To be fair it's a very slow kiss of death. I expect by 2020 Tesla alone will be delivering around 300k vehicles/year. Even at that pace, Tesla will still be less than 5% the number of vehicles delivered than Toyota. You are conflating to separate aspects. 1 - It will take decades until 50% of new cars sold are electric cars, to get to just 10% of new cars being electric cars should happen from 2020-2025. 2 - Every electric car in the roads are way less profitable for fossil fuel companies We'll see by 2025 a measurable reduction in oil consumption per capta, since new electric vehicle purchases will trend towards higher utilization cars, so even 20% of all cars in the road being electrical could reduce oil utilization by 35-40%. Right now we're seeing EVs being purchased by green minded rich people. Once EVs are a little bit more affordable and their lower maintenance costs are proven, we'll see people with enough savings to justify owning EVs primarily for their cost X benefit analysis. Then the Oil companies will squirm big time. So no, I wouldn't short oil companies yet, but between 2020 and 2030 we'll start seeing a substantial challenge to their shareholder value proposition. The more expensive oil gets, the more economical EVs become. That will be the ultimate kiss of death of the oil companies, they won't be able to capitalize on really expensive oil, because it will be too expensive to compete with EVs. US$ 200 / barrel oil would make EVs very cheap comparatively.
Never gonna happen. But if you buy the base Tesla and drive it a lot for 15 years, in the end, the cost of the car is fully paid by savings in gas and maintenance. That's right, the car comes out essentially free if you drive it a lot (and keep it for a really long time). Electrical battery prices will drop but not that much. They will always keep EVs significantly more expensive than normal gas cars, but you can save $5K / yr in gas and maintenance costs if you drive a lot (and put solar panels in your house).
This whole "negotiating best price" argument is a farce and you know it. The reason you don't get to negotiate prices when buying a Tesla is there's a 6 week production backlog. They are not desperate to sell you the car, they have thousands of customers in line. It's an awesome car. Perhaps if Detroit stopped innovating at a snails pace and started actually put brilliant, radically innovative designers to design cars, without lawyers and the overall poisonous corporate culture stepping on their toes all the time, perhaps they could make a car that will truly compete with Tesla. Until then, Tesla rules ! For decades, Detroit has innovated at a snails pace, catering to the most conservative customers the US has. My message to car dealers is R.I.P. You are just dying an ultra slow, agonizing death, cause you don't care one bit about your customers.
The reality is electric cars are wayyyyy less profitable for "energy companies" than gasoline cars. Mainly because you can put this thing called solar panels on your roof and charge your cars with your own generated electricity (either directly, or sell your surplus to the grid during the day and buy it back in the wee hours when your car is home charging). Electric Vehicles + Solar panels are the kiss of death for all fossil fuel based energy companies.
In the greenies world, nuclear was always an unacceptable evil. But if you look around, they protest even large hydro dams as well, claiming they are too expensive. They tried to abort construction of two large hydro dams in Brazil because "wind and solar would be less expensive".
The problem isn't the radical green mindset, it's when their opinion got traction and started infesting the general liberal mindset. That I believe happened as the main ripple effect of TMI.
We need to let the world know that radiation is everywhere. Our bodies are much more radioactive than the environment around us. Bananas are incredibly radioactive due to high Potassium 40 content. The big culprit is utter lack of rational radioactivity education. We should educate our young about radiation even more than we educate them about fire. At least fire we can just stay away from it. But radiation is everywhere.
Dam right. It doesn't just influence. In my opinion the nuclear power politics is essentially violently choking the nuclear industry (as far as new installations go). The real problem is with all the huge hoopla, revenue guarantees, political support and overall coolness around wind and solar, plus the explicit decision to invest essentially zero on R&D for new nuclear technologies (outside of minor improvements to water cooled, uranium fueled, fission plants), the game is rigged towards killing fission moving forward. This started back at Three Mile Island. If you compare the nuclear industry with the airlines, it would be the same if the Airlines were still flying 70s era 40+ yr old 737, 727 and 747, instead of buying new aircraft.
It won't launch in 2014, but I believe it will launch in 2015. SpaceX has been pretty busy, and they must prioritize fulfilling the current high volume Falcon 9v1.1 launches rather than getting the new rocket ready. This is what happens when you don't have the one billion dollar per year subsidy that ULA enjoys just to upkeep its infrastructure or the billions that SLS suppliers make to rehash old space shuttle rocket technology for the Ares rocket. We need to remember that SpaceX has advanced the space industry in it's less than a decade of life more than all combined advancement in the industry in the 20 years prior. And they done that with very limited funding, compared to ULA or SLS contractors.
I believe we need an all of the above solution (nuclear, solar, wind, biomass,...). In reality, nuclear is just lip service, it's not really an all of the above solution. So I'm very loud when I sense the lip servicing, in the direction of exposing the lie (the lip service BS).
Nuclear is the only solution that could provide electricity to 100% of the world needs. The ONLY solution. Solar and Wind require huge technological breakthroughs in energy storage that are still in the future.
But....... The main reason nuclear is expensive today is the result of a chicken egg problem caused since Three Mile Island: Nuclear became expensive after nuclear operators backed off from installing new reactors after TMI, nuclear has no chance of becoming cheaper because it has low volume of nuclear reactor installations. Nuclear could be at least 20% cheaper if there were scale/volume in the nuclear construction business and the NRC streamlined the regulatory process with a focus of providing a predictable model (if you comply with this rules new installations will get certified at an X maximum NRC regulation costs).
