nuclear powered bomber in the 60s). After ICBMs were perfected USAF lost interest in bombers capable of staying in the air for weeks. Oak Ridge National labs managed to get a few more years of molten salt research funding, eventually running a 5MW research reactor for 22000 hours. But since Thorium doesn't produce plutonium, U-233 is bad for bombs and the political interest was in plutonium fast breeders, funding was cancelled and molten salt research was restricted to theoretical work, even after they showed the solution that was proven to work and had none of the drawbacks of fast plutonium breeders (even lead cooled reactors have the problem with fast neutrons degrading internal reactor materials much faster than a thermal reactor).
There are even White House tapes from the Nixon area that document talks between Nixon and California congressman showing there were fully vested in the fast breeders.
So of course the answer is right now zero molten salt reactors operating, but my point is, we don't have LFTR (an advanced molten salt reactor) because its the right solution for civilian usage (99%+ burnup, core materials non reactive with oxygen or water, have all advantages of fast plutonium breeders, plus Thorium is essentially free, and uranium spent nuclear fuel could be diluted at 3% concentration to slowly burnup all spent nuclear fuel, freeze plug, catch pan, negative reactivity coeficient resulting in a truly walk away safe reactor with the sole risk of contamination in case of a precision military strike or a precision comet/asteroid hit).
Then why is GE still proposing a Sodium cooled fast reactor instead of a Lead one ?
How many civilian lead cooled reactors in operation in Russia and former USSR states ?
Just because something works well for subs doesn't mean they are great for civilian needs.
If something was designed for military needs, gets no respect from me, cause it's the same reason we're mostly stuck with LWR and AHWR reactors.
Awareness that we got the light water reactor exactly because it was the solution decided upon for military usage, and since the US govt had no honest interest in fully funding civilian oriented nuclear research, we're so far stuck in LWR reactors that only use 0,65% of mined uranium, that is riddled with required safety systems, overall too expensive exactly because of the insistence on ignoring the simple, efficient solution, because it wasn't seen as good for military usage (molten salt reactors).
If you are only interested in criticizing then for you it's just videos on you tube.
There are many more resources. But since you are clearly not interested in studying the available materials and producing a consistent criticism of the vision around molten salt reactors, I don't see much of any point in trying to debate with you.
I'll reply solely for other's to understand why you are soooo wrong.
There are discussion forums.
And even many of the videos on you tube are deeply technical. If you aren't interested in watching them, then please don't criticize, you are just not interested in new technology.
If you are unwilling to understand the simple fact that large corporations are EXTREMELY RISK AVERSE, they only invest in something AFTER GOVERNMENT funded at least 90% of the basic R&D on that technology (typically more like 95+%), they expect to get that tech for free and do minor refinement and offer that as something great. ... corporate bubble, it will likely be impossible for you to see outside your sanitized view of politics and economics.
If you are inside the GE, Westinghouse,
The basic issues I'm trying to show you have nothing specific to nuclear power.
Its the same reason only Tesla came up with a real, revolutionary electric cars, instead of GM, Ford, Toyota.
You need to look no further than GE S-PRISM. They got all the basic research for free from the US government. The US government put billions towards fast U-238/Pu-239 breeders, then GE invested a few millions, and are unwilling to make the first one happen out of its own pocket. Instead its shopping around the world for the first guinea pig govt to pay for the first reactor, to pay for any mistakes in its design. ... Are no better. They are only interested in investing on absolute sure things, zero balls, zero willingness to take large risks.
If GE was anything like the company that would be interested in thorium, GE would already have the first S-PRISM reactor being built somewhere to put its money where its mouth is. But it doesn't. I rest my case. Westinghouse, AREVA, Toshiba, Bechtel,
Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors are a "breeder reactor", as in they produce more U-233 from Th-232 than they consume.
U-238 -> Pu-239 fast breeders are trouble, because of the Sodium, because of the fast neutrons wreaking havoc inside the reactor, and because Plutonium is probably an even dirtier word than nuclear in the minds of the general population.
If Fast Breeders were a good idea, Russia would be filled with them. They have been operating a few for almost 40 years. If they were economical, they would have super seeded their light water reactor fleet.
The gossip is they always build them in pairs. Two reactors for a single turbine. The maintenance is so heavy, you don't even plan to have both operational at once.
Just lookup sodium fires on youtube.
I can't be OK with another reactor that uses materials that want to spontaneously explode / catch fire with water or oxygen. A really bad idea. Even though they could probably be engineered to be safer than current light water reactors (big pressure cooker at 150 atmospheres / 2500 psi internal pressure). We need a reactor that is safe because it uses the laws of physics smartly instead of trying to defy physics. That's by far the most important feature of molten salt reactors, walk away safe. Impossible to contaminate the surrounding environment unless hit by an asteroid or a precise military strike.
