What about Yankee Rowe, Trojan*, Rancho Seco, and Maine Yankee*?
I wouldn't really call three reactor shutdowns 'large scale'. At issue is when the reactors were/are demolished what and how much radioactive isotope is released? This is why demolishing the reactor is a more energy intensive process than building it in the first place. For example, Yankee Rowe, was a controlled shutdown of a functioning reactor. It cost half a billion dollars to clean-up and it was only 137 Megawatts, less than a quarter of the size of TMI-2. You have to wait decades to allow the *really* radioactive elements to decay. This is because new and highly radioactive elements are created in the reactor core. It's still not something that has been addressed in an industrially proficient way that makes the sites safe or 'greenfeild'. Considering the 104 reactor sites around America are multi-core the United States will be looking at a conservative estimate of a quarter of a *Trillion* dollars, at todays prices, on reactor decommissioning alone.
While the cost is a concern, decommissioning the reactor core has to be conducted so that it doesn't release any of the new radioactive elements free to bio-concentrate in the food chain. That's why the major feature of all reactors should be that they are built underground so they can be sealed up and entombed as is. But you know all this.
I think you will also find that the spent fuel is still on the sites.
For example Diablo Canyon helped replace Rancho Seco, and has busted capacity factor/reliability standards.
I would expect it to. Like people, nuclear reactors are complex beasts. Having turbulent youths, relatively stable middle ages and maturity followed be a march into decrepitude. The problems are flushed out when the reactor is new, runs with relatively stability during maturity, then suffers problems as it gets older. Inevitably it *has* to be shut down, cooled down, then demolished.
It's also a newer plant. Basically, that's the problem with saying there's all sorts of trouble with nuclear reacters - sure, they have to be done right, but it's certainly possible and we have 30 years of experience telling us what to look out for. New reactor designs are safer AND less complicated - complication adds expense and cuts into reliability.
Unfortunately thats the ideal situation that does not apply to the real world. In reactor design economics trumps good engineering. Besides we've had this conversation before regarding nuclear industry recommendations for improving reactor design. But since you have provided me with an opportunity to address the points you left me with before;
The real copy is kept in my safety deposit box, on the premise that if something happens such that I need said paperwork, there's a good chance of it having been destroyed along with the house. Ergo, keep it in an alternet location.
So you've had plenty of time to visit your safe deposit box and it was on your mind - what did the insurance paper say?
Except we don't know the true odds of an accident yet with post TMI/Chernobyl designs. Not enough reactor-years, apparently.
All we need to know is that it is some number greater than zero.
Hmm... I think I know what part of the problem is. I'm practicing risk management, you're trying to practice risk avoidance. Now, when dealing with incidents as expensive* as a nuclear incident, they often look the same. The thing with the measures you list is that, in a risk management scenario, are they going to avoid, on average, as much or more damage expense than what they'll cost? If not, then you don't do it. Some of the things you're suggesting are VERY EXPENSIVE, and given that the AP1000 isn't going to be producing as much power as the E
I was rebutting was the perceived upcoming 'shortage' of nuclear fuel, not the immediate viability of technologies.
I understand you were making that point, however it's not relevant to the issue at hand. There are no commercial reactors of the 440 odd around the world fueled by uranium that can be fueled by thorium. Thorium based reactors are a completely different technology stream.
from someone else's research on the matter
That's great but it doesn't change anything so to re-iterate;
So we would have to have a waste repository designed, constructed and operational before we even start talking about Thorium based reactors.
It seems to me the problems they having with fast reactors is building them at the typical multi-GW scale. We have had many working smaller-scale prototypes of many flavours fast reactors and those based on the thorium cycle.
Indeed. A major problem that affects reactors (Breeder, PWR, ABWR etc) is the pressure vessel suffers from neutron bombardment which 'embrittles' it. This results in the eventual breakdown of containment. This is unavoidable with current construction methods/materials and is why I often cite that the types of reactors that *have* to be built if we are going to continue with this technology *cannot* be built with our current materials technology. Thorium based reactors raise different infrastructure issues.
I think your view of the nuclear fuel cycle is not entirely critical or honest!
ad hominem, first line. We're off to a great start already.
New refinement plants do not use or emit CFCs. So while true, it's not an honest, critical, or complete view of the matter.