Do you know the NRC bills nuclear operators US$ 300 / hr they spent certifying new nuclear reactors, and that every new nuclear plant demands like 20000 hours of regulatory work ? This adds up to tens of millions of regulatory costs, with zero certainty to the nuclear operator.
Until its mandated that all nuclear operators must reprocess nuclear fuel at least twice this will continue, because it's cheaper to build nuclear fuel from freshly enriched uranium instead of doing reprocessing. Some will say "but reprocessing isn't legal". It is legal in the USA, it's just not done as it's more expensive than building fresh fuel.
This isn't politics, it's economics. Reprocessing of nuclear fuel was forbidden for a while late 70s/early 80s, but that prohibbition has been rescinded for decades. Now it's very likely that should a nuclear reprocessing facility starts, it will attract thousands of crackpot anti nuclear protesters from all over the world to protest that reprocessing is _____ (insert your favorite bad word).
Nuclear waste from once through (no reprocessing) is 99,3% fissionable material for light water reactors, about 98,7% from heavy water reactors. There are reactors designed to take this fuel in and fission it completely, Molten Salt reactors and Sodium cooled fast reactors. There is no commercially operational molten salt reactors and sodium cooled reactors in commercial operation only in Russia sphere of influence. But there is a solution. The real problem is after Three Mile Island nuclear is seen as an evil technology that must be avoided at all costs and should get near zero public research investment. The problem isn't it can't be done, is republicans are okay with nuclear, but are more okay with natural gas and coal, while democrats are against anything that says nuclear anywhere.
The reality is creationism shouldn't get any time because this debate has been done and it got no traction. What matters is the mainstream scientific community, peer reviewed publications, scrutinized by the worldwide biology / genetic PhDs of the world. In that arena creationism has been thoroughly debunked. Cosmos isn't a scientific discussion program, it's a scientific education program. So unproven theories should not be given any credit in such a medium.
Of course, Cosmos is a TV show, the National Geographic could choose to show it. But I doubt the current producers would accept to show credible scientific theories side by side with creationism.
People that believe in creationism as hard scientific data usually don't have much of a measurable IQ, BTW. Teaching creationism at church sunday school is one thing, but in high school, nonononono !
The high cost of nuclear is the result of Nuclear being ostracized since Three Mile Island. It's the classical chicken-egg problem. It's too expensive because it has no scale, and it has no scale because it's too expensive. Plus water cooled reactors can't be very cheap to begin with. And until Nuclear can be made cool again, neither nuclear operators nor nuclear suppliers will do anything to lower costs.
Finally, the anti nuclear movement is very strong inside the NRC, my perception is the NRC will only be happy when they finish up with the whole nuclear industry. Like goes the old saying about the FAA, and you can replace FAA with NRC, we're not happy until you're unhappy. They have no incentive to keep nuclear affordable. They don't care about the costs of their measures, even the ones that aren't essential to safety. They will happily create regulatory burden with huge costs that increase nuclear safety very little. This isn't particular to the NRC. It happens all the time in the FAA, FDA, DoE, DoT,... It's the law of the land of the US federal govt.
I believe that maximizing utilization of nuclear material is extremely important for any Gen IV tech, regardless of Uranium costs. Nuclear worst enemy isn't cost, it's PR ! So the more we can deconstruct all anti nuclear pundits critics the better. Perhaps you haven't realized nuclear is essentially impossible to build today in CA, NY, New England, Germany, do you ? We need reactors that break the mold of all criticism that created that anti nuclear stance. One of the many advantages of molten salt reactors is the salt coolant, nuclear fuel and fission products are all mixed up in the core, specially in the DMSR, where you will have a mix of: Th232, U232, U233, U235, U238, Np, Pu238, Pu239, Pu240, Am and Cu, makes the material essentially useless for extraction of nuclear material. I have nothing against building new current Gen III+ reactors where possible. But we need a cheaper, better solution. I'm hoping the DMSR will be the first to market Gen IV modular reactor, breaking away from the valid criticism that water cooled nukes are enormous pressure cookers being contained by ultra expensive safety systems. Molten Salt reactors are essentially at ambient pressure, the core material solidifies quickly as it cools, so it's arguably safe even in case the reactor is struck with a precision military strike (or a comet), since there's no pressure trying to throw nuclear material afar. Plus it would be useful to have a reactor that has less proliferation potential even than a solid fuel water cooled nuke.
CANDU is a bit better than LWR, but not by much. Going from using 0,65% of Uranium to about twice as much is still very low efficiency. There's no way around it with solid fuel reactors. All water cooled reactors such in efficiency. In a way, the DMSR is the least efficient molten salt reactor design, and still its over one order of magnitude more efficient (considering both how much fissile material gets split + higher efficiency from higher temperature operation). The details on David LeBlanc's DMSR are still confidential, it is expected to use a different coolant salt exactly to avoid producing the dreaded tritium.