I'm against funding fusion because it's not really meant to work. It's meant to be a glimmer of hope to take the heat away from coal and gasoline burning, a way to tell the public "we have the future covered". ... are lobbying behind the scenes to prevent this from happening. No, I don't have any real proof of that, but they would be really stupid if they aren't, because they would be the first ones to loose billions in yearly revenue if molten salt reactors materialize.
If the government was even half serious about cheap nuclear energy, they would have reinstated molten salt research back in the 80s when most knowledge base on the subject was still alive (versus today where all experts from the 60s and 70s are either dead or too old to work on this). The reality is that GE, Westinghouse,
The NRC has zero interest in moving from a prescription based regulatory model to a performance based regulatory model. Since they work based on how you must work, and they have zero regulatory framework for molten salt reactors, hence that's an enourmous entry barrier to molten salt reactors. Even if the US government don't want to actively invest on molten salt nuclear development, they could at least mandate the NRC work with molten salt startup to develop a molten salt regulatory framework without charging them the usual US$ 300/hr fee they charge the light water reactor industry. Just that alone would be enough to create investment interest in the area, since the current implied message from the US government on molten salt reactors is "No way Jose !".
It would take 40 billion to do it the GE / Westinghouse / Areva / Hitachi way of doing (the complete opposite of the startup way).
There is already a credible effort to produce a DMSR (KISS version of the Thorium LFTR) in Canada. Terrestrial Energy Inc, Dr. David LeBlanc is working on this. They already have the funding for the next year's work. And due to the far more sane Canadian version of the NRC regulation, they are promising to have the first DMSR in commercial operation in 10 years.
Lookup DMSR (denatured molten salt reactor) in youtube.
Instead of using Thorium in a breeding configuration, the reactor will startup with a mix of spent nuclear fuel + thorium and will get some extra enriched uranium yearly (about 20% of the uranium required per MWt of a regular water cooled reactor).
The problem is there is zero interest in the USA to invest public money on non military nuclear research, unless the party getting the money is already investing millions on republican / democrat politicians. Startups without well connected DC backers are out of the game.
The reality is that today green peace has far more political clout than the nuclear industry, they have so much clout that anything remotely related to nuclear gets zero interest from politicians. Its a "radioactive" subject, pun intended.
And there we go slaughtering the goose that is laying golden eggs every week.
Proponents of advanced fission products state that advanced fission will be a hundred times safer than current fission (which is already arguably the safest energy source available).
The are asking for a pawty 2 billion USD not for research, but to engineer a proof of concept Thorium Fluoride Molten Salt Reactor (LFTR), including the cost to actually startup a mass production line.
They state there is zero research involved. Its strictly development/engineering of well understood engineering challenges, mostly chemistry engineering challenges instead of nuclear research.
If we stop chasing after unicorns (fusion), we can fix our energy crisis in 15 years (10 to develop and 5 to mass produce enough reactors to replace the first 10% of coal thermal plants with LFTR reactors). The production line would produce one 300MWe reactor every week, enough to replace every coal and gas power station in 30 years or so.
There's zero reason not to know about this, there are extensive videos on this in youtube.
If you tell GE or Westinghouse to make LFTR happen, then it will cost tens of billions.
But if you fund only startups that don't have the typical big inefficient corporation way of thinking this can be done for less than the cost of a single AP1000 nuclear reactor.
That's right, continue to strangle the goose that laid the golden egg.
Nuclear power in the USA is already beyond too expensive and all the anti nuclear pundits are hell bent on burdening the industry with evermore cumbersome regulation.
Prove the risk exist, beyond any reasonable doubt.
Without lots and lots of new nuclear power, the world is doomed to the worst of climate change. Germany's renewable energy plan has only showed us that there are serious limits to how much a country can replace nuclear and fossil fuels with solar and wind.
I'm not a fan of current pressurized water reactors, but they are better than any other energy source available right now, except for hydro, geothermal and biomass. Instead of making current nuclear operators life a living hell, why isn't the atomic scientists pushing for public funding of revolutionary new reactors that will be far safer and should be far cheaper than current nuclear, molten salt reactors ?
Is it justified to force the industry to prevent accidents that never, ever happened ?
This sounds like a fundamentalist ideal, no risk is ever acceptable article.
First get rid of all coal and most of natural gas utilization in the world, then prove we can get rid of nuclear as well.