So you're saying that all the problems with ultracentrifuge technology has been solved, it's commercially implemented on an industrial scale in America and that Paducah has been shut down. Before you call me a liar you could send some links supporting your claims as they look like fiction to me.
Energy return is already factored into the cost of energy and the operational cost of the plant.
citation please.
At 3 times the price, nuclear power will have low operational costs. Again -- true, but not really critical or honest.
George W, is that you?
I'm happy to hear the negative things about nuclear power, which mainly revolve around proliferation and safety, but please don't try to claim you are being critical and honest while making outdated or one-sided claims.
I guess you just don't get it, later I might address some of your other points but I'm short on time so I'll summarise. You have provided no evidence to support your assertions. What I provided you were the facts as discovered. If you are going to persist with ad hominem attacks your "argument" really has no credibility.
Fraud Alert! My guess is that this story is a public relations piece by people who are trying to sell solar energy. Is a Slashdot editor paid to run P.R.?...Wow! That was easy! Indicating the falsehood of the Slashdot story only required copying the comments in the linked story.
Well insurance companies won't insure Nuclear Power. That is the purpose of the Price-Anderson act, to limit liability so investors would put money into Nuclear power. It was originally set to expire in 1967 once the industry had proved itself safe. Evidently it hasn't. The continued existence of the Price-Anderson act illustrates that professional risk assessors consider the risks involved in the Nuclear Industry too high to be financially viable, so the federal government stepped in with a remedy. The Nuclear industry would not be able to exist without the protections the P-A act afford as no sane investor would expose themselves to that level of liability.
Actuaries and Risk Assessors are professionals in the insurance industry and their assessment of the Nuclear Industry is that they won't insure it without the Price-Anderson Act. They're not 'against' Nuclear power, they're just paid to asses the risks, professionally.
Speaking of subsidies the 2005 U.S energy bill provided another $13 billion dollars worth of subsidies this round to 2021 and re-authorised the Price-Anderson Act to underwrite the Nuclear industry with $600 Billion of Taxpayer money and closer to a trillion dollars if you factor the huge amount of land you are going to lose from a single accident.
Solar power doesn't require such a construct to be viable, or to exist. So let's not go waving the Fraud word around because the real fraud perpetrated is if the Nuclear power industry was forced to cover it's own liability and fund itself it would cease to exist.
Nuclear power offers the advantage of massive energy production on a small area of land, giving it a high W/skm rate.
I don't think you can say that considering the amount of land mining takes and that the Chernobyl disaster consumed 2640 Square kilometres of farmland and 1900 sqkm of forest. How energetic would a solar array that large be?
I don't have a citation handy, but as I understand the situation, the rich uranium deposits are very low, resulting in the mining of lower grade deposits, Thus the cost of extracting uranium is going up, on a semi permanent basis.
Total Identified (formerly Known Conventional) Resources (RAR & Inferred
(formerly EAR-I) Resources) in both the under USD 80/kgU (about 3 804 000 tonnes U) and
under USD 130/kgU (about 4 743 000 tonnes U) categories increased significantly compared
to their 2003 levels, although it is important to note that the bulk of these increases were
not the result of new discoveries but were the result of re-evaluations of previously
Identified Resources in light of the effects of higher uranium prices on cut-off grades.
Identified Resources in the under USD 40/kgU increased by about 13% compared to 2003,
mainly due to increases in this category reported by Australia, Brazil and Niger. Total
Undiscovered Resources (Prognosticated Resources (formerly EAR-II) & Speculative
Resources) in 2005 amounted to about 10 000 000 tonnes U (tU), a slight increase of
about 25 000 tU from the total reported in 2003.
At the end of 2004, a total of 440 commercial nuclear reactors were operating with a
net generating capacity of about 369 GWe requiring about 67 320 tU. By the year 2025,
world nuclear capacity is projected to grow to between about 449 GWe net in the low
demand case and 533 GWe net in the high demand case. Accordingly, world reactor-
related uranium requirements are projected to rise to between about 82 275 tU and
100 760 tU by 2025.
What this boils down to is there is approximately 21 years (1453000 tU) of soft ore uranium at the worlds current consumption of 67000 tU per year (provided it's found of course). After that point only hard ore sources remain which is where the cost goes up. But the issue is not the cost it's Net Energy Return. You have to process so much rock to get so little uranium and it takes so much energy to get the ore in the first place. 2.4 gigajoules per ton for soft ores and 5.5 gigajoules per ton for hard hard ores. To get a kilogram of uranium you have to process 500 tons of hard ore (almost no soft ore left) - and even that is assuming an extremely optimistic extraction efficiency approaching %50 AND assumes you have a high grade ore. Even then you still have to factor the energetic remediation of the mine tailing.
