I'm sorry but your statement is demonstrably incorrect. Western nuclear power plants are not dual use in any way, there is no way to extract weapons grade fissile material from light water reactors. You could, at great expense, extract the reactor-grade plutonium from the spent fuel but this plutonium would have to be enriched in the same way that natural uranium is enriched. It is a pointless effort since you could have just enriched natural uranium to begin with if you already have the capability. The only power plants that actually are dual-use are the soviet graphite-moderated reactors, of which few remain operational around the world. I'm not sure where your criticism of availability comes from, I work in the industry so I can tell you that our power factors are in deed almost always above 90% and often above 95% for our plants. This is typical for other utilities.
If you think nuclear electricity generation is not mature then you are grossly mistaken. Nuclear produces more then 20% of US electric power, and has been around since the 1960's. We have gained huge amounts of experience in designing and operating plants in that time, plants today are much cleaner and are exceeding 98% availability. There is no comparison between western plants and soviet plants.
I still shop at Compusa fairly frequently. Not too long ago my motherboard died and needed an RMA, but I couldn't cross ship. So, I bought a replacement at Compusa without having to wait for shipping. It was definitely overpriced, but was comparable to getting overnight shipping anyway. Even more recently my power supply died and again, Compusa allowed me to get my computer up an running the same night at around the same price of getting a new power supply shipped overnight from Newegg. I also buy keyboards and such there, as I can try them out on display, and I also bought my last LCD monitor there because I could return it if it had _any_ dead pixels.
I'm kind of saddened buy this but not at all surprised. They don't offer large scale business needs nor competitive prices on consumer goods, nor technical advice to the less computer savvy. Their one niche is offering parts locally otherwise only available online at a premium to users who know what they need when they walk in the door.
What would be cool is if a motherboard manufacturer would add a bios feature, that works with wake-on-lan, that has a phone-home feature of some sort that is user-configurable. What are the odds that the thief would remove the CMOS battery, in a laptop?
Just playing the devil's advocate here, but why is it ok to ban certain internet sites, but it's presumably not ok to ban certain books? What if the government said they didn't want our youth being exposed to the dangerous ideas of Shakespeare/Newton/Ghandi? Or that the study of Christianity/Atheism/Global Warming/whatever is a waste of time, and that if you really want to read books on these topics, there are plenty of private libraries around where such information is freely available, as long as that source doesn't receive any public funding? The whole decision seems completely arbitrary to me. What if I was a sociologist doing research about the interactions of teenagers on the internet, etc?
The drop testing machine that's located at the Osaka R&D facility is one of only eight in the world, but unfortunately it wasn't working on the day we visited.
Things just arent built to last these days ..
Or, maybe it was SO tough, that the laptop broke the testing machine itself! OOooooo!:)
(Ballmer charges at the two mice, who simply step aside, letting Ballmer crash a Ballmer-shaped hole through the wall.) Gates: (looking at hole in wall) Oh, no. Once he stops there's no stopping him. He'll be running for hours.
Don't you know who I am? I'm the Ballmernaught, bitch!
Thus inferring global warming from a 3 Martian year regional trend is unwarranted. The observed regional changes in south polar ice cover are almost certainly due to a regional climate transition, not a global phenomenon, and are demonstrably unrelated to external forcing. There is a slight irony in people rushing to claim that the glacier changes on Mars are a sure sign of global warming, while not being swayed by the much more persuasive analogous phenomena here on Earth...
Interesting, how this statement reads when you remove just a couple words...
"Thus inferring global warming from a regional trend is unwarranted. The observed regional changes in south polar ice cover are almost certainly due to a regional climate transition, not a global phenomenon, and are demonstrably unrelated to external forcing. There is a slight irony in people rushing to claim that the glacier changes are a sure sign of global warming, while not being swayed by the much more persuasive analogous phenomena...";)
Tanks, SCUD missiles, and nuclear weapons are not arms. They are ordnance. Arms refers to individual weapons, like rifles, machine guns, etc. We can debate all day long whether portable anti-aircraft launchers or RPG's should be regulated in this day and age, but making the argument that the second amendment is obsolete and should be abandoned because more powerful military weapons exist is a red herring.