But the actual plan seems to be coal is more acceptable than nuclear, which is downright "looney tunes" stupidity.
300k SMS in five hours ? That's just 18 SMS / second.
Add three zeros and you're still not making even the oldest GSM network in the world sweat.
Sounds like a big bowl of boloney mixed with a lot of malarkey.
Perhaps the explanation is since everything is censored in Cuba, perhaps the govt minders were overwhelmed trying to censor that much SMS, that would actually make some sense.
At sea refueling trivially easy ?
Yes, it's done often, and it works, but the important aspect isn't if it's a safe/common operation, but rather cost.
It's fairly well documented that the cost to deliver jet fuel to a destroyer/cruiser/carrier in the middle of an Ocean is anything but cheap. "trivially easy" utterly disregards the cost of the task at hand, which is high.
Just operating oilers to transport fuel is a high enough cost.
In the long run, this technology could be perfected to cost less to produce jet fuel onboard a carrier than it would cost to purchase jet fuel on land.
Specially if Oil spikes to US$ 200 and above.
Energy independence is particularly important to the Armed Forces.
Solar energy for the Marines and the Army. Nuclear producing jet fuel for the navy, the kinds of solutions a modern army needs to avoid having your enemy artificially increasing the price to fight a war, by cutting oil supplies.
Yeah, right, before religious groups could brainwash people and it was hard to verify the validity of the crap they were being fed, now it's easy to understand the bible was written 300 years after Christ, by a bunch of politicians that called themselves the Catholic church. Humm, yep, religions are doomed.
Nuclear waste getting recycled is much more practical than energy storage in the scale of a day's electricity production of the the world.
I need to look no further than the fact that you don't really understand nuclear technology, just enough to attack it, while I do understand solar, wind, thermal gas/coal plants and nuclear.
Yes, you are fabricating dire predictions.
My analysis is in a few years people will be allowed back into Fukushima.
Your dire prediction is that Fukushima will be no man's land for decades.
And living there right now would be just a slight risk of cancer.
Finally, the German clean energy plan is quoted to cost one trillion euros.... That's a huge JOBS program. It is uneconomical, and even at that astronomical price it's kind of frozen, since they can't add more unstable renewables to the grid like solar and wind, even with all the advantages of Germany's neighbors helping use the excess electricity and supply them energy back when they have short falls.
Nuclear is the safest energy source out there. That is based on hard data, not one the FUD (your dire predictions about the risks of nuclear so you state).
Please show me the cancers or deaths from Fukushima. Until then, all of your "it's a catastrophe", is all HYPE !
Yes, TEPCO was terribly irresponsible, that's their incompetence, not the rest of the world's. Japan has a terrible lack of whistleblower culture that leads to a culture very permissible to those absurds, this isn't a nuclear problem, it's a Japanese problem.
You really need to watch Pandora's Promise, see how the anti nuclear environmentalist movement never takes the time to validate it's assumptions, they aren't interested in asking themselves the hard questions, their movement would crumble if they looked back at their predictions and compare that with reality.
Nuclear waste from water cooled plants is still 99% fuel. We'll need that to startup molten salt reactors. BTW, MSR's can't melt down, the fuel is already molten, they operate at atmospheric pressure, so they have zero tendency to try to spew stuff into the atmosphere, and worst case, they will use around 90% of the fission potential of the nuclear fuel (over 99% in some design choices), so it will produce between 10% and 1% the total waste per unit of energy produced.
The fission products from an MSR can be partitioned before putting it into storage, with 83% of the fission products stable at 10 years, the remainder 17% will take 300 years to become stable, but that's around 0,1% in the best molten salt design (Thorium LFTR) or a light water reactor, or 1% DMSR vs LWR.
You need to learn electrical engineering, transmission systems to understand the crap that you are being fed that wind can power the UK alone, wind alone will give you an essentially useless GRID. It's not a matter of improving the wind turbines. Until those pro solar and wind pundits start talking logically, discussing issues, instead of sweeping it under the rug, they aren't very credible. Germany halted it's renewables plan, even with the advantage of being able to stuff their neighbors when they overproduce and the ability to buy nuclear power from their neighbors when they underproduce electricity, still they can't add more solar to their grid.
The electrical grid has ZERO energy storage characteristics, too much electricity is just as bad as too little. It's the generators jobs to adjust production to demand. Solar and wind can't adjust, they produce variable power, with the solar criteria being the strength of the wind or the available sun light at that second.
Again, look at the actual numbers, deaths, cancers, not your side's fabricated dire predictions. Nuclear is the safest energy source in the world. That is a fact.
