Your assumption is that peak insolation lasts for 6 hours a day which is wrong. Peak insolation only occurs around noon when the sun is high in the sky and the airpath to the panel surface is minimal. Early in the morning and late in the evening the sun is low in the sky, the airpath is long and the blue and UV light which drives photovoltaics gets absorbed by the air, attenuateded by clouds, diffracted by dust etc. and the output of the cells drops off significantly even if sun-tracking arrays are used (more expensive to build, break down more often than fixed arrays, need wider spacing to prevent fraternal shadowing of adjacent panels, more prone to damage from storm-force winds catching them like sails, use power themselves to track...)
The figures reported in the press for renewables such as PV and wind tend to emphasise the maximum possible output -- a 5MW wind turbine or a 300MW PV/solar thermal array. It's a bit like headlining the fact your car can do 130 mph although it almost never reaches that speed that even when you're driving and most of the time it's sitting still parked up somewhere. A more realistic figure is the total number of miles you drive each year in the car rather than its maximum speed in which case your car's average "speed" is more like 1.1 mph (10,000 miles a year) and the same should apply to comparisons of power generating systems. For example an EPR1400 nuclear reactor produces more than 10,000 GWhr of electricity per year baseload with a 90% uptime whereas this solar farm will produce 43GWh over the same time period non-baseload.
Solar thermal power stations like the SEGS in the Mojave desert require lots of water to operate since they use a Carnot cycle, producing steam to drive turbines which then needs condensing on the other side of the loop like any thermal power station (coal, gas, nuclear). The SEGS generating facility evaporates 3.5 tonnes of water for every MWh of electricity produced, pumped out of a local aquifer which is not being replenished.
Thermal solar power stations tend to be situated in deserts where sunlight is abundant and land is cheap but the lack of renewable water sources is a bit of a hurdle to overcome unless a rape-and-run operation is planned, make money for twenty years or so and then abandon the site when the water runs out.
After the Great Debacle in mid-2011 both Avid and Adobe (their Premiere suite, not really pro shop grade but useful for a lot of folks) moved in quick offering special terms for professionals who wanted to Think Different and move over to a non-proprietary editing system.
It doesn't help that Apple users are stuck with desktop-grade hardware at best, no rackable server-level kit with redundant hot-swap PSUs and lights-out management, a pitiful hardware limit of 128GB of RAM and when the new Mac Pro litterbin hits the market a limit of 12 cores per box. As ultra-HD (4k and 8k) video hits the market that's going to squeeze more editing shops out of the Apple monoculture.
You can run really good third-party video editing software on Apple kit under OS/X, although the top-of-the-line hardware has been needing a refresh for a couple of years now -- nobody's going to be editing or rendering serious video on laptops or iPads. Final Cut Pro X only runs on Apple hardware since it's an Apple-only product. A lot of pro shops used it as it fit really neatly into their workflow with the ability to outsource audio, colour, output to tape, XML support, project control as well as FCP Server, SAN support etc. When Apple released Final Cut Pro X a couple of years back they got rid of all that pro stuff and added a Facebook button, turning it into a Moviemaker-type package instead. Before that happened FCP had a big following in TV stations, technical schools taught it to trainee editors, lots of third-party support packages to do workflow things and it all ran on the moneymaker Apple hardware under OS/X. Nowadays not so much.
J. J.'s shop uses Avid and could switch over to Dell or HP or anybody else's hardware if he wanted to, no OS and hardware lockin and minimal disruption to workflow. Last I heard FCP X had about 2% of the pro market in the US, a big drop from before and another "creative" market Apple has let slip through their fingers.
The professional video and TV editing biz got shafted by Apple during the great Final Cut Pro disaster a couple of years back and a lot of them have shifted to Avid and other non-proprietary OS-hardware-locked video solutions. They should have seen it coming after Xserve and Xsan got the bullet though.
The ion thrusters on the Japanese Hayabusa asteroid sample-return mission kept on breaking down but after a lot of TLC the main spacecraft did get back to Earth and its sample capsule was recovered.
A European Space agency probe, the 370kg SMART 1 was powered by an ion motor and flew from Earth orbit to Lunar orbit under ion propulsion in 2004. It burned 80kg of fuel over about 13 months producing 68 mN of thrust.
The good news about the capital costs of a reactor build is that the new designs are being given an initial licencing period of 60 years operation to help defray their construction costs. They may even run for a century or more given inspections and upgrades during their lifespan. The generation 2 reactors built in the 1970s and 1980s were originally licenced for 40 years but that was because there was no knowledge of how they would age and 40 years looked like a good starting point. As it turned out most reactors built back then were perfectly functional after 40 years and licence extensions have been issued for many of them, subject of course to ongoing regular inspections and maintenance.