The second amendment protects the state's rights to have the national guard? Yeah. Just like the first amendment protects the freedom of speech for state-run newspapers. Or the right of news agencies to publish newspapers, but limited to 18th century printing presses and ink quills.
Why would the second amendment refer to a "state right" where as all other amendments refer to individual rights? Doesn't that seem logically inconsistent? Why would the founding fathers, whom above all else feared and detested government control and power, create an amendment in the bill of rights specifically calling for such control?
I'm a little confused by you response. You feel that goverment control was the problem for Chornobyl yet government control is the solution here.
No. I don't know how you managed to come to this conclusion.
Government regulation, to ensure that the utilities are following safety regulations and provide guidelines to help various plants operate as safely as possible is not the same thing as a communist regime operating an unsafely designed plant with poorly trained staff with no regard to safety. Soviet government control is not the same as commercial operation guided by federal regulations. They are not comparable situations, for a multitude of reasons.
Assuming our government control and your bottom line argument are correct and nuclear power in the US is perfectly safe and no accident can possibly happen, then why not repeal Price-Anderson since there should be no chance of liability where no accident can happen?
Because accidents of lesser magnitude can and have happened (TMI).
So, a market distortion, that has likely delayed the development of renewable energy, is what this is really what this is all about.
In the 1950's when P-A was passed, nuclear was THE solution to world energy, it was clean, plentiful, and thought to be "too cheap to meter". In the 50's there was no prospect for solar or wind power.
Furthermore, I read the link you posted at the bottom. You seem to think that if we had enough solar and wind power generation, that nuclear plants would have to shut down to make room for them, and that this would somehow increase their operating costs. Your little scenario shows you have little understanding of how the electrical generation industry works.
While nuclear power is dying out in Europe due to public opinion, it is BOOMING in Asia, and is likely to soon witness a rebirth in the United States. Nuclear is the solution to global energy demand, barring some breakthrough in fusion research in the next few decades. While solar and wind power are a great way to supplement energy demand, especially in countries that lack reliable infrastructure, they are not and will never be the solution to our energy needs.
Uh, I think you missed the whole point of the Price-Anderson act. It does far more then just give a modest subsidy to power plants. It limits the maximum liability a power company must pay in the event of a nuclear catastrophe. The chances of a disaster are infinitesimal, but because the cost of such a disaster would be so astronomically large, insurance companies were unable to provide coverage because they wouldn't have the resources to make the claims payments on hundreds of billions of dollars. And if power companies can't get insurance coverage, then they can't build the plants.
What P-A does is let the government pay the liability costs over $10 billion if such a disaster would occur. This makes commercial nuclear power possible. Some people have this misconception that nuclear power is uncompetitive, and that it requires government subsidies in order to be economically sustainable. This is not the case, all P-A does is allow the government to essentially act as the insurance agent in case of a nuclear disaster. It is the value of this insurance coverage, the coverage of claims over $10 billion dollars, which is valued at $2 million per reactor. You might think "how is it that insurance coverage for a disaster costing over $10 billion would only cost $2 million per year?" It is because the reactors are designed, operated, and maintained with such high safety standards making such a disaster nearly impossible.
What does the Price-Anderson act have to do with Chernobyl? Nothing.
In the US, private companies spend their own capital to build and operate power reactors for profit. It is in their best interest to operate as safely as possible, because any accident will spell utter disaster for their bottom line. The Price-Anderson act is feasible in this country because the reactors are regulated by the NRC and the safety of the plants is in the best interest of those operating them.
In the Soviet Union, their goal was to make as much electricity and weapons-grade plutonium as possible for as cheaply as possible. Safety expenses and training were not big considerations. Under those circumstances, no insurance company or government act would cover the liability because it is such a large and plausible risk.
You can't use Chernobyl as an example of Price-Anderson causing market distortion because Chernobyl was run by a communist regime, where market forces don't apply. This example is complete nonsense in the same manner as your web page link on waste disposal.
Yup, you are correct. There are basically three parts to high level nuclear waste (spent fuel):
1) light elements - these decay down to natural levels in about 30 years and are made up of elements like iron, nickel, cobolt, etc.