Peer review means you don't have the freedom to say whatever you want without scrutiny.
Peer review means other must be able to duplicate your conclusions.
Even without peer review, there's no documentary that shows an actual one hundred thousand deaths from Chernobyl. There's just predictions. It's been 25 years, show me the deaths, show me hospitals filled with Chernobyl cancer cases !
The reality is the predictions of one million deaths were caused by taking 3% additional chance of cancer on a one million people population and turning into they will all get cancer ! The kind of absurdity that would be exposed by peer review.
The anti nuclear shills must do a rebuttal of Pandora's Promise. We're all waiting for you to put your money where your mouth is.
If Pandora's Promise is such a bold faced lie, it should be easy to do a low budget rebuttal.
You need to look no further than the type of anti nuclear videos on youtube. Every single one of the has been totally rebutted with hard scientific data, that's a kind of peer review.
> How many Fukishimas, windscales, three-mile-islands and chernobyls do we have to have before we say enough is enough. We CAN power this planet on renewables.
Sweet dreaming my friend. Not possible on current technology.
Hawai, Arizona, Germany is showing there are LIMITS to how much solar and wind can be added to the grid before destabilizing it.
You say solar and wind is cheap, but you only account for the cost of the wind turbine and solar panels, and ignore the cost of redesigning the grid and implementing extremely costly energy storage solutions.
If you are unwilling to expose yourself to any risks, just give up and kill yourself. Life is full of risks.
The issue is nuclear is being put against an idealized, impossibly perfect solution.
More solar panel installers and wind farm maintainers are killed worldwide every year than nuclear workers, although the 435 operational nuclear reactors in the world produce enough juice to run the entire Europe electricity demand.
Nuclear is safer than solar and wind will ever be. Because nuclear is a dense power source, making it economical to adopt the extreme safety attitude it currently enjoys. Just because Japan was irresponsible in it's nuclear regulatory system, doesn't mean North America and Western Europe is.
Until you can think outside your eco fundamentalist bubble, it's impossible to discuss this further.
Your statements show that you aren't interested in looking at pro nuclear rational data, you are only interested in drinking the anti nuclear eco fundamentalist cool aid.
I'm no FAN of water cooled, solid fuel reactors, for they are wasting 99,3% of Uranium mined.
But still, they are way, way safer than even the cleanest coal power plant, because for each ton of spent nuclear fuel, coal produces tens of thousands of coal ash, filled with mercury, cadmium, arsenic, all neurologic agents, that will remain poisonous FOREVER, because they don't decay.
At least Sr90 and Cs137 decay into stable forms after releasing their radioactivity, loosing any harmful radioactive effects after that.
I don't agree with the opinion that Fukushima is worse than Chernobyl. I don't believe it will be even 5% of Chernobyl effects.
The reasons Chernobyl were so bad were all due to USSR incompetence:
1 - The reactor was astonishingly unsafe. It has no secondary containment building. It had fundamental safety flaws that caused the explosion during a shutdown. It didn't have advanced computer monitoring systems that can predict problems, analyze all reactor safety parameters hundreds of times per second and show anything of concern.
2 - The explosion blew a 2000 ton reactor top off meters away, the reactor graphite moderator caught fire, exacerbating the radioactive release. This is impossible with a modern reactor
3 - Iodine tablets were no distributed to the affected population. Most cancers from nuclear accidents come from radioactive iodine, but it decays fairly quickly, 7 day half life, so in 70 days it's essentially all gone (rule of thumb = 10 half lives it's 99% gone)
This won't ever happen again. The main reason isn't the lessons learned, all 3 lessons were already ingrained in nuclear safety people outside the USSR. Only the USSR would be crazy to do that even back then.
Fukushima might even slowly release the same levels of raw radioactivity, but since it's going into the Pacific, and being released in small doses, it gets diluted very quickly, so people aren't breathing radioactive iodine, Sr, Cs.
No, the pacific isn't lost. Even 50Km away, the Pacific is perfectly safe and fine.
If any of those concerns were a real issue, USA and France would be having serious nuclear incidents all the time.
Why is it that France produces 75% of its electricity from nuclear and we don't hear of clusters of cancer cases around nuclear plants ?
Why is it that the USA produces more total electricity from nuclear than France, without incident ?
Where are the radiation sickness deaths from Fukushima ? Where are the real cancer cases from Fukushima ?
The reality still is that the anti nuclear community is still doing it's usual overreaction act around Fukushima.
The German greens forced nuclear reactors to be shutdown in a hurry, causing German's CO2 emissions to go up from burning more coal. The net effect of all solar and wind installed completely washed by shutting down just 5 nuclear reactors.