The GenIII reactors being built in China, France and elsewhere can swing their output from 100% to about 70% in a few minutes. It makes poor economic sense as the fuel cost per MWh for a nuclear reactor is very low hence the tendency to run them at 100% output whenever possible.
I'm not American but I know a few American citizens who are living and working in my native country. They are eligible to vote in US elections even though they have email and home addresses which don't fit into a standard US-centric template.
The Obama campaign made a point of getting in touch with and trying to persuade US citizens abroad to vote. They also hit them up for donations which expatriates are legally permitted to make even if they don't live in the US currently.
The last Prime Minister of the UK who "inherited" the post from his father was William Pitt the Younger who took on the role in 1783. Since then we've had women, socialists (really real socialists, not right-wing conservatives like Clinton and Obama), liberals (who are not socialists) and deep-down conservatives as Prime Minister and few if any of them had much in the way of a family history in the role (Winston Churchill may have been an exception but his father never made it to high office). The US has had a number of Presidents in the past century whose dynastic relationships through blood and marriage into money are only exceeded by traditionally hereditary Senators (like the Kennedys), Governors and Congressmen (like the Bushes). It's why there was so much shock and disbelief about President Obama winning the last two elections since he's not filthy rich and he's not the product of a plutocratic political dynasty like George W. Bush or Senator Jay Rockefeller IV.
In American (and most western) politics today organisation of the electoral effort is key, moreso than the candidates especially in the US where heredity and family money usually play the greater part. For example Jeb Bush's son George Prescott Bush is starting his run at the Presidency although he has not yet been elected to any public office -- he is being referred to as "47" among his family's consiglieres. The fact that Hillary Rodham Clinton is even being considered as Presidential material is amazing to non-USians. She'll need a better organisation than the one that fronted her up for the 2008 primaries though.
It's early days yet but I'd not be surprised to see one of the Romney sons step forward as a candidate for elected office and eventually, with the aid of his father's billions make a run for the White House. It's the American Way, after all.
Some politicians believe today they can speak privately to groups of supporters and those words will not be recorded and released to the world, or their secrets revealed by well-connected insiders. In the past this was true; either there was no cheap easy method to record their words and deeds (phone cameras, fifty-buck video recorders etc.) or the gatekeeper press would simply not report what they knew (FDR in a wheelchair, JFK's medical problems, Reagan's Alzheimers etc.) The world has changed and successful politicians are aware of this. If you don't want what you say made public then don't say it to anyone.
Governor Romney deluded himself that his supposedly private fundraising speech would never be revealed to the rest of the world. That's part of the reason he lost the election. His own campaign's efforts in data collection and analysis and Get Out The Vote was as big and as complex as President Obama's but it was incompetently implemented (first live-fire test of a complex multilevel data delivery system involving thousands of operators on the day of the election? Really?) The only good thing that came out of that expensive fiasco was that several of his friends and colleagues made a lot of money out of it.
I had occasion recently to look at the makeup of the Lords Science and Technology Select committee. Approximately half of them are Fellows of the Royal Society. The committee includes notables like the world-famous embryology researcher Robert Winston as well as other high flyers in the science and high-tech world. The chairman is Lord Krebs who has headed up the Food Standards Agency as well as the NERC in the past. His day job is Principal of Jesus College, Oxford. Being a member of the House of Lords is not regarded as a "real" job, they get paid a daily allowance if they attend the Chamber during a sitting and/or take part in committee work.
On the other hand the US Senate committee on Science etc. has three times the number of members of the Lords committee. Most of these elected representatives have been professional politicians for their entire adult life and have never been anywhere near a science or research establishment, never mind working in one. The current chairman is Jay Rockefeller, a fourth-generation scion of one of America's ruling families who has been in the Washington "bubble" since election to the Senate in 1984. US Senators get paid $174,000 per annum for the 150 days a year they are supposed to turn up at the Capitol plus expenses, staffs etc. and a very generous care package (medical, pension etc.).
The problem comes during decommissioning where a site now has to be basically cleaned for decades (a cost not usually factored in or accounted for when pricing power - in the ideal case the money for the cleanup comes during operation and is banked up, but capitalism makes this an impossibility).
Nope. All Western nations, including the US require the operators to create and maintain a fund for decommissioning power station reactors at end-of-life, usually through a levy per kWh generated. No such funds are required for coal-fired power station operators, wind farms etc.
"the taxpayer is on the hook for decommissioning" is a common lie promulgated by anti-nuclear True Believers, easily disproved by a trivial search on the Web and elsewhere. Same thing for spent fuel, a standard levy per kWh generated funds disposal operations.
Decommissioning CAN take decades but almost all of that time the operation consists of building a wire fence and supplying a few security guards plus some weatherproofing, waiting for residual radioactivity in the core parts of the main building (reactor vessel mainly) to decay to the point where it's a conventional demolition job rather than involving hazardous low-level waste. The process is called SafStor if you want to look it up. Cost per Gen II/III reactor is generally $300-500 million per unit over 60 years or so.