2) fission products - these are the nasty guys. They have medium half-lives so they release a lot of high energy radiation. However, because they release a lot of energy, they also decay in a reasonable amount of time. They will decay to natural levels in around 100 years, and are made up of elements like cesium, promethium, scandium, etc.
3) transuranics - these are the long lived guys. They are elements heavier then uranium, mainly plutonium and americium. While these isotopes can have half lives of billions of years, it is because they release radiation so slowly. Additionally, these elements can be remanufactured into new fuel to be burned in future fuel cycles. They aren't really waste.
It's true that Yucca mountain will most likely not be used as a commercial power reactor waste repository site. But it is not as if the billions of dollars in the nuclear waste fund will go to waste. The money will be used towards another storage solution or, more likely, waste reprocessing.
As for the insurance costs, it most certainly is not free. Power plants spend huge amounts of money for their liability insurance. What you are probably thinking of is the price-anderson act, which states that power companies are only liable for the first $10 billion in damages due to a nuclear accident, where the federal government picks up the rest. While the act makes it so that people cannot sue the power companies for _punitive_ damages in a nuclear accident, it also states that the power companies cannot defend any action for damages. It's a fair two-way street that makes nuclear power commercially possible.
According to the wikipedia article on the price-anderson act, the actual subsidy comes out to around $2 million per reactor per year. That seems fairly modest to me, considering the financial risk power companies invest in the plants and their benefit to the country via clean, reliable power.
Hum, you've forgotten the incredible subsidy nuclear power gets: It's been promised not to have to deal with the waste. That promise is not at all realistic since Yucca Mountian can't go forward. So, we're in a postion where we'll have to pay back all the energy we've ever gotten from nuclear power and then some. How much more expensive can you get? See: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/saving-not-bor rowing.html
That article is a load of crap. Basically, what he is saying is that in order to clean up all of the waste we've generated, we need to use high energy particle accelerators to split apart every last atom of radioactive waste, and since the particle accelerator would require more energy to run then what we obtained from the nuclear power to begin with, it's therefore not worth the trouble. This is equivalent to saying that fossil fuels can't be economically used, because the energy required to rebind the molecules after they are combusted is greater then the energy used to burn them to begin with. It's a ridiculous argument and is wrong on so many levels I'm not going to go into it here unless you really want me to.
And your original point is wrong. You are backwards, power reactors don't receive subsidies to dispose of their waste. They've been paying into a DOE waste fund since 1982. The cost of waste disposal has already been factored into the economics of their operation.
I think the best way to go is to only use sales taxes. That way, you tax the "idle rich", the wealthy that have lots of money but don't necessarily have an income to tax, because they still buy stuff. The more you make, the more cool stuff you can buy, but the more tax you pay. But if you are poor, and only buy the essentials, you basically pay no tax. Check out fairtax.org/.
This isn't quite correct. First, nuclear fuel doesn't get used up if it is not at power. The neutron flux at shutdown, compared to full power, is many orders of magnitude lower. The amount fuel is depleted is called the burnup, and is measured in gigawatt-days per metric ton uranium. Typical fuel is designed to last 40-60 gwd/mtu. If the reactor is at low power, the fuel will not be depleted at a significant rate. However, there are issues with running at low power for extended periods of time, this is because "burning" the fuel with control rods in causes axial asymmetry.
Second, power reactors can remain hot at zero power for extended periods of time (called hot-zero-power or hot-standby). In PWR's, the reactor is designed to operate at a certain temperature (usually around 580 degrees F and 2250 psi). The reactor cannot be operated at colder then 540 degrees or so, due to physics limitations (moderator temperature coefficient, thermal stresses, etc). The way PWR's initially heat up the coolant at the beginning of a cycle is by simply running the coolant pumps. The pumps that circulate the coolant are monstrous (~7000 hp) and can heat up the system to operating temperatures all by themselves. They also keep the water at hot conditions while the reactor is at zero power.
In a world powered entirely by solar panels, large nuclear power plants for use at night or in case of volcano would work just fine. This is because if they were needed, they would be operating at 100% as base load plants.