I'm sorry, but I can't agree with any of the actions you propose, because your side get attention to your issues by fearmongering the population. I'm not a nuclear industry representative, I'm not even a nuclear physicist or a nuclear engineer. My pro nuclear feelings are a result of the anti nuclear people selling lies to the general public. My interest on studying nuclear power and fully understanding it comes 99% from correcting your side's fearmongering. I'm against lies and in favor of credible information. Until the anti nuclear shills stop fearmongering, I'm against them.
Spreading lies is never a good thing. It makes your movement a fundamentalist one.
Nuclear power IS safe. You concerns are not significant, because as it is, nuclear technology is already extremely safe.
Everything has risks. Chernobyl killed far less people than one weeks worth of car accidents in the USA. Chernobyl killed less people than coal kills every month worldwide.
We need to fund new nuclear alternatives that are efficient in using thorium and uranium, if we do that, we can reduce nuclear fission products by 99%. With just the currently available spent nuclear fu
Neither does nuclear !
People are living in the Chernobyl exclusion zones !
By using the word permanently, you already lost the argument because it's not hard data, it's your wild exaggeration of hard scientific data.
Chernobyl dumped 5% of the reactor core materials, one million cancer deaths were predicted, it's been 25 years, why can't the anti nuclear pundits produce a scientific peer review study showing at least one hundred thousand actual deaths ?????
You anti nuclear shills, have zero credibility among the scientific community.
Stop spreading FUD about nuclear. We have been using it for 50 years. Nuclear is safe. Solar and wind will continuously kill far more people per GWh produced than nuclear, because it requires massive installation and maintenance labor.
Yes, the oldest nuclear reactors should be replaced with state of the art new ones, but they can't do it, cause the NRC is making it impossible. It's a chicken egg problem.
Yeah, right, yet, show me cancer cases from Cs137 and Sr90 outside of Chernobyl.
Nuclear power is the goose that lays golden eggs, and you are strangling all of them.
Until you start giving coal power the treatment it DESERVES by killing about 200,000 people/year worldwide and 13,000 people/year in the USA alone, you have ZERO moral authority to try to destroy nuclear power for its most remote risks.
Either you are a fossil fuel shill that is being paid to do your best to destroy nuclear power, or you have been brainwashed into believing that nuclear is two orders of magnitude riskier than it is.
The realities is nuclear power is worst case the 3 safest power sources in use, if the the safest.
We need more nuclear lots of more nuclear.
Invest that money on DMSR reseach. It's a simplified version of the Thorium LFTR reactor. Burning SNF on a DMSR will use up 99% of the fissionable and fertile material, resulting in real nuclear waste (99% fission products), instead of the current nuclear waste which is still 99% nuclear fuel.
The critical step to make the DMSR extremely efficient is the pyro nuclear reprocessing (to remove only fission products and leave all heavy elements in). Even though this is far from the typical nuclear reprocessing (used to separate plutonium from the rest, pyro reprocessing will keep uranium, plutonium, thorium, americium, curium, californium, inside the reactor), it's considered a nuclear proliferation issue. So instead of designing the reactor with an integral pyro reprocessing facility, it's being designed without one, so it could be brought say every 5 years along with nuclear inspectors.
Doing reprocessing more often would make the reactor a valuable and reliable source of Molybdenum 99 and Bismuth 213 and other radioisotopes used for radiotherapy cancer treatments.
The reactor is continuously making those and many other extremely valuable isotopes.
Real work is being done on this in Canada. Too much NRC red tape to do it in the USA. ... That's nothing specific to nuclear.
Terrestrial Energy Inc. Lead nuclear engineer Dr. David LeBlanc.
He has a few hours of lectures and being interviewed in youtube about this.
He's promising this will happen in less than 10 years, but I'm sure a few hundred million could speed it up a little.
Uranium is more valuable than gold (a ton of uranium can produce much more electricity than it's weight in gold).
When will we stop blaming nuclear technology for the century old energy political game player in the USA.
Everybody gets tax breaks, subsidies,
There was a single nuclear related death in the last 10 years in the USA, a Uranium mining accident. Nuclear is much safer even than Solar and Wind (kills a few people due to installation and maintenance accidents every year) !
Stop the BS !
That's right. I suck at being funny !
The "cold weather energy cell" has been shown to be some bad 12V batteries in some cars (Tesla have the large li-ion battery pack and a more traditional 12V battery). AFAIK, those have been replace, problem solved. Elon tweeted about this about 3-4 months ago. Somebody will correct me in 1,2,3,4,5,...