Electricity generating capacity in the US is about 1200 GW -- that powers aircon, heating, street lights, shops, entertainment, sewage treatment plants, data centres etc. for 4% of the world's population.
China has about the same generating capacity as the US but with a population over four times the size of the US. If they reach parity with the US that will require four times as much generating capacity as they've got today and that's without any increase in population (which is going to happen anyway).
Same with India and many other advancing countries, they're needing more and more electricity just to approach the lifestyles, health and welfare standards of the US and other Western nations so they're going to build out more generating capacity. They can burn fossil fuels or they can build nukes to provide the power they need. If you feel CO2 levels are a problem then it's a no-brainer.
So you want a War on Coal, do you, throwing thousands of miners out of a job? Heartless bastard. Raising the cost of a gallon of gas? Unthinkable!
and a big piggy bank full of money next to every nuclear plant to pay for dismantling when the time comes
A Lie That Will Not Die, the taxpayers have to pay for decommissioning nuclear power stations. False.
That "piggy bank" you speak of already exists, and has done so since the 1980s in most Western nations that have nukes. Operators of nuclear power stations in the US have to pay into a fund to cover future decommissioning of individual plants. It's more than the coal-fired station operators, wind turbine and solar generators do to clean up after themselves and after forty or fifty gigawatt-years of generating power for a given reactor it adds up to quite a large amount, including interest. The San Onofre nuclear power station, even though it's being shut down only 30 years after being built, has about 3 billion bucks in its "piggy bank" for decommissioning, and using a long-term custodianship system (aka SafStor) it won't spend much of that for another fifty or sixty years meaning more interest accruing into the fund.
U-233 has already been used as the core of nuclear weapons, fired in a couple of test shots by the US and the Indians. It's not the optimal material to build a nuclear weapon from but it works (somewhat).
I didn't say a thorium MSR would produce weapons-grade Pu; it's very unlikely it ever would as getting from Th-232 to Pu-239 is a bit of a stretch. The proliferation threat is the production of and extraction of U-233 in a continuous-process extraction line required to prevent the reactor poisoning itself with byproducts.
Starting up a thorium MSR needs a lot of neutrons as it has to transmute quite a lot of Th-232 into U-233 before a chain reaction can start hence the need for MEU and maybe some Pu in the mix. It doesn't help that a lot of the fuel is outside the reactor vessel and the moderator at any given time. The Indian thorium PWR designs use 20%-enriched U plus Pu fuel rods as their kickstarter (and if I remember correctly they produce about 10-20% of the total energy produced in a given fuelling cycle). The amount of Californium or other neutron source needed for a light-water-moderated reactor is trivial in comparison.
I hate to analogize but the MSRs with fuel dissolved in a molten matrix are like complex jet engines compared to the locomotive-boiler-simple uranium-fuelled water and gas-cooled reactors in use today providing nearly 20% of the world's electricity generating capacity. Uranium is cheap and plentiful at the moment and for the lifetime of at least the next generation of reactors (60 years or more), and that's if we don't fix the problems we have with breeders and move to a MOX/Pu fuel cycle for the next generation. I think the MSR is a solution going around looking for a problem, basically.
As for the Chinese working on MSR they're working on everything -- breeders, fast-spectrum reactors, thorium etc. What they're building right now though is modern PWRs and BWRs because they need the electricity right now. Maybe in ten or twenty years time they'll be commercialising MSR but right now paper exercises and Powerpoint presentations aren't going to keep the lights on.
A submarine pressure vessel has to withstand a maximum crush pressure of about 30 atmospheres intermittently at about 2 to 3 deg C. for a couple of decades in service. A nuclear reactor vessel has to withstand a working internal pressure of about 175 atmospheres at several hundred deg C for at least 40 years and more (some newer reactor designs are being licenced out to 60 years with regular inspections). In addition the inner surface of the reactor vessel gets bombarded with hard radiation, particles and neutrons which change its chemical and isotopic properties over time which is why it starts off nearly a foot thick.
A submarine hull is made from welded sections of steel plate, a reactor vessel's main body is a single forged piece of steel alloy with no welds that might fail under load, time and radioactive bombardment. Apart from that they're remarkably similar. Not.
The containment dome is never irradiated; the reactor pressure vessel is bombarded with radiation and neutrons but it's made from steel over a foot thick and that stops any particles or gamma radiation getting out to affect the primary containment. A regular part of a refuelling and inspection operation involves technicians entering the containment volume next to the reactor vessel to check for damage, leaks etc. and to replace instruments and do other remedial work before the reactor is restarted.