It's being done, but outside the USA. Terrestrial Energy Inc of Canada are developing a simpler version of the LFTR reactor, the DMSR, operating on a mix of Thorium and Uranium, with the ability to be at least 50x more efficient than regular LWR reactors (as in GWh of energy produced per ton of fissile/fertile material fed into the reactor). Since it's a molten salt / molten fuel design, once the reactor is decommissioned, it's core materials can be recycled into a new reactor. They are skipping the nuclear material reprocessing (as well as a few others technological advantages of LFTR that carry perceived regulatory hurdles). But reprocessing could be performed every so many years, for a huge gain in efficiency (the more fission products kept inside the reactor, the less efficient it gets). The main difference of LFTR to DMSR is the DMSR always runs of a mix of Thorium and enriched uranium, such that any U-233 produced is instantly mixed with U-238, such that it makes the U-233 produced just as hard to extract than U-235 from mined uranium. But contrary to regular water cooled / solid fuel reactors, Xe-135 produced is immediately captured at the top of the reactor (Xe-135 is the biggest efficiency problem in solid fuel reactors), plus the molten fuel means annual fuel top offs can be done without stopping the reactor, making for a reactor that can run much closer to 100% of the time. Finally as all molten fuel / molten coolant reactors, it has the drain tank, the catch pan and the freeze plug that makes the reactor walk away safe (if the reactor overheats the freeze plug melts draining the core material into the drain tank, if the reactor suffers a leak the leakage either solidify plugging the leak or drains into the catch pan. And finally, since the core material is a solid below 300C, and there's nothing at any high pressure, the reactor isn't trying to throw radioactive materials into the atmosphere. Hopefully this will be online by 2022. Long video (73 minutes): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... Bottom line, if this works (I think it will), doing a full blown LFTR Thorium reactor will be much easier, since the DMSR is in most ways a simplification of the full LFTR reactor.
I don't agree with your quoted cost for Fukushima cleanup. The pattern so far has been of wildly inflated and some fully made up numbers about Fukushima, so I don't agree with any predictions until they actually materialize.
>Very little of that was directly due to the aircraft though, most of it was self-inflicted damage due to the way the US responded. The same argument can be made that the Fukushima exclusion zone is much larger than necessary and that nuclear power plant remediation procedures are far more costly than necessary. Should we accept that the LNT model is wrong, the real procedures that will have to be undertaken would be reduced by about 75%.
The reality is if the LNT model were right, there would have been about a hundred times more cancers from Chernobyl than actually happened. Remember the prediction of millions of cancer deaths from Chernobyl ? Countries no longer under the influence of Russia that were very close to Chernobyl report very little cancers compared to the dire predictions. So the massive cover up doesn't quite pan out. And there is people living back in the Chernobyl exclusion area, in defiance of the military blockade, people drinking radioactive water. If the LNT model were right, they would have cancers by the buckets, which isn't actually happening. The reality is the only real serious risk in both Chernobyl and Fukushima are Thyroid cancer from radioactive iodine, which has an 8 day half life, so 99.99% is gone in 80 days (10 half lives means 99.99% is gone). Our bodies deal with radiation all the time. We have radioactive Potassium-40 and Carbon-14 in our bodies decaying all the time. We breathe radioactive Radon all the time, cause it seeps from Thorium decay inside the earth. We can avoid fire in order not to get burned. We can't avoid radiation, it's everywhere.
Nuclear is the safest energy source out there, and it doesn't have to be expensive, if we stop with the sensationalism and approach it with responsibility and sobriety.
Chernobyl had:
No secondary containment structure
A few serious safety risks, which combined with the lack of a secondary containment really made it an accident waiting to happen Both those bad features had been known for over a decade as a huge safety risk. Only the USSR would dare build a reactor without secondary containment. That is indisputable, and should Chernobyl had a secondary containment, it would have been an accident a little worse than Three Mile Island
Fukushima was an old Gen II reactor. About as old as the oldest operating reactors in the world. That accident would have been impossible in a modern AP1000 since the reactor has passive cooling capabilities, able to go for days without any external power. Besides they had been warned both that its Tsunami defenses were inadequate and that they shouldn't put all diesel generators in the basement.
In both cases it's like trying to use a safety problem of a first generation 737 as a reason not to fly 787's or using a safety problem on a A300 as a reason not to fly A380s.
New nuclear isn't cheap but isn't expensive either. China, India and South Korea are building new reactors on a cost effective basis. There are cheaper solutions that are even safer, with the real problem being that vested nuclear suppliers don't want to invest on something that will give them less revenue.
Nuclear upfront investment is expensive, but nuclear reactors are far cheaper to operate after built even than coal, like 1/3rd the cost.
Even natural gas exploration and distribution kills people every year. Hundreds worldwide. It's just that those deaths are one or two here, one or two there, plus there's no sensationalism about industrial accidents that kill a few people.
Over the last 10 years there was a single nuclear related death in the USA, a uranium mining accident. And if you go back 50 years, there are very few deaths related to nuclear stuff.
France actually produces less total electricity from nuclear than the USA, but its over 75% of their total electricity, also with just a handful of deaths over a long period.
Should just the diesel generators for Fukushima been fine after the Tsunami, it would have been an example of how resilient nuclear can be in the face of extreme accidents.
No, Germany hurriedly shutdown its oldest nuclear reactors after Fukushima, under the fear of Bavarian Tsunamis and eventual low intensity earthquakes that are non events. Now not only their emissions are up, as well as Germany is even more dependent on Russia, which make them weak in dealing with Mr. Putin's plan to rebuild part of the USSR empire.
How much 9/11 losses caused on the American economy ? Studies place the price tag at 2 trillion USD ! Again, then why are we letting the airlines continue to operate ? Can we honestly guarantee a 9/11 style attack will never, ever happen again ?
A Chernobyl style accident is essentially impossible to happen again. It wasn't the first stupid idea coming from Russia, the stupidity continues right now (in other areas). Nukes without secondary containment were a stupid idea only the Russians would be stupid enough to pursue. And the other problems with that reactor were the result of it being a knockoff from the USA design before it was fixed.
The Tsunami reconstruction is projected to cost US$ 300 billion. Let's maintain that number for perspective.
