I'm all for building more nuclear plants and think they, along with fuel reprocessing, are a key element in reducing our dependence on fossil fuels. McCain's plan, however, ignores the realities of what it would take to physically build 45 plants in the US by 2030.
There was an article covered a while back (http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/14/1238233) talking about the 600-ton steel forgings required for a reactor containment vessel and the fact that on one company in Japan can, currently, make them. Given that their production rate is only 5 per year and their first open slot is in ~2015, the US would need 80% of their output from 2015 to 2027 to hope to meet that goal.
Unless the rest of the world stops building nuclear plants or someone else starts making containment vessels, all this is just talk.
...the accompanying photo shows, what I assume to be, an engineering student working a problem using a TI-83 CALCULATOR!!! WTF? In my school, all self-respecting engineers sported HP iron using the vastly more efficient RPN (Reverse Polish Notation, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Polish_notation) entry method. Given the length of some of my exams, you needed every speed advantage you could get and RPN was the way to go. I still use the HP-48S I bought in 1990.
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In response to the question 'Why would you like to attend North Carolina State University?', I wrote the following very candid and succinct list:
1. It's close.
2. It's cheap.
3. I can get in.
Approximately four years later, I had a BS in Aerospace Engineering.
I'm all for building more nuclear plants and think they, along with fuel reprocessing, are a key element in reducing our dependence on fossil fuels. McCain's plan, however, ignores the realities of what it would take to physically build 45 plants in the US by 2030.
There was an article covered a while back (http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/14/1238233) talking about the 600-ton steel forgings required for a reactor containment vessel and the fact that on one company in Japan can, currently, make them. Given that their production rate is only 5 per year and their first open slot is in ~2015, the US would need 80% of their output from 2015 to 2027 to hope to meet that goal.
Unless the rest of the world stops building nuclear plants or someone else starts making containment vessels, all this is just talk.
...the accompanying photo shows, what I assume to be, an engineering student working a problem using a TI-83 CALCULATOR!!! WTF? In my school, all self-respecting engineers sported HP iron using the vastly more efficient RPN (Reverse Polish Notation, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Polish_notation) entry method. Given the length of some of my exams, you needed every speed advantage you could get and RPN was the way to go. I still use the HP-48S I bought in 1990.