Then there is the discussion about enrichment, without touching on the energy efficiency of that process, demolishing a decommissioned nuclear reactor has not successfully been performed safely on a large scale yet. Nuclear industry proponents tout the amount of energy that can be extracted from a gram of Uranium but rarely factor the *Net Energy Return* of the Nuclear fuel cycle, associated infrastructure and the long term storage of toxic waste.
The other myth is that carbon dioxide is the major green house gas. Water vapor is the major green house gas...This is relevant because Nuclear power plants
One thing that is not immediately obvious is that greenhouse gas emissions from the Nuclear industry include Chlorinated Fluro-Carbons (CFC114) a greenhouse gas 20,000 times more potent than C02. Whilst it's equivalent effect is slightly over 8 megatons of C02, more potent is the destruction this compound causes to the ozone layer and it's eventual effect on Phytoplankton which creates more breathable oxygen than the Amazon.
the economics of an isolated nuclear power plant looks pretty good, but when you put them in the real world
I think many people are enamoured by the technology and the "idea" of it. It's only when you take a critical and honest view of the entire cycle do you come to the inevitable conclusion that commercial nuclear power is not viable as there is no net energy return.
In fact, just the thorium discarded from our surface-mined coal could power us for thousands of years.
Meant to mention it in my last post. The spent fuel stream is thallium-208, a gamma emmiter - very nasty stuff to deal with - very hard to deal with. So we would have to have a waste repository designed, constructed and operational before we even start talking about Thorium based reactors.
To understand why the words of Dixie Lee Ray, former head of the Atomic Energy Commission, proclaiming that the disposal of nuclear fuel would be "the greatest non-problem in history" and would be accomplished by 1985, yet here we are in 2010, over twenty years past that date and still there is no high level waste disposal site anywhere.
Dude, you need a reality adjustment. It is estimated that there is enough surface-mineable thorium alone to power us for hundreds of thousands of years to come. In fact, just the thorium discarded from our surface-mined coal could power us for thousands of years.
Thorium based reactors are a completely different technology stream from existing reactor technology and commercially undeveloped. If you are going to include thorium reactor technology with existing reactor technology then wouldn't it also be valid to ask if the spent fuel would be handled any better than the existing Nuclear industry? It's promising but I wouldn't want to relate it to the mess of the current nuclear industry.
Then when have fast breeder reactor designs which burn uranium at efficiencies orders of magnitude better than our current production reactors. These designs even allow you to burn up almost all of the nuclear waste from slow breeder reactors.
Except you are talking about a "Burner" reactor not a "Breeder" reactor and the technology for either type of fast reactor is not feasible with current materials technology. Even then you would still need a minimum of 30 years to resolve the infrastructure issues (mainly transporting the existing spent fuel) associated with it's implementation.
Care to support this with a citation? The only news I read about nuclear is how to get rid of waste and at the same time stop teRRists from getting it.
Read Nuclear Power - Some Facts is a paper written by a senior nuclear energy scientist J W Storm Van Leeuwen.
The top wavering and the kids changing size led me to believe that he was in fact awake, and the end was real.
It's doesn't matter whether the top continues to spin or we know it falls over. What matters is that Cobb (De-Caprio) knows he has come back to reality, eventually he will.
I suspect that the directors may have wanted to box the film in uncertainty and that once we observe the outcome the film loses it's power. Best film I've seen in many years.
Ideally you'd have uranium coming in and lead going out. But stupid laws prevent that stateside.
No. Material Sciences prevent that. It is not possible yet to build a breeder reactor that has a similar lifespan to the fuel that is being used. Even if it was constructing such a reactor project would radically change society. Politically, the proper design process would go beyond the shallow terms of office occupied by elected officials and commercially the contracts to finance these power generation projects revolve around a 40-50 year term and would require a new legal construct to fund it. Besides, you don't want a breeder reactor you want a Burner reactor that consumes transuranics (like pu-239) into fissile ash if you are to solve the high level waste problems. It's the fissile ash that has a shorter (around 600 year) half lives that dictates the required reactor lifespan. With current stockpiles of transuranics there is about 5000 operating years of fuel for such a project. So lets be clear about this;
Any potential Reactor design would have to have a minimum 600 year lifespan to be a viable operation. Why, you ask?