There are credible, rational, facts based studies that show tens of millions of people would have died if we had no nuclear power stations using coal instead. Wanna put a price tag to those lifes ? Those same studies show that nuclear is the safest energy source per GWh produced in the USA, and France. I was educated with the thinking that instead of looking for the worse possible way of doing something, instead we learn what to do from the BEST and what not to do from the WORSE.
Yeah go right ahead and conflate the most wildly unsafe nuclear power plant in the world with all of the others with a secondary containment building. With proper safe design. Go ahead and spread all of your anti nuclear paranoia non sense. While we are at it, why don't we push the disapearance of Air Malasia Flight 370 as an excuse to ground all airliners, eventually leading to shuting down the whole airline industry for good. It's the kind of wisdom the anti nuclear wise man are proposing.
The only real way to get rid of coal is coming up with a cheaper replacement. You might even get away with banning coal in a few developed countries, but if you care about climate change, this will solve nothing. If China and India alone are allowed to continue with their insatiable consumption of coal, they would offset any reduction in coal consumption in North America and Europe in a decade or so. Until we acknowledge that solar and wind aren't a credible solution to replace even 50% of coal and natural gas consumption, we can't begin to focus on the real solution. The only greenhouse gas free solution to replace coal is nuclear. Nuclear doesn't have to be expensive. It's expensive in the USA and most of Europe because:
- The local nuclear regulatory agencies are being lead by people with the hidden mandate of making nuclear as expensive as possible
- An extremely vocal minority want to get rid of all nuclear power, immediately
- the extremely low volume of new nuclear reactor installations make current technology even more expensive
- the custom of making tiny changes to new nuclear power plants every few years, preventing standardization
- new nuclear research is based on an assumption that current nuclear isn't safe enough (when it actually is plenty safe, there has been zero Generation III nuclear power plant accidents)
- current nuclear technology (light water, solid fuel) are safe because of the plethora of expensive systems used to make it safe There are nuclear designs that are safe because its designed to be safe (using gravity, chemically stable coolants, the advantage of having the nuclear fuel dissolved with the coolant), yet that tech has been banned for 40 years since it doesn't produce plutonium for nuclear bombs, that tech avoids the vast majority of all expensive safety systems, being walk away safe I don't love nuclear, I'm just really scared of climate change, and the "let's pretend we're solving it with solar+wind initiative" has gone too far already.
Typing this on a Chromebook ARM (dual Cortex A15). 2GB RAM, 16GB Flash. With it were 4GB of RAM and 32GB of Flash, and there's no Java plugin for Cortex ARM CPUs, so I need another computer to do banking. Very convenient machine otherwise, no need to worry about moving it while powered on (zero moving parts). Don't even need to power it off, close the lid. A full battery can hold the system in a suspended mode for almost a week. Thanks to having linux under the hood instead of EvilWindows !
The real story here is Tesla success is making everybody else look bad. They are a threat to much more than the car dealers. They are a threat to the innovate at a snails pace mantra of Detroit. They are a threat to big oil companies. Electricity is about 1/4 the cost of gasoline mile per mile (even comparing a Model S with a Prius, even considering the Model S is a large premium sedan, versus the Prius being a mid size). And they got this far in less than two years of Model S sales. Give them another 5 years and the auto industry will be undergoing an earthquake of innovation with Tesla at the forefront and few companies with enough agility to try to follow. It won't take long until a few of those state representatives don't get re-elected for their Tesla actions. Tesla adoption is spreading like wildfire. If Tesla had twice the li-ion battery supply, they would be delivering twice as much.
The problem isn't the spent fuel. The problem isn't the actual cost of the reactors. The cost is: 1 - The NRC system leaves propective nuclear operators of new plants with an enormous uncertainty, even the part that depends solely on the NRC has no certainty. It's the typical big, government, setup to make government important, and the nuclear operators standing on their knees to get something 2 - Political uncertainty. The areas that consume the most electricity in the USA are anti nuclear. You can't even think about installing a nuke in CA, or the Northwest 3 - Lack of economies of scale. If a nuclear operator were to make a deal to start construction of a dozen nuclear reactors in the next ten years they would get a much better deal from suppliers, but who would be crazy to even try that with #1 and #2 ? 4 - Solid Fuel, Water cooled reactors are the most risky of all technologies. And the new ones that offered much better alternatives were killed because they would otherwise kill coal and natural gas. I'm not a big fan of the IFR (Sodium Cooled Fast reactor) but even with the Sodium risk it should be a safer, cheaper reactor, but 5 - The better solution was proven to work in the 60s. But since it did produced material for nuclear bombs, and it was outside the mainsteam train off though at the time, it got killed.
Please take a look at: http://slashdot.org/comments.p... The reality is spent nuclear fuel isn't the problem. Better reactors use the nuclear fuel much better, resulting in much less, actual nuclear waste. There's no real problem with the barrels of spent nuclear fuel after they are cool enough to move from the spent fuel pools into the barrels for the next 20-30 years. As long as we decide to fund the better solution. Thorium molten salt reactors (like the LFTR and the DMSR) will use the spent nuclear fuel as startup fuel, keeping that material in the reactor until it's 99% fissioned. Light water solid fuel uranium reactors are the solution for the US Navy, which is fine for a small submarine / aircraft carrier reactor (even the largest Aircraft Carrier has much smaller reactors than the usual GW plus civilian reactors). The NRC has refused to either create a regulatory framework for molten salt reactors or switch from a hard rules based to a performance based regulation that the Canadian nuclear regulatory agency is adopting for molten salt reactors. It's like trying to regulate a turbofan with internal combustion regulations.
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To be fair it's a very slow kiss of death.