Not quite true. Lifetime on fuel rods is dependent on the number of fissions, not the time spent in the reactor. Control rods mediate the reaction or can shut it down nearly entirely. I have looked with "no joy" (unsuccessfully) for info on minimum power levels at nuke plants, my guess would be 5%-ish of maximum power just to keep the turbine spinning. There would also be some interconnect time if they're off-grid.
The minimum power a nuclear plant can produce electricity at is around 20%, but this is due to non-nuclear issues (turbine vibrations, steam quality, etc). As far as the reactor is concerned, you could theoretically run at 5% power indefinitely, however there are issues associated with running at less then 100% power for extended periods of time. What happens is that in order to run at low power, you have to use the control rods to control power level, but if you deplete the core with control rods in you create axial asymmetries.
Big nuke power plants are designed to be base load generating plants, running at 100% all the time. They are sensitive to making power changes on the fly and if you shut down completely, you can't go back online for a couple days due to xenon. However, there is no reason why you couldn't design a smaller reactor designed for peak loads or emergency use. It would work just like a naval reactor: compact, high power, and using highly enriched uranium.
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I'm sorry but your statement is demonstrably incorrect. Western nuclear power plants are not dual use in any way, there is no way to extract weapons grade fissile material from light water reactors. You could, at great expense, extract the reactor-grade plutonium from the spent fuel but this plutonium would have to be enriched in the same way that natural uranium is enriched. It is a pointless effort since you could have just enriched natural uranium to begin with if you already have the capability. The only power plants that actually are dual-use are the soviet graphite-moderated reactors, of which few remain operational around the world. I'm not sure where your criticism of availability comes from, I work in the industry so I can tell you that our power factors are in deed almost always above 90% and often above 95% for our plants. This is typical for other utilities.
If you think nuclear electricity generation is not mature then you are grossly mistaken. Nuclear produces more then 20% of US electric power, and has been around since the 1960's. We have gained huge amounts of experience in designing and operating plants in that time, plants today are much cleaner and are exceeding 98% availability. There is no comparison between western plants and soviet plants.
I still shop at Compusa fairly frequently. Not too long ago my motherboard died and needed an RMA, but I couldn't cross ship. So, I bought a replacement at Compusa without having to wait for shipping. It was definitely overpriced, but was comparable to getting overnight shipping anyway. Even more recently my power supply died and again, Compusa allowed me to get my computer up an running the same night at around the same price of getting a new power supply shipped overnight from Newegg. I also buy keyboards and such there, as I can try them out on display, and I also bought my last LCD monitor there because I could return it if it had _any_ dead pixels.
I'm kind of saddened buy this but not at all surprised. They don't offer large scale business needs nor competitive prices on consumer goods, nor technical advice to the less computer savvy. Their one niche is offering parts locally otherwise only available online at a premium to users who know what they need when they walk in the door.
Except for the ESBWR, the most likely candidate for new reactor construction in the US and abroad...
What would be cool is if a motherboard manufacturer would add a bios feature, that works with wake-on-lan, that has a phone-home feature of some sort that is user-configurable. What are the odds that the thief would remove the CMOS battery, in a laptop?
Wouldn't that make the journey take less time? Not having to stop to let them go to the bathroom every 10 miles?
Just playing the devil's advocate here, but why is it ok to ban certain internet sites, but it's presumably not ok to ban certain books? What if the government said they didn't want our youth being exposed to the dangerous ideas of Shakespeare/Newton/Ghandi? Or that the study of Christianity/Atheism/Global Warming/whatever is a waste of time, and that if you really want to read books on these topics, there are plenty of private libraries around where such information is freely available, as long as that source doesn't receive any public funding? The whole decision seems completely arbitrary to me. What if I was a sociologist doing research about the interactions of teenagers on the internet, etc?
In silicon brain, linux runs you!
Hey, that actually makes sense for once.
I might agree to a national drivers license if it also meant I could get a national CCW license.
"Thus inferring global warming from a regional trend is unwarranted. The observed regional changes in south polar ice cover are almost certainly due to a regional climate transition, not a global phenomenon, and are demonstrably unrelated to external forcing. There is a slight irony in people rushing to claim that the glacier changes are a sure sign of global warming, while not being swayed by the much more persuasive analogous phenomena..."
