My god, you have no clue what you are talking about. The information is freely available to educate yourself. Please Please PLEASE go do some reading on how a nuclear plant works, why it generates heat after shutdown, and the causes of the Fukushima disaster before posting.
A dagger that was made by people with the knowledge to undo the spell binding me together. The dagger broke the spell that made his body obey his will, then Eowyn killed him. May I suggest you re-read the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. This dagger came from a barrow wight mound.
No; dedication and professionalism are fine. However, paranoia and an inability to communicate and discuss risk are not. The perfect example is point d). I'm clearly making a point in favour of new reactors. I'm precisely saying that reactors are improving and that that's a good thing. Instead you seem to take it as an attack on the nuclear industry. I am sorry, but I wouldn't want you to be the person judging if a new reactor is safe or not.
And also the fact that no one knew about Wigner energy at the time those graphite cores were designed, so no method for efficient annealing was designed in.
It's been done numerous times already jackass. It's called electromagnetic heating. You offload the core, remove the vessel internals, and lower essentially a big electricmagetic coil to generate currents in the vessel wall to heat it up. It's not rocket science, it's not even nuclear science, it's basic metallurgy.
a) nuclear plants suffer from neutron damage. Almost any material can be degraded by long term neutron bombardment through neutron capture; this means that over the long term parts of nuclear reactors have failure modes that may not be present in any other power plant
So? There is nothing new scientifically here, you design for a level of neutron damage and periodically verify your assumptions are correct. And you can always anneal the reactor vessel in place to remove much of the neutron damage and regain operating margins. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annealing_(metallurgy)
b) nuclear reactor cores are highly radioactive to the level that can even destroy electronic equipment, certainly causes contamination and makes human inspection impossible. This makes it extremely difficult to be sure that equipment degradation has not become serious (compare with aeroplane inspection which uses detailed visual inspection at close range combined with large devices wheeled right up to the plane)
Complete B.S. Radiation hardened underwater camera systems have been available for 30 years. And there are fiber optic methods available for remote inspection as well.
c) the parts which are likely to fail (those close to the reactor core) are precisely the ones which really matter and can have worse consequences than the typical failures in a conventional power plant
More B.S. The most likely parts to fail in a reactor are never in the core. The nuclear industry is well away of which parts are closest to their long term operating margins and which require the most frequent inspection and repair. And the stuff inside the reactor vessel ain't it.
d) reactor physicists (the same ones that guaranteed us that Fukashima was safe) tell us that the new generations of reactors are much safer than the old ones; hydro power, for example, hasn't really had a massive safety change in the last fifty (or even hundred) years
Nuclear power is the only industry that is not permitted to improve, it must be perfect from day one. FYI, hydro has killed more people than multiples of all other power generation methods combined. It's not even close. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
e) nuclear reactors are incredibly complex, difficult and precise mechanisms. They have a huge setup and teardown cost which means that the capital investment is huge, even compared to other large power plants. The more often this is done the more likely that it will go wrong.
Ehh? High capital costs are from what? High interest rates. Delays in plant construction and operation many times a result of frivilous lawsuits DESIGNED by environmental organizations to intentionally run up costs. Talk about self fulfilling criticisms. The current generation of plants are avoiding this by getting all that crap doen up front and also by self financing. We'll see.
f) nuclear reactors leave large amounts of radioactive waste during decommissioning; one part of this is the fuel, but probably more important is all of the other parts which become radioactive during the lifetime of the reactor (remember neutron capture). The fewer plants that are decommissioned the lower the volume of this waste.
This is true, but to put some context on this, the volumes are simply insignificantly small. We have many many many times the volume being buried from nasty municipal waste that have chemicals in it that do not decay away, but thats ok right?
Obviously a), b) and c) push in the opposite direction from d), e) and f). What this means is that basically we should have a smaller number of safer nuclear reactors run for longer by people who we can trust to ensure that a) and b) don
"but you can't just pull a reactor core (along with all its infrastructure) and swap in a totally different design as part of an upgrade. Changes like that generally call for outright replacement anyway."
"Eventually you get to replace the reactor vessel, which for all practical purposes involves disassembling nearly the entire plant, and reassembling it, "
A school board member who is fighting tooth and nail against standardized testing as a means of evaluating the quality of staff and schools fails the standardized test and holds that up as proof said test is invalid. Color me not surprised.
Sodium reacts violently to moisture and air. Yes youcan have all these engineered safeguards to prevent that, but IMHO it's better to avoid having to do that. One less thing to worry about.
All of our current coal/gas/nuclear power plants are heat engines hooked up to an Rankine cycle steam plant. The maximum theoretical efficiency of any Rankine cycle is a function of the maximum temperature of the working fluid.
Thee is work going on to move to a Brayton cycle power plant. That one change can conceivably double plant efficiencies. But a Brayton cycle needs much higher temperatures than a Rankine cycle.
Technically speaking, anything in the periodic table over Pb208 (Lead) is radioactive. It's just some of these elements have REALLY long half lives. And the longer the half life, the lower the radioactivity...