I expect by 2020 Tesla alone will be delivering around 300k vehicles/year. Even at that pace, Tesla will still be less than 5% the number of vehicles delivered than Toyota.
You are conflating to separate aspects.
1 - It will take decades until 50% of new cars sold are electric cars, to get to just 10% of new cars being electric cars should happen from 2020-2025.
2 - Every electric car in the roads are way less profitable for fossil fuel companies
We'll see by 2025 a measurable reduction in oil consumption per capta, since new electric vehicle purchases will trend towards higher utilization cars, so even 20% of all cars in the road being electrical could reduce oil utilization by 35-40%. Right now we're seeing EVs being purchased by green minded rich people. Once EVs are a little bit more affordable and their lower maintenance costs are proven, we'll see people with enough savings to justify owning EVs primarily for their cost X benefit analysis. Then the Oil companies will squirm big time.
So no, I wouldn't short oil companies yet, but between 2020 and 2030 we'll start seeing a substantial challenge to their shareholder value proposition.
The more expensive oil gets, the more economical EVs become. That will be the ultimate kiss of death of the oil companies, they won't be able to capitalize on really expensive oil, because it will be too expensive to compete with EVs. US$ 200 / barrel oil would make EVs very cheap comparatively.
Never gonna happen. But if you buy the base Tesla and drive it a lot for 15 years, in the end, the cost of the car is fully paid by savings in gas and maintenance.
That's right, the car comes out essentially free if you drive it a lot (and keep it for a really long time).
Electrical battery prices will drop but not that much. They will always keep EVs significantly more expensive than normal gas cars, but you can save $5K / yr in gas and maintenance costs if you drive a lot (and put solar panels in your house).
This whole "negotiating best price" argument is a farce and you know it.
The reason you don't get to negotiate prices when buying a Tesla is there's a 6 week production backlog. They are not desperate to sell you the car, they have thousands of customers in line.
It's an awesome car.
Perhaps if Detroit stopped innovating at a snails pace and started actually put brilliant, radically innovative designers to design cars, without lawyers and the overall poisonous corporate culture stepping on their toes all the time, perhaps they could make a car that will truly compete with Tesla. Until then, Tesla rules !
For decades, Detroit has innovated at a snails pace, catering to the most conservative customers the US has.
My message to car dealers is R.I.P. You are just dying an ultra slow, agonizing death, cause you don't care one bit about your customers.
The reality is electric cars are wayyyyy less profitable for "energy companies" than gasoline cars.
Mainly because you can put this thing called solar panels on your roof and charge your cars with your own generated electricity (either directly, or sell your surplus to the grid during the day and buy it back in the wee hours when your car is home charging).
Electric Vehicles + Solar panels are the kiss of death for all fossil fuel based energy companies.
In the greenies world, nuclear was always an unacceptable evil. But if you look around, they protest even large hydro dams as well, claiming they are too expensive. They tried to abort construction of two large hydro dams in Brazil because "wind and solar would be less expensive".
The problem isn't the radical green mindset, it's when their opinion got traction and started infesting the general liberal mindset. That I believe happened as the main ripple effect of TMI.
We need to let the world know that radiation is everywhere. Our bodies are much more radioactive than the environment around us. Bananas are incredibly radioactive due to high Potassium 40 content. The big culprit is utter lack of rational radioactivity education. We should educate our young about radiation even more than we educate them about fire. At least fire we can just stay away from it. But radiation is everywhere.
Dam right. It doesn't just influence. In my opinion the nuclear power politics is essentially violently choking the nuclear industry (as far as new installations go).
The real problem is with all the huge hoopla, revenue guarantees, political support and overall coolness around wind and solar, plus the explicit decision to invest essentially zero on R&D for new nuclear technologies (outside of minor improvements to water cooled, uranium fueled, fission plants), the game is rigged towards killing fission moving forward. This started back at Three Mile Island.
If you compare the nuclear industry with the airlines, it would be the same if the Airlines were still flying 70s era 40+ yr old 737, 727 and 747, instead of buying new aircraft.
It won't launch in 2014, but I believe it will launch in 2015. SpaceX has been pretty busy, and they must prioritize fulfilling the current high volume Falcon 9v1.1 launches rather than getting the new rocket ready. This is what happens when you don't have the one billion dollar per year subsidy that ULA enjoys just to upkeep its infrastructure or the billions that SLS suppliers make to rehash old space shuttle rocket technology for the Ares rocket.
We need to remember that SpaceX has advanced the space industry in it's less than a decade of life more than all combined advancement in the industry in the 20 years prior. And they done that with very limited funding, compared to ULA or SLS contractors.
I believe we need an all of the above solution (nuclear, solar, wind, biomass, ...). In reality, nuclear is just lip service, it's not really an all of the above solution. So I'm very loud when I sense the lip servicing, in the direction of exposing the lie (the lip service BS).
Nuclear is the only solution that could provide electricity to 100% of the world needs. The ONLY solution. Solar and Wind require huge technological breakthroughs in energy storage that are still in the future.
But....... The main reason nuclear is expensive today is the result of a chicken egg problem caused since Three Mile Island:
Nuclear became expensive after nuclear operators backed off from installing new reactors after TMI, nuclear has no chance of becoming cheaper because it has low volume of nuclear reactor installations.
Nuclear could be at least 20% cheaper if there were scale/volume in the nuclear construction business and the NRC streamlined the regulatory process with a focus of providing a predictable model (if you comply with this rules new installations will get certified at an X maximum NRC regulation costs).