Tanks, SCUD missiles, and nuclear weapons are not arms. They are ordnance. Arms refers to individual weapons, like rifles, machine guns, etc. We can debate all day long whether portable anti-aircraft launchers or RPG's should be regulated in this day and age, but making the argument that the second amendment is obsolete and should be abandoned because more powerful military weapons exist is a red herring.
The second amendment protects the state's rights to have the national guard? Yeah. Just like the first amendment protects the freedom of speech for state-run newspapers. Or the right of news agencies to publish newspapers, but limited to 18th century printing presses and ink quills.
Why would the second amendment refer to a "state right" where as all other amendments refer to individual rights? Doesn't that seem logically inconsistent? Why would the founding fathers, whom above all else feared and detested government control and power, create an amendment in the bill of rights specifically calling for such control?
Government regulation, to ensure that the utilities are following safety regulations and provide guidelines to help various plants operate as safely as possible is not the same thing as a communist regime operating an unsafely designed plant with poorly trained staff with no regard to safety. Soviet government control is not the same as commercial operation guided by federal regulations. They are not comparable situations, for a multitude of reasons. Because accidents of lesser magnitude can and have happened (TMI). In the 1950's when P-A was passed, nuclear was THE solution to world energy, it was clean, plentiful, and thought to be "too cheap to meter". In the 50's there was no prospect for solar or wind power.
Furthermore, I read the link you posted at the bottom. You seem to think that if we had enough solar and wind power generation, that nuclear plants would have to shut down to make room for them, and that this would somehow increase their operating costs. Your little scenario shows you have little understanding of how the electrical generation industry works.
While nuclear power is dying out in Europe due to public opinion, it is BOOMING in Asia, and is likely to soon witness a rebirth in the United States. Nuclear is the solution to global energy demand, barring some breakthrough in fusion research in the next few decades. While solar and wind power are a great way to supplement energy demand, especially in countries that lack reliable infrastructure, they are not and will never be the solution to our energy needs.
Uh, I think you missed the whole point of the Price-Anderson act. It does far more then just give a modest subsidy to power plants. It limits the maximum liability a power company must pay in the event of a nuclear catastrophe. The chances of a disaster are infinitesimal, but because the cost of such a disaster would be so astronomically large, insurance companies were unable to provide coverage because they wouldn't have the resources to make the claims payments on hundreds of billions of dollars. And if power companies can't get insurance coverage, then they can't build the plants.
What P-A does is let the government pay the liability costs over $10 billion if such a disaster would occur. This makes commercial nuclear power possible. Some people have this misconception that nuclear power is uncompetitive, and that it requires government subsidies in order to be economically sustainable. This is not the case, all P-A does is allow the government to essentially act as the insurance agent in case of a nuclear disaster. It is the value of this insurance coverage, the coverage of claims over $10 billion dollars, which is valued at $2 million per reactor. You might think "how is it that insurance coverage for a disaster costing over $10 billion would only cost $2 million per year?" It is because the reactors are designed, operated, and maintained with such high safety standards making such a disaster nearly impossible.
What does the Price-Anderson act have to do with Chernobyl? Nothing.
In the US, private companies spend their own capital to build and operate power reactors for profit. It is in their best interest to operate as safely as possible, because any accident will spell utter disaster for their bottom line. The Price-Anderson act is feasible in this country because the reactors are regulated by the NRC and the safety of the plants is in the best interest of those operating them.
In the Soviet Union, their goal was to make as much electricity and weapons-grade plutonium as possible for as cheaply as possible. Safety expenses and training were not big considerations. Under those circumstances, no insurance company or government act would cover the liability because it is such a large and plausible risk.
You can't use Chernobyl as an example of Price-Anderson causing market distortion because Chernobyl was run by a communist regime, where market forces don't apply. This example is complete nonsense in the same manner as your web page link on waste disposal.
Yup, you are correct. There are basically three parts to high level nuclear waste (spent fuel):
1) light elements - these decay down to natural levels in about 30 years and are made up of elements like iron, nickel, cobolt, etc.