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My god, you have no clue what you are talking about. The information is freely available to educate yourself. Please Please PLEASE go do some reading on how a nuclear plant works, why it generates heat after shutdown, and the causes of the Fukushima disaster before posting.
Helicopters are easier.
Well thought out cogent arguments. I know this because the anti-nuke 1%'rs elbowiung themselves aside to run away from this post.
This study includes that, nuclear is still lower.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/
Not according to Forbes.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/
Or anyone with a six-digit one either?
Westinghouse is building 4 reactors in the USA right this minute. Look up Vogtle Units 3&4 and VCS Units 2&3.
0 in the USA. Many elsewhere.
But there are 4 being built now in the US.
Spot on.
Useful Idiot.
A dagger that was made by people with the knowledge to undo the spell binding me together. The dagger broke the spell that made his body obey his will, then Eowyn killed him. May I suggest you re-read the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. This dagger came from a barrow wight mound.
What a gigantic pile of steaming FUD. You win the FUD award of the decade.
I tried hard, but I could not find a single factual statement in anything you wrote. Every single statement is a lie. Wow.
It's not a talking point if it killed hundreds of thousands of people.
RBMK reactors do not have a reactor vessel anyway. It's a POS pressure tube design, the above pots never applied to it.
No; dedication and professionalism are fine. However, paranoia and an inability to communicate and discuss risk are not. The perfect example is point d). I'm clearly making a point in favour of new reactors. I'm precisely saying that reactors are improving and that that's a good thing. Instead you seem to take it as an attack on the nuclear industry. I am sorry, but I wouldn't want you to be the person judging if a new reactor is safe or not.
Too late.
Muhuhuahahaha.
And also the fact that no one knew about Wigner energy at the time those graphite cores were designed, so no method for efficient annealing was designed in.
It's been done numerous times already jackass. It's called electromagnetic heating. You offload the core, remove the vessel internals, and lower essentially a big electricmagetic coil to generate currents in the vessel wall to heat it up. It's not rocket science, it's not even nuclear science, it's basic metallurgy.
So? There is nothing new scientifically here, you design for a level of neutron damage and periodically verify your assumptions are correct. And you can always anneal the reactor vessel in place to remove much of the neutron damage and regain operating margins. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annealing_(metallurgy)
Complete B.S. Radiation hardened underwater camera systems have been available for 30 years. And there are fiber optic methods available for remote inspection as well.
More B.S. The most likely parts to fail in a reactor are never in the core. The nuclear industry is well away of which parts are closest to their long term operating margins and which require the most frequent inspection and repair. And the stuff inside the reactor vessel ain't it.
Nuclear power is the only industry that is not permitted to improve, it must be perfect from day one. FYI, hydro has killed more people than multiples of all other power generation methods combined. It's not even close. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
Ehh? High capital costs are from what? High interest rates. Delays in plant construction and operation many times a result of frivilous lawsuits DESIGNED by environmental organizations to intentionally run up costs. Talk about self fulfilling criticisms. The current generation of plants are avoiding this by getting all that crap doen up front and also by self financing. We'll see.
This is true, but to put some context on this, the volumes are simply insignificantly small. We have many many many times the volume being buried from nasty municipal waste that have chemicals in it that do not decay away, but thats ok right?
Obviously a), b) and c) push in the opposite direction from d), e) and f). What this means is that basically we should have a smaller number of safer nuclear reactors run for longer by people who we can trust to ensure that a) and b) don
"but you can't just pull a reactor core (along with all its infrastructure) and swap in a totally different design as part of an upgrade. Changes like that generally call for outright replacement anyway."
Of course you can.
"Eventually you get to replace the reactor vessel, which for all practical purposes involves disassembling nearly the entire plant, and reassembling it, "
Or you can just anneal it in place to remove much of the neutron damage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annealing_(metallurgy)
You can also choose to anneal the reactor vessel in place. This will restore much of the original ductility.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annealing_(metallurgy)
A school board member who is fighting tooth and nail against standardized testing as a means of evaluating the quality of staff and schools fails the standardized test and holds that up as proof said test is invalid. Color me not surprised.
Sodium reacts violently to moisture and air. Yes youcan have all these engineered safeguards to prevent that, but IMHO it's better to avoid having to do that. One less thing to worry about.
No I wasn't looking for that term.
All of our current coal/gas/nuclear power plants are heat engines hooked up to an Rankine cycle steam plant. The maximum theoretical efficiency of any Rankine cycle is a function of the maximum temperature of the working fluid.
Thee is work going on to move to a Brayton cycle power plant. That one change can conceivably double plant efficiencies. But a Brayton cycle needs much higher temperatures than a Rankine cycle.
Look up Rankine and Brayton cycles on wiki.
Technically speaking, anything in the periodic table over Pb208 (Lead) is radioactive. It's just some of these elements have REALLY long half lives. And the longer the half life, the lower the radioactivity...