Do you know the NRC bills nuclear operators US$ 300 / hr they spent certifying new nuclear reactors, and that every new nuclear plant demands like 20000 hours of regulatory work ? This adds up to tens of millions of regulatory costs, with zero certainty to the nuclear operator.
Until its mandated that all nuclear operators must reprocess nuclear fuel at least twice this will continue, because it's cheaper to build nuclear fuel from freshly enriched uranium instead of doing reprocessing. Some will say "but reprocessing isn't legal". It is legal in the USA, it's just not done as it's more expensive than building fresh fuel.
This isn't politics, it's economics. Reprocessing of nuclear fuel was forbidden for a while late 70s/early 80s, but that prohibbition has been rescinded for decades.
Now it's very likely that should a nuclear reprocessing facility starts, it will attract thousands of crackpot anti nuclear protesters from all over the world to protest that reprocessing is _____ (insert your favorite bad word).
Nuclear waste from once through (no reprocessing) is 99,3% fissionable material for light water reactors, about 98,7% from heavy water reactors.
There are reactors designed to take this fuel in and fission it completely, Molten Salt reactors and Sodium cooled fast reactors.
There is no commercially operational molten salt reactors and sodium cooled reactors in commercial operation only in Russia sphere of influence.
But there is a solution. The real problem is after Three Mile Island nuclear is seen as an evil technology that must be avoided at all costs and should get near zero public research investment.
The problem isn't it can't be done, is republicans are okay with nuclear, but are more okay with natural gas and coal, while democrats are against anything that says nuclear anywhere.
The reality is creationism shouldn't get any time because this debate has been done and it got no traction.
What matters is the mainstream scientific community, peer reviewed publications, scrutinized by the worldwide biology / genetic PhDs of the world. In that arena creationism has been thoroughly debunked.
Cosmos isn't a scientific discussion program, it's a scientific education program. So unproven theories should not be given any credit in such a medium.
Of course, Cosmos is a TV show, the National Geographic could choose to show it. But I doubt the current producers would accept to show credible scientific theories side by side with creationism.
People that believe in creationism as hard scientific data usually don't have much of a measurable IQ, BTW.
Teaching creationism at church sunday school is one thing, but in high school, nonononono !
The high cost of nuclear is the result of Nuclear being ostracized since Three Mile Island.
It's the classical chicken-egg problem.
It's too expensive because it has no scale, and it has no scale because it's too expensive.
Plus water cooled reactors can't be very cheap to begin with.
And until Nuclear can be made cool again, neither nuclear operators nor nuclear suppliers will do anything to lower costs.
Finally, the anti nuclear movement is very strong inside the NRC, my perception is the NRC will only be happy when they finish up with the whole nuclear industry. ... It's the law of the land of the US federal govt.
Like goes the old saying about the FAA, and you can replace FAA with NRC, we're not happy until you're unhappy. They have no incentive to keep nuclear affordable. They don't care about the costs of their measures, even the ones that aren't essential to safety. They will happily create regulatory burden with huge costs that increase nuclear safety very little. This isn't particular to the NRC. It happens all the time in the FAA, FDA, DoE, DoT,
I believe that maximizing utilization of nuclear material is extremely important for any Gen IV tech, regardless of Uranium costs.
Nuclear worst enemy isn't cost, it's PR ! So the more we can deconstruct all anti nuclear pundits critics the better.
Perhaps you haven't realized nuclear is essentially impossible to build today in CA, NY, New England, Germany, do you ? We need reactors that break the mold of all criticism that created that anti nuclear stance.
One of the many advantages of molten salt reactors is the salt coolant, nuclear fuel and fission products are all mixed up in the core, specially in the DMSR, where you will have a mix of: Th232, U232, U233, U235, U238, Np, Pu238, Pu239, Pu240, Am and Cu, makes the material essentially useless for extraction of nuclear material.
I have nothing against building new current Gen III+ reactors where possible. But we need a cheaper, better solution. I'm hoping the DMSR will be the first to market Gen IV modular reactor, breaking away from the valid criticism that water cooled nukes are enormous pressure cookers being contained by ultra expensive safety systems. Molten Salt reactors are essentially at ambient pressure, the core material solidifies quickly as it cools, so it's arguably safe even in case the reactor is struck with a precision military strike (or a comet), since there's no pressure trying to throw nuclear material afar.
Plus it would be useful to have a reactor that has less proliferation potential even than a solid fuel water cooled nuke.
CANDU is a bit better than LWR, but not by much. Going from using 0,65% of Uranium to about twice as much is still very low efficiency. There's no way around it with solid fuel reactors. All water cooled reactors such in efficiency.
In a way, the DMSR is the least efficient molten salt reactor design, and still its over one order of magnitude more efficient (considering both how much fissile material gets split + higher efficiency from higher temperature operation).
The details on David LeBlanc's DMSR are still confidential, it is expected to use a different coolant salt exactly to avoid producing the dreaded tritium.
It's being done, but outside the USA.
Terrestrial Energy Inc of Canada are developing a simpler version of the LFTR reactor, the DMSR, operating on a mix of Thorium and Uranium, with the ability to be at least 50x more efficient than regular LWR reactors (as in GWh of energy produced per ton of fissile/fertile material fed into the reactor). Since it's a molten salt / molten fuel design, once the reactor is decommissioned, it's core materials can be recycled into a new reactor. They are skipping the nuclear material reprocessing (as well as a few others technological advantages of LFTR that carry perceived regulatory hurdles).
But reprocessing could be performed every so many years, for a huge gain in efficiency (the more fission products kept inside the reactor, the less efficient it gets).