And guess what? The reactor vessel is made from a steel alloy with as little "element 27" as possible, to prevent neutron activation of the regular isotope you're so scared to mention into its more dangerous cousin. It's almost like, you know, the people designing nuclear reactors had figured this problem out for themselves, oh, half a century ago.
"I thought they originally went with uranium, because you could build nuclear weapons from the waste."
Oh dear, The Lie That Will Not Die.
A uranium-fuelled reactor like a PWR works by stacking a lot of uranium fuel pellets in close proximity to each other and moderating (slowing down) the neutrons they emit so they cause fission in nearby uranium atoms, producing heat and yet more neutrons. That's it, steam-engine simple. Sure there are complexities of design and engineering but they're dealt with at the drawing board, not while the reactor is running. In the 1950s and 1960s that what was possible and cost-effective to design and build.
Breeding plutonium for nuclear weapons was carried out virtually everywhere in the world in specialised reactors, almost all of which never generated a watt of electricity since they were optimised to turn U-238 into Pu-239 without producing much Pu-240 which screws up the functioning of a nuclear weapon. There were a couple of dual-use reactor designs like the British Magnox and the infamous Soviet-era RMBK-4 reactors of Tchernobyl fame which could be tasked with short-exposure fuelling cycles to produce nearly-pure Pu-239 but they were not popular and in most cases they were never actually used to make weapons-grade Pu-239, in part because by the time they came on stream the countries building them had produced as much nuclear weapons material (a few tonnes) as they would ever need from their military reactors. Since then the number of weapons has gone down, not up and the decommissioned weapon cores are stockpiled until they can be burned up in uranium reactors as mixed-oxide fuel (MOX) elements.
Thorium reactors of the liquid salt type require continuous processing of the fuel to remove assorted highly radioactive byproducts in a chemical plant while the reactor is running. Thorium itself is not fertile, it needs to be transmuted into U-233 which is fissile and can be "burned" in the same way U-235 is in existing reactors. It's the dark secret of the LFTR design that it needs a sparkplug of enriched uranium and even some plutonium to start up from cold to begin the transmutation process and the only place that can come from at the moment is the conventional nuclear reactor industry. In addition any unburnt U-233 they produce can be extracted from the fuel stream and used in nuclear weapons after processing.
Ah but the US built a thorium reactor in the 1960s! Yes, it was a 5MW thermal experimental prototype which never ran continuously for more than a few weeks at a time. Conventional 1600MWe PWR reactors being built in China, France and Finland (the EPR 1600 design) produce nearly 5 gigawatts of heat, a thousand times as much as the prototype LFTR did and they will run for 18 to 24 months at a time between refuelling operations and produce no weapons-grade plutonium.
The licencing for nuclear reactors in the US, the UK and a few other countries requires that the site be returned to greenfield status after the reactor(s) on site are decommissioned. That means total demolition of the structures including the metre-thick reinforced concrete containment buildings.
In some cases if the site is to be reused immediately then the reactors are demolished quickly with special handling of the slightly radioactive pressure vessel which has suffered neutron activation. It costs a little bit less to wait a few decades for that radioactivity to decay at which point the demolition can go ahead with no radiation-specific problems. The real problem during demolition in either case with older (1970s vintage) reactors is the presence of asbestos in pipe lagging, tank insulation etc.
There's a 1980s-era submarine, the "Akishio" in the JMSDF museum at the waterfront in Kure, Japan that was lifted into position by a floating crane. That weighed 2250 tonnes.
There were some reports early in the disaster of workers taken to the hospital with radiation exposure,
The two workers were released from hospital a few days later. It wasn't splattered over the world news channels the way their admittance to hospital was.
It's not against any treaties per se but it's only borderline economic to take in other people's washing, so to speak and the various reprocessing lines in operation around the world are designed with the capacity to handle the home country's spent fuel "load" and not much more. Saying that France and the UK did reprocess some Japanese spent fuel for a time. They produced mixed-oxide fuel with plutonium recovered from the spent fuel using the PUREX reprocessing technology. The vitrified waste was returned to Japan after processing was complete.
The Japanese are just coming to the end of commissioning their own reprocessing plant at Rokkaisho; when up to speed it can deal with about 800 tonnes of spent fuel each year. A smaller prototype plant could deal with about 100 tonnes a year but it was shut down a few years back.
I believe the ban on commercial reprocessing in the US was lifted by Reagan. However it costs a lot to reprocess spent fuel and currently mined uranium is ridiculously cheap so it's not cost-effective by itself. The reduction in waste volume and hence the cost of storage can help defray some of the differential -- the US has something like 700,000 tonnes of unprocessed spent fuel in storage whereas France which has reprocessed most of its commercial nuclear spent fuel has only a few thousand tonnes of high-level waste to store and dispose of.