1. Because the energy to build, decommission and fuel a reactor exceeds the expected energy output of the reactor over it's life if it's any shorter. I know this is contrary to many peoples beliefs but the reason is because the amount of energy extracted from the ore is a very small fraction of the energy available from the ore with current reactor technology.
2. It would have to be housed in the belly of a geologically stable solid granite mountain, like Cheyenne_Mountain as you would need to process, use and store the fuel on site and be safe from attack. When it's not possible to use the reactor anymore it would be sealed in the mountain for it to all cool thus avoiding the energetic costs of dismantling the reactor.
3. It will need a massive infrastructure project to support it to transport an estimated 70,000 tons of pu-239 from around the country (the US in this case) to the facility which itself is estimated as a 30 year project.
In the meantime you are going to need well developed wind, solar, wave and geothermal power projects to support such a long term project. Don't get me wrong, I think it could be possible, in fact I think it needs to be done as it's irresponsible of our generation to hand future generations a radioactive externality to handle the way our generation has been handed a carbon externality to handle. Anyone thinking one electrical power generation method (like nuclear) is going to solve our problems is deluding themselves and if you don't have the balls to advocate for a properly designed Nuclear facility and infrastructure the you should STFU about Nuclear power because it is not responsible nuclear advocacy.
To re-iterate, whilst necessary, a properly designed Nuclear Infrastructure is a 50-100 year project to implement and will *require* the support of wind, solar, wave and geothermal reserves. Flamebait? You may think so, but this is the reality we have to face if we want to overcome the mess of the last 50 years of Nuclear Industry. In the meantime developments such as this molten salt solar plant is exactly what we need.
You do some code type stuff that isn't a game because programming has become your video game. At least that's what I explain to the WOWers I meet at work. It's not that I don't like to play games it's just that I like to code more than playing games.
I hate to accuse him with no evidence, but those pictures look ridiculously staged.
I saw a documentary that incorporated a video of the artist at work where he took the camera to seabird after seabird (chick) killed this way. The artist most damning commentary was that the presentation of his work was to include the single caption in the viewers mind "Recycling is the answer" as recycling is the way the developed world relieves itself of the guilt associated with using plastics.
Recycled Island is exactly the same thing on a much larger scale, "don't feel so bad, we'll recycle it into a doo goood plastic island!, everything is ok, take comfort, continue to consume without guilt, don't look don't look at how utterly doomed our civilisation has become.
That's all this whole fucking article says, you may continue your consumption now.
Many years ago I had a mobile phone stolen with two cd wallets (I had loaned them to a friend who had just returned them) that contained over $2500 worth of original cd's. Stupidly the thief used my phone account which I had left active to see if they would use it. The sim pin but not a phone pin guaranteed a limited use of the phone and it was enough to track the thief to their home address where I waited.
Good sense prevailed and I left the scene and reported the information I found to the police who said I should work for them. They did nothing and now I am sorry I didn't kick the door down and collect my property. Sure it's illegal but how the fuck are they going to prove you are stealing what is already yours.
I'd be careful though, I hear that Americans tend to own guns.
So nuclear is the cheapest day to day energy producer (obviously it has large upfront costs) even compared to coal.
It's ridiculous that the figures you mention don't include the reactor construction costs, I've seen them before and apply to the output of old and established reactors. The other costs that aren't included are
managing pollution
accidents
insurance
protection from terrorists
inevitable decommissioning costs
Even Westinghouse says that if Natural gas goes back to $3.5 per MBtu nuclear power ceases to become competitive even with artificial estimates. In Australia NSW *alone* has over a Trillion barrels in coal seam gas reserves and Hurrican Katrina disrupted gas supplies in the U.S so severely that the price is still artificially high. So it's not unreasonable to expect gas prices to fall as production increases.
M.I.T's paper "The Future of Nuclear Power" finds the cost of nuclear power from new plants to be 60% higher than coal when construction and maintenance costs of both types of plants are included.
Could you get some numbers to back up the claim that solar or wind comes even remotely close to nuclear power in terms of costs per kwh without any subsidies?
2005 U.S energy bill and The Price Anderson Act will be a good place for you to start to understand where the subsides come from. The figures I cited come from Congressional Research Services and represent DOE R&D spending from 1948-1998 and is in 1999 dollars whereas the figure you cite differ (I haven't fully absorbed them).