The main difference of LFTR to DMSR is the DMSR always runs of a mix of Thorium and enriched uranium, such that any U-233 produced is instantly mixed with U-238, such that it makes the U-233 produced just as hard to extract than U-235 from mined uranium.
But contrary to regular water cooled / solid fuel reactors, Xe-135 produced is immediately captured at the top of the reactor (Xe-135 is the biggest efficiency problem in solid fuel reactors), plus the molten fuel means annual fuel top offs can be done without stopping the reactor, making for a reactor that can run much closer to 100% of the time.
Finally as all molten fuel / molten coolant reactors, it has the drain tank, the catch pan and the freeze plug that makes the reactor walk away safe (if the reactor overheats the freeze plug melts draining the core material into the drain tank, if the reactor suffers a leak the leakage either solidify plugging the leak or drains into the catch pan. And finally, since the core material is a solid below 300C, and there's nothing at any high pressure, the reactor isn't trying to throw radioactive materials into the atmosphere.
Hopefully this will be online by 2022.
Long video (73 minutes): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Bottom line, if this works (I think it will), doing a full blown LFTR Thorium reactor will be much easier, since the DMSR is in most ways a simplification of the full LFTR reactor.
I don't agree with your quoted cost for Fukushima cleanup.
The pattern so far has been of wildly inflated and some fully made up numbers about Fukushima, so I don't agree with any predictions until they actually materialize.
>Very little of that was directly due to the aircraft though, most of it was self-inflicted damage due to the way the US responded.
The same argument can be made that the Fukushima exclusion zone is much larger than necessary and that nuclear power plant remediation procedures are far more costly than necessary. Should we accept that the LNT model is wrong, the real procedures that will have to be undertaken would be reduced by about 75%.
The reality is if the LNT model were right, there would have been about a hundred times more cancers from Chernobyl than actually happened.
Remember the prediction of millions of cancer deaths from Chernobyl ?
Countries no longer under the influence of Russia that were very close to Chernobyl report very little cancers compared to the dire predictions. So the massive cover up doesn't quite pan out.
And there is people living back in the Chernobyl exclusion area, in defiance of the military blockade, people drinking radioactive water.
If the LNT model were right, they would have cancers by the buckets, which isn't actually happening.
The reality is the only real serious risk in both Chernobyl and Fukushima are Thyroid cancer from radioactive iodine, which has an 8 day half life, so 99.99% is gone in 80 days (10 half lives means 99.99% is gone).
Our bodies deal with radiation all the time. We have radioactive Potassium-40 and Carbon-14 in our bodies decaying all the time. We breathe radioactive Radon all the time, cause it seeps from Thorium decay inside the earth.
We can avoid fire in order not to get burned.
We can't avoid radiation, it's everywhere.
Nuclear is the safest energy source out there, and it doesn't have to be expensive, if we stop with the sensationalism and approach it with responsibility and sobriety.
Chernobyl had:
No secondary containment structure
A few serious safety risks, which combined with the lack of a secondary containment really made it an accident waiting to happen
Both those bad features had been known for over a decade as a huge safety risk. Only the USSR would dare build a reactor without secondary containment. That is indisputable, and should Chernobyl had a secondary containment, it would have been an accident a little worse than Three Mile Island
Fukushima was an old Gen II reactor. About as old as the oldest operating reactors in the world. That accident would have been impossible in a modern AP1000 since the reactor has passive cooling capabilities, able to go for days without any external power. Besides they had been warned both that its Tsunami defenses were inadequate and that they shouldn't put all diesel generators in the basement.
In both cases it's like trying to use a safety problem of a first generation 737 as a reason not to fly 787's or using a safety problem on a A300 as a reason not to fly A380s.
New nuclear isn't cheap but isn't expensive either. China, India and South Korea are building new reactors on a cost effective basis. There are cheaper solutions that are even safer, with the real problem being that vested nuclear suppliers don't want to invest on something that will give them less revenue.
Nuclear upfront investment is expensive, but nuclear reactors are far cheaper to operate after built even than coal, like 1/3rd the cost.
Even natural gas exploration and distribution kills people every year. Hundreds worldwide. It's just that those deaths are one or two here, one or two there, plus there's no sensationalism about industrial accidents that kill a few people.
Over the last 10 years there was a single nuclear related death in the USA, a uranium mining accident. And if you go back 50 years, there are very few deaths related to nuclear stuff.
France actually produces less total electricity from nuclear than the USA, but its over 75% of their total electricity, also with just a handful of deaths over a long period.
Should just the diesel generators for Fukushima been fine after the Tsunami, it would have been an example of how resilient nuclear can be in the face of extreme accidents.
No, Germany hurriedly shutdown its oldest nuclear reactors after Fukushima, under the fear of Bavarian Tsunamis and eventual low intensity earthquakes that are non events.
Now not only their emissions are up, as well as Germany is even more dependent on Russia, which make them weak in dealing with Mr. Putin's plan to rebuild part of the USSR empire.
How much 9/11 losses caused on the American economy ?
Studies place the price tag at 2 trillion USD !
Again, then why are we letting the airlines continue to operate ?
Can we honestly guarantee a 9/11 style attack will never, ever happen again ?
A Chernobyl style accident is essentially impossible to happen again. It wasn't the first stupid idea coming from Russia, the stupidity continues right now (in other areas). Nukes without secondary containment were a stupid idea only the Russians would be stupid enough to pursue. And the other problems with that reactor were the result of it being a knockoff from the USA design before it was fixed.
The Tsunami reconstruction is projected to cost US$ 300 billion. Let's maintain that number for perspective.
There are credible, rational, facts based studies that show tens of millions of people would have died if we had no nuclear power stations using coal instead.