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Your assumption is that peak insolation lasts for 6 hours a day which is wrong. Peak insolation only occurs around noon when the sun is high in the sky and the airpath to the panel surface is minimal. Early in the morning and late in the evening the sun is low in the sky, the airpath is long and the blue and UV light which drives photovoltaics gets absorbed by the air, attenuateded by clouds, diffracted by dust etc. and the output of the cells drops off significantly even if sun-tracking arrays are used (more expensive to build, break down more often than fixed arrays, need wider spacing to prevent fraternal shadowing of adjacent panels, more prone to damage from storm-force winds catching them like sails, use power themselves to track...)
The figures reported in the press for renewables such as PV and wind tend to emphasise the maximum possible output -- a 5MW wind turbine or a 300MW PV/solar thermal array. It's a bit like headlining the fact your car can do 130 mph although it almost never reaches that speed that even when you're driving and most of the time it's sitting still parked up somewhere. A more realistic figure is the total number of miles you drive each year in the car rather than its maximum speed in which case your car's average "speed" is more like 1.1 mph (10,000 miles a year) and the same should apply to comparisons of power generating systems. For example an EPR1400 nuclear reactor produces more than 10,000 GWhr of electricity per year baseload with a 90% uptime whereas this solar farm will produce 43GWh over the same time period non-baseload.
Solar thermal power stations like the SEGS in the Mojave desert require lots of water to operate since they use a Carnot cycle, producing steam to drive turbines which then needs condensing on the other side of the loop like any thermal power station (coal, gas, nuclear). The SEGS generating facility evaporates 3.5 tonnes of water for every MWh of electricity produced, pumped out of a local aquifer which is not being replenished.
Thermal solar power stations tend to be situated in deserts where sunlight is abundant and land is cheap but the lack of renewable water sources is a bit of a hurdle to overcome unless a rape-and-run operation is planned, make money for twenty years or so and then abandon the site when the water runs out.
After the Great Debacle in mid-2011 both Avid and Adobe (their Premiere suite, not really pro shop grade but useful for a lot of folks) moved in quick offering special terms for professionals who wanted to Think Different and move over to a non-proprietary editing system.
It doesn't help that Apple users are stuck with desktop-grade hardware at best, no rackable server-level kit with redundant hot-swap PSUs and lights-out management, a pitiful hardware limit of 128GB of RAM and when the new Mac Pro litterbin hits the market a limit of 12 cores per box. As ultra-HD (4k and 8k) video hits the market that's going to squeeze more editing shops out of the Apple monoculture.
You can run really good third-party video editing software on Apple kit under OS/X, although the top-of-the-line hardware has been needing a refresh for a couple of years now -- nobody's going to be editing or rendering serious video on laptops or iPads. Final Cut Pro X only runs on Apple hardware since it's an Apple-only product. A lot of pro shops used it as it fit really neatly into their workflow with the ability to outsource audio, colour, output to tape, XML support, project control as well as FCP Server, SAN support etc. When Apple released Final Cut Pro X a couple of years back they got rid of all that pro stuff and added a Facebook button, turning it into a Moviemaker-type package instead. Before that happened FCP had a big following in TV stations, technical schools taught it to trainee editors, lots of third-party support packages to do workflow things and it all ran on the moneymaker Apple hardware under OS/X. Nowadays not so much.
J. J.'s shop uses Avid and could switch over to Dell or HP or anybody else's hardware if he wanted to, no OS and hardware lockin and minimal disruption to workflow. Last I heard FCP X had about 2% of the pro market in the US, a big drop from before and another "creative" market Apple has let slip through their fingers.
The professional video and TV editing biz got shafted by Apple during the great Final Cut Pro disaster a couple of years back and a lot of them have shifted to Avid and other non-proprietary OS-hardware-locked video solutions. They should have seen it coming after Xserve and Xsan got the bullet though.
The ion thrusters on the Japanese Hayabusa asteroid sample-return mission kept on breaking down but after a lot of TLC the main spacecraft did get back to Earth and its sample capsule was recovered.
A European Space agency probe, the 370kg SMART 1 was powered by an ion motor and flew from Earth orbit to Lunar orbit under ion propulsion in 2004. It burned 80kg of fuel over about 13 months producing 68 mN of thrust.
The good news about the capital costs of a reactor build is that the new designs are being given an initial licencing period of 60 years operation to help defray their construction costs. They may even run for a century or more given inspections and upgrades during their lifespan. The generation 2 reactors built in the 1970s and 1980s were originally licenced for 40 years but that was because there was no knowledge of how they would age and 40 years looked like a good starting point. As it turned out most reactors built back then were perfectly functional after 40 years and licence extensions have been issued for many of them, subject of course to ongoing regular inspections and maintenance.
The GenIII reactors being built in China, France and elsewhere can swing their output from 100% to about 70% in a few minutes. It makes poor economic sense as the fuel cost per MWh for a nuclear reactor is very low hence the tendency to run them at 100% output whenever possible.