2) fission products - these are the nasty guys. They have medium half-lives so they release a lot of high energy radiation. However, because they release a lot of energy, they also decay in a reasonable amount of time. They will decay to natural levels in around 100 years, and are made up of elements like cesium, promethium, scandium, etc.
3) transuranics - these are the long lived guys. They are elements heavier then uranium, mainly plutonium and americium. While these isotopes can have half lives of billions of years, it is because they release radiation so slowly. Additionally, these elements can be remanufactured into new fuel to be burned in future fuel cycles. They aren't really waste.
It's true that Yucca mountain will most likely not be used as a commercial power reactor waste repository site. But it is not as if the billions of dollars in the nuclear waste fund will go to waste. The money will be used towards another storage solution or, more likely, waste reprocessing.
As for the insurance costs, it most certainly is not free. Power plants spend huge amounts of money for their liability insurance. What you are probably thinking of is the price-anderson act, which states that power companies are only liable for the first $10 billion in damages due to a nuclear accident, where the federal government picks up the rest. While the act makes it so that people cannot sue the power companies for _punitive_ damages in a nuclear accident, it also states that the power companies cannot defend any action for damages. It's a fair two-way street that makes nuclear power commercially possible.
According to the wikipedia article on the price-anderson act, the actual subsidy comes out to around $2 million per reactor per year. That seems fairly modest to me, considering the financial risk power companies invest in the plants and their benefit to the country via clean, reliable power.
And your original point is wrong. You are backwards, power reactors don't receive subsidies to dispose of their waste. They've been paying into a DOE waste fund since 1982. The cost of waste disposal has already been factored into the economics of their operation.
They didn't. Why do you think it crashed in the first place?
Is 20 million herring sufficient to chop down the mightiest tree in the forest?
The fairtax proposal includes a monthly prebate which offsets the cost of sales tax on clothes, food, utilities, etc.
I think the best way to go is to only use sales taxes. That way, you tax the "idle rich", the wealthy that have lots of money but don't necessarily have an income to tax, because they still buy stuff. The more you make, the more cool stuff you can buy, but the more tax you pay. But if you are poor, and only buy the essentials, you basically pay no tax. Check out fairtax.org/.
This isn't quite correct. First, nuclear fuel doesn't get used up if it is not at power. The neutron flux at shutdown, compared to full power, is many orders of magnitude lower. The amount fuel is depleted is called the burnup, and is measured in gigawatt-days per metric ton uranium. Typical fuel is designed to last 40-60 gwd/mtu. If the reactor is at low power, the fuel will not be depleted at a significant rate. However, there are issues with running at low power for extended periods of time, this is because "burning" the fuel with control rods in causes axial asymmetry.
Second, power reactors can remain hot at zero power for extended periods of time (called hot-zero-power or hot-standby). In PWR's, the reactor is designed to operate at a certain temperature (usually around 580 degrees F and 2250 psi). The reactor cannot be operated at colder then 540 degrees or so, due to physics limitations (moderator temperature coefficient, thermal stresses, etc). The way PWR's initially heat up the coolant at the beginning of a cycle is by simply running the coolant pumps. The pumps that circulate the coolant are monstrous (~7000 hp) and can heat up the system to operating temperatures all by themselves. They also keep the water at hot conditions while the reactor is at zero power.
In a world powered entirely by solar panels, large nuclear power plants for use at night or in case of volcano would work just fine. This is because if they were needed, they would be operating at 100% as base load plants.
The minimum power a nuclear plant can produce electricity at is around 20%, but this is due to non-nuclear issues (turbine vibrations, steam quality, etc). As far as the reactor is concerned, you could theoretically run at 5% power indefinitely, however there are issues associated with running at less then 100% power for extended periods of time. What happens is that in order to run at low power, you have to use the control rods to control power level, but if you deplete the core with control rods in you create axial asymmetries.
Big nuke power plants are designed to be base load generating plants, running at 100% all the time. They are sensitive to making power changes on the fly and if you shut down completely, you can't go back online for a couple days due to xenon. However, there is no reason why you couldn't design a smaller reactor designed for peak loads or emergency use. It would work just like a naval reactor: compact, high power, and using highly enriched uranium.