Wanna put a price tag to those lifes ?
Those same studies show that nuclear is the safest energy source per GWh produced in the USA, and France.
I was educated with the thinking that instead of looking for the worse possible way of doing something, instead we learn what to do from the BEST and what not to do from the WORSE.
Yeah go right ahead and conflate the most wildly unsafe nuclear power plant in the world with all of the others with a secondary containment building. With proper safe design.
Go ahead and spread all of your anti nuclear paranoia non sense.
While we are at it, why don't we push the disapearance of Air Malasia Flight 370 as an excuse to ground all airliners, eventually leading to shuting down the whole airline industry for good. It's the kind of wisdom the anti nuclear wise man are proposing.
The only real way to get rid of coal is coming up with a cheaper replacement.
You might even get away with banning coal in a few developed countries, but if you care about climate change, this will solve nothing.
If China and India alone are allowed to continue with their insatiable consumption of coal, they would offset any reduction in coal consumption in North America and Europe in a decade or so.
Until we acknowledge that solar and wind aren't a credible solution to replace even 50% of coal and natural gas consumption, we can't begin to focus on the real solution.
The only greenhouse gas free solution to replace coal is nuclear.
Nuclear doesn't have to be expensive. It's expensive in the USA and most of Europe because:
- The local nuclear regulatory agencies are being lead by people with the hidden mandate of making nuclear as expensive as possible
- An extremely vocal minority want to get rid of all nuclear power, immediately
- the extremely low volume of new nuclear reactor installations make current technology even more expensive
- the custom of making tiny changes to new nuclear power plants every few years, preventing standardization
- new nuclear research is based on an assumption that current nuclear isn't safe enough (when it actually is plenty safe, there has been zero Generation III nuclear power plant accidents)
- current nuclear technology (light water, solid fuel) are safe because of the plethora of expensive systems used to make it safe
There are nuclear designs that are safe because its designed to be safe (using gravity, chemically stable coolants, the advantage of having the nuclear fuel dissolved with the coolant), yet that tech has been banned for 40 years since it doesn't produce plutonium for nuclear bombs, that tech avoids the vast majority of all expensive safety systems, being walk away safe
I don't love nuclear, I'm just really scared of climate change, and the "let's pretend we're solving it with solar+wind initiative" has gone too far already.
Typing this on a Chromebook ARM (dual Cortex A15).
2GB RAM, 16GB Flash.
With it were 4GB of RAM and 32GB of Flash, and there's no Java plugin for Cortex ARM CPUs, so I need another computer to do banking.
Very convenient machine otherwise, no need to worry about moving it while powered on (zero moving parts). Don't even need to power it off, close the lid. A full battery can hold the system in a suspended mode for almost a week. Thanks to having linux under the hood instead of EvilWindows !
The real story here is Tesla success is making everybody else look bad.
They are a threat to much more than the car dealers. They are a threat to the innovate at a snails pace mantra of Detroit. They are a threat to big oil companies. Electricity is about 1/4 the cost of gasoline mile per mile (even comparing a Model S with a Prius, even considering the Model S is a large premium sedan, versus the Prius being a mid size). And they got this far in less than two years of Model S sales. Give them another 5 years and the auto industry will be undergoing an earthquake of innovation with Tesla at the forefront and few companies with enough agility to try to follow.
It won't take long until a few of those state representatives don't get re-elected for their Tesla actions.
Tesla adoption is spreading like wildfire. If Tesla had twice the li-ion battery supply, they would be delivering twice as much.
The problem isn't the spent fuel. The problem isn't the actual cost of the reactors.
The cost is:
1 - The NRC system leaves propective nuclear operators of new plants with an enormous uncertainty, even the part that depends solely on the NRC has no certainty. It's the typical big, government, setup to make government important, and the nuclear operators standing on their knees to get something
2 - Political uncertainty. The areas that consume the most electricity in the USA are anti nuclear. You can't even think about installing a nuke in CA, or the Northwest
3 - Lack of economies of scale. If a nuclear operator were to make a deal to start construction of a dozen nuclear reactors in the next ten years they would get a much better deal from suppliers, but who would be crazy to even try that with #1 and #2 ?
4 - Solid Fuel, Water cooled reactors are the most risky of all technologies. And the new ones that offered much better alternatives were killed because they would otherwise kill coal and natural gas. I'm not a big fan of the IFR (Sodium Cooled Fast reactor) but even with the Sodium risk it should be a safer, cheaper reactor, but
5 - The better solution was proven to work in the 60s. But since it did produced material for nuclear bombs, and it was outside the mainsteam train off though at the time, it got killed.
Please take a look at: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
The reality is spent nuclear fuel isn't the problem. Better reactors use the nuclear fuel much better, resulting in much less, actual nuclear waste. There's no real problem with the barrels of spent nuclear fuel after they are cool enough to move from the spent fuel pools into the barrels for the next 20-30 years. As long as we decide to fund the better solution. Thorium molten salt reactors (like the LFTR and the DMSR) will use the spent nuclear fuel as startup fuel, keeping that material in the reactor until it's 99% fissioned.
Light water solid fuel uranium reactors are the solution for the US Navy, which is fine for a small submarine / aircraft carrier reactor (even the largest Aircraft Carrier has much smaller reactors than the usual GW plus civilian reactors).
The NRC has refused to either create a regulatory framework for molten salt reactors or switch from a hard rules based to a performance based regulation that the Canadian nuclear regulatory agency is adopting for molten salt reactors.
It's like trying to regulate a turbofan with internal combustion regulations.