I'm not American but I know a few American citizens who are living and working in my native country. They are eligible to vote in US elections even though they have email and home addresses which don't fit into a standard US-centric template.
The Obama campaign made a point of getting in touch with and trying to persuade US citizens abroad to vote. They also hit them up for donations which expatriates are legally permitted to make even if they don't live in the US currently.
The last Prime Minister of the UK who "inherited" the post from his father was William Pitt the Younger who took on the role in 1783. Since then we've had women, socialists (really real socialists, not right-wing conservatives like Clinton and Obama), liberals (who are not socialists) and deep-down conservatives as Prime Minister and few if any of them had much in the way of a family history in the role (Winston Churchill may have been an exception but his father never made it to high office). The US has had a number of Presidents in the past century whose dynastic relationships through blood and marriage into money are only exceeded by traditionally hereditary Senators (like the Kennedys), Governors and Congressmen (like the Bushes). It's why there was so much shock and disbelief about President Obama winning the last two elections since he's not filthy rich and he's not the product of a plutocratic political dynasty like George W. Bush or Senator Jay Rockefeller IV.
In American (and most western) politics today organisation of the electoral effort is key, moreso than the candidates especially in the US where heredity and family money usually play the greater part. For example Jeb Bush's son George Prescott Bush is starting his run at the Presidency although he has not yet been elected to any public office -- he is being referred to as "47" among his family's consiglieres. The fact that Hillary Rodham Clinton is even being considered as Presidential material is amazing to non-USians. She'll need a better organisation than the one that fronted her up for the 2008 primaries though.
It's early days yet but I'd not be surprised to see one of the Romney sons step forward as a candidate for elected office and eventually, with the aid of his father's billions make a run for the White House. It's the American Way, after all.
Some politicians believe today they can speak privately to groups of supporters and those words will not be recorded and released to the world, or their secrets revealed by well-connected insiders. In the past this was true; either there was no cheap easy method to record their words and deeds (phone cameras, fifty-buck video recorders etc.) or the gatekeeper press would simply not report what they knew (FDR in a wheelchair, JFK's medical problems, Reagan's Alzheimers etc.) The world has changed and successful politicians are aware of this. If you don't want what you say made public then don't say it to anyone.
Governor Romney deluded himself that his supposedly private fundraising speech would never be revealed to the rest of the world. That's part of the reason he lost the election. His own campaign's efforts in data collection and analysis and Get Out The Vote was as big and as complex as President Obama's but it was incompetently implemented (first live-fire test of a complex multilevel data delivery system involving thousands of operators on the day of the election? Really?) The only good thing that came out of that expensive fiasco was that several of his friends and colleagues made a lot of money out of it.
The US government is planning to supply weapons to moderate revolutionaries in Syria, if they can find any.
"What do we want?"
"Gradual change!"
"When do we want it?"
"In due course!"
I had occasion recently to look at the makeup of the Lords Science and Technology Select committee. Approximately half of them are Fellows of the Royal Society. The committee includes notables like the world-famous embryology researcher Robert Winston as well as other high flyers in the science and high-tech world. The chairman is Lord Krebs who has headed up the Food Standards Agency as well as the NERC in the past. His day job is Principal of Jesus College, Oxford. Being a member of the House of Lords is not regarded as a "real" job, they get paid a daily allowance if they attend the Chamber during a sitting and/or take part in committee work.
On the other hand the US Senate committee on Science etc. has three times the number of members of the Lords committee. Most of these elected representatives have been professional politicians for their entire adult life and have never been anywhere near a science or research establishment, never mind working in one. The current chairman is Jay Rockefeller, a fourth-generation scion of one of America's ruling families who has been in the Washington "bubble" since election to the Senate in 1984. US Senators get paid $174,000 per annum for the 150 days a year they are supposed to turn up at the Capitol plus expenses, staffs etc. and a very generous care package (medical, pension etc.).
The problem comes during decommissioning where a site now has to be basically cleaned for decades (a cost not usually factored in or accounted for when pricing power - in the ideal case the money for the cleanup comes during operation and is banked up, but capitalism makes this an impossibility).
Nope. All Western nations, including the US require the operators to create and maintain a fund for decommissioning power station reactors at end-of-life, usually through a levy per kWh generated. No such funds are required for coal-fired power station operators, wind farms etc.
"the taxpayer is on the hook for decommissioning" is a common lie promulgated by anti-nuclear True Believers, easily disproved by a trivial search on the Web and elsewhere. Same thing for spent fuel, a standard levy per kWh generated funds disposal operations.
Decommissioning CAN take decades but almost all of that time the operation consists of building a wire fence and supplying a few security guards plus some weatherproofing, waiting for residual radioactivity in the core parts of the main building (reactor vessel mainly) to decay to the point where it's a conventional demolition job rather than involving hazardous low-level waste. The process is called SafStor if you want to look it up. Cost per Gen II/III reactor is generally $300-500 million per unit over 60 years or so.
Electricity generating capacity in the US is about 1200 GW -- that powers aircon, heating, street lights, shops, entertainment, sewage treatment plants, data centres etc. for 4% of the world's population.
China has about the same generating capacity as the US but with a population over four times the size of the US. If they reach parity with the US that will require four times as much generating capacity as they've got today and that's without any increase in population (which is going to happen anyway).
Same with India and many other advancing countries, they're needing more and more electricity just to approach the lifestyles, health and welfare standards of the US and other Western nations so they're going to build out more generating capacity. They can burn fossil fuels or they can build nukes to provide the power they need. If you feel CO2 levels are a problem then it's a no-brainer.
And that means one motherfucking hefty CO2 tax
So you want a War on Coal, do you, throwing thousands of miners out of a job? Heartless bastard. Raising the cost of a gallon of gas? Unthinkable!
and a big piggy bank full of money next to every nuclear plant to pay for dismantling when the time comes
A Lie That Will Not Die, the taxpayers have to pay for decommissioning nuclear power stations. False.
That "piggy bank" you speak of already exists, and has done so since the 1980s in most Western nations that have nukes. Operators of nuclear power stations in the US have to pay into a fund to cover future decommissioning of individual plants. It's more than the coal-fired station operators, wind turbine and solar generators do to clean up after themselves and after forty or fifty gigawatt-years of generating power for a given reactor it adds up to quite a large amount, including interest. The San Onofre nuclear power station, even though it's being shut down only 30 years after being built, has about 3 billion bucks in its "piggy bank" for decommissioning, and using a long-term custodianship system (aka SafStor) it won't spend much of that for another fifty or sixty years meaning more interest accruing into the fund.
U-233 has already been used as the core of nuclear weapons, fired in a couple of test shots by the US and the Indians. It's not the optimal material to build a nuclear weapon from but it works (somewhat).
I didn't say a thorium MSR would produce weapons-grade Pu; it's very unlikely it ever would as getting from Th-232 to Pu-239 is a bit of a stretch. The proliferation threat is the production of and extraction of U-233 in a continuous-process extraction line required to prevent the reactor poisoning itself with byproducts.
Starting up a thorium MSR needs a lot of neutrons as it has to transmute quite a lot of Th-232 into U-233 before a chain reaction can start hence the need for MEU and maybe some Pu in the mix. It doesn't help that a lot of the fuel is outside the reactor vessel and the moderator at any given time. The Indian thorium PWR designs use 20%-enriched U plus Pu fuel rods as their kickstarter (and if I remember correctly they produce about 10-20% of the total energy produced in a given fuelling cycle). The amount of Californium or other neutron source needed for a light-water-moderated reactor is trivial in comparison.
I hate to analogize but the MSRs with fuel dissolved in a molten matrix are like complex jet engines compared to the locomotive-boiler-simple uranium-fuelled water and gas-cooled reactors in use today providing nearly 20% of the world's electricity generating capacity. Uranium is cheap and plentiful at the moment and for the lifetime of at least the next generation of reactors (60 years or more), and that's if we don't fix the problems we have with breeders and move to a MOX/Pu fuel cycle for the next generation. I think the MSR is a solution going around looking for a problem, basically.
As for the Chinese working on MSR they're working on everything -- breeders, fast-spectrum reactors, thorium etc. What they're building right now though is modern PWRs and BWRs because they need the electricity right now. Maybe in ten or twenty years time they'll be commercialising MSR but right now paper exercises and Powerpoint presentations aren't going to keep the lights on.
A submarine pressure vessel has to withstand a maximum crush pressure of about 30 atmospheres intermittently at about 2 to 3 deg C. for a couple of decades in service. A nuclear reactor vessel has to withstand a working internal pressure of about 175 atmospheres at several hundred deg C for at least 40 years and more (some newer reactor designs are being licenced out to 60 years with regular inspections). In addition the inner surface of the reactor vessel gets bombarded with hard radiation, particles and neutrons which change its chemical and isotopic properties over time which is why it starts off nearly a foot thick.
A submarine hull is made from welded sections of steel plate, a reactor vessel's main body is a single forged piece of steel alloy with no welds that might fail under load, time and radioactive bombardment. Apart from that they're remarkably similar. Not.
The containment dome is never irradiated; the reactor pressure vessel is bombarded with radiation and neutrons but it's made from steel over a foot thick and that stops any particles or gamma radiation getting out to affect the primary containment. A regular part of a refuelling and inspection operation involves technicians entering the containment volume next to the reactor vessel to check for damage, leaks etc. and to replace instruments and do other remedial work before the reactor is restarted.
And guess what? The reactor vessel is made from a steel alloy with as little "element 27" as possible, to prevent neutron activation of the regular isotope you're so scared to mention into its more dangerous cousin. It's almost like, you know, the people designing nuclear reactors had figured this problem out for themselves, oh, half a century ago.
"I thought they originally went with uranium, because you could build nuclear weapons from the waste."
Oh dear, The Lie That Will Not Die.
A uranium-fuelled reactor like a PWR works by stacking a lot of uranium fuel pellets in close proximity to each other and moderating (slowing down) the neutrons they emit so they cause fission in nearby uranium atoms, producing heat and yet more neutrons. That's it, steam-engine simple. Sure there are complexities of design and engineering but they're dealt with at the drawing board, not while the reactor is running. In the 1950s and 1960s that what was possible and cost-effective to design and build.
Breeding plutonium for nuclear weapons was carried out virtually everywhere in the world in specialised reactors, almost all of which never generated a watt of electricity since they were optimised to turn U-238 into Pu-239 without producing much Pu-240 which screws up the functioning of a nuclear weapon. There were a couple of dual-use reactor designs like the British Magnox and the infamous Soviet-era RMBK-4 reactors of Tchernobyl fame which could be tasked with short-exposure fuelling cycles to produce nearly-pure Pu-239 but they were not popular and in most cases they were never actually used to make weapons-grade Pu-239, in part because by the time they came on stream the countries building them had produced as much nuclear weapons material (a few tonnes) as they would ever need from their military reactors. Since then the number of weapons has gone down, not up and the decommissioned weapon cores are stockpiled until they can be burned up in uranium reactors as mixed-oxide fuel (MOX) elements.
Thorium reactors of the liquid salt type require continuous processing of the fuel to remove assorted highly radioactive byproducts in a chemical plant while the reactor is running. Thorium itself is not fertile, it needs to be transmuted into U-233 which is fissile and can be "burned" in the same way U-235 is in existing reactors. It's the dark secret of the LFTR design that it needs a sparkplug of enriched uranium and even some plutonium to start up from cold to begin the transmutation process and the only place that can come from at the moment is the conventional nuclear reactor industry. In addition any unburnt U-233 they produce can be extracted from the fuel stream and used in nuclear weapons after processing.
Ah but the US built a thorium reactor in the 1960s! Yes, it was a 5MW thermal experimental prototype which never ran continuously for more than a few weeks at a time. Conventional 1600MWe PWR reactors being built in China, France and Finland (the EPR 1600 design) produce nearly 5 gigawatts of heat, a thousand times as much as the prototype LFTR did and they will run for 18 to 24 months at a time between refuelling operations and produce no weapons-grade plutonium.
The licencing for nuclear reactors in the US, the UK and a few other countries requires that the site be returned to greenfield status after the reactor(s) on site are decommissioned. That means total demolition of the structures including the metre-thick reinforced concrete containment buildings.
In some cases if the site is to be reused immediately then the reactors are demolished quickly with special handling of the slightly radioactive pressure vessel which has suffered neutron activation. It costs a little bit less to wait a few decades for that radioactivity to decay at which point the demolition can go ahead with no radiation-specific problems. The real problem during demolition in either case with older (1970s vintage) reactors is the presence of asbestos in pipe lagging, tank insulation etc.
There's a 1980s-era submarine, the "Akishio" in the JMSDF museum at the waterfront in Kure, Japan that was lifted into position by a floating crane. That weighed 2250 tonnes.
There were some reports early in the disaster of workers taken to the hospital with radiation exposure,
The two workers were released from hospital a few days later. It wasn't splattered over the world news channels the way their admittance to hospital was.
It's not against any treaties per se but it's only borderline economic to take in other people's washing, so to speak and the various reprocessing lines in operation around the world are designed with the capacity to handle the home country's spent fuel "load" and not much more. Saying that France and the UK did reprocess some Japanese spent fuel for a time. They produced mixed-oxide fuel with plutonium recovered from the spent fuel using the PUREX reprocessing technology. The vitrified waste was returned to Japan after processing was complete.
The Japanese are just coming to the end of commissioning their own reprocessing plant at Rokkaisho; when up to speed it can deal with about 800 tonnes of spent fuel each year. A smaller prototype plant could deal with about 100 tonnes a year but it was shut down a few years back.
I believe the ban on commercial reprocessing in the US was lifted by Reagan. However it costs a lot to reprocess spent fuel and currently mined uranium is ridiculously cheap so it's not cost-effective by itself. The reduction in waste volume and hence the cost of storage can help defray some of the differential -- the US has something like 700,000 tonnes of unprocessed spent fuel in storage whereas France which has reprocessed most of its commercial nuclear spent fuel has only a few thousand tonnes of high-level waste to store and dispose of.