Because I'm pretty sure there are no such figures from unbiased reputable sources
Yeah. I always liked Vernor Vinge's concept of a "programmer-archaeologist", and his idea that the codebase of a starfaring trade civilization millenia in the future will still have components and artifacts dating back to Unix Version 1.
Is this where I make a joke about some pleasure model android thousands of years in the future not being able to ignore root commands?
MS Windows has received a lot of bad press in geekdom for perceived unnecessary legacy support ("holding it back and perpetuating old bugs and bad design decisions"), but Unix legacy support practically makes Microsoft a piker.
Again I agree with you but maybe this is a open vs closed source observation here.
I'm not interested in CO2, and OP was writing about efficiency. And, where "efficiency", I mean "miles per dollar."
Your CO2 discussion belongs in another thread (and I submit that it probably ends with nuclear energy being king, which is fine by me).
You speak of efficiency and Nuclear in the same post when reputable Nuclear scientists demonstrate that there is no net energy return from nuclear power. You can check their research I believe you will find it's been peer reviewed and constructed using using U.S government standards for industrial process measurement. So, actually, I think you will find that that thread ends with geothermal, solar and wind.
Nuclear is pretty cheap per kWh. If you take away free money that other forms of energy production get then it is quite affordable.
The breakdown of U.S energy research and development reported by the US DOE is roughly 60% for nuclear, 25% to fossil fuels and 15% to SUSTAINABLE energy sources. Wall Street doesn't like nuclear because its a risky investment, investors don't like that sort of risk, solar and wind are way ahead simply because the return on investment is much better than nuclear, i.e. Solar and wind satisfies the criteria that makes an investment "economically viable" nuclear power is only "economically viable" with substantial regulatory support.
In addition to what I mentioned above you can add the 2005 U.S energy bill provided another $13 billion dollars worth of subsidies revocation of the Public Utilities Holding Company Act (PUHCA) which was put into law in 1935 to stop a re-occurrence of the 1929 stock market crash, now allowing the owners of nuclear power stations to syphon money from ratepayers. Half a billion dollars worth of subsidies for procuring companies (i.e oil companies) proposing "pre-approved" reactor designs, even if they don't build it, and a 1.8 cent per kilowatt hour tax credit if they do. The reality is if the Nuclear power industry was forced to cover it's own liability and fund itself it would cease to exist. I could go on and on but the bottom line is how can America, of all countries, continue to justify this form of corporate welfare?
And high maintenance costs isn't quite right either, you were probably thinking high upfront costs (which is certainly true)...
Standard and Poor's assessment of the Nuclear industry's financial viability "the industry's legacy of cost growth, technological problems, cumbersome political and regulatory oversight, and the newer risks brought about by competition and terrorism keep credit risk too high for even federal legislation that provides loan guarantees to overcome"
An assessment supported by Britain's Royal Institute of International Affairs "even with an explicit tax on carbon-based power generation, new nuclear power plants cannot be economical without government subsidies"
The reason people hate nuclear energy is because of fear and misinformation.
Maybe people hate Nuclear power because when they educate themselves about it they discover how bad it is.
That would be interesting. Especially since TCP/IP is flatly impossible with an out-of-the-box serial terminal, such as a VT320.
Of course you are right.
For some reason I thought this was an old unix machine and I forget how much things have changed. Long ago I actually wrote a/etc/termcap entry for a HP700/44. In the late 80's the company I worked for was importing the terminals and there was no support for them in Xenix. I wrote the termcap sent it back to SCO and they included it without even a thank you:-( of well I guess thats what I should of expected.
I remember altering inittab files frequently do do this sort of thing, 300,1200 and 2400 baud modems. The bronze or iron age of computing perhaps?
I'd imagine the level of toxicity there would give you a good starting point, although of course it's a different dynamic, because it's multiple smaller leaks over a long time, rather than a single big leak over a relatively short time.
We talk in terms of As and other compounds released into nature when the worst toxicity exists in the boardrooms of the corporate giants prepared to take these enormous risks.
When I was looking for a list of oil spills and was astounded to see how many there were since E.V, they must have bought the media time. If you've ever watched a documentary called "The Corporation" (which I recommend to get a non-political idea of the structural problems our society faces) a Wall st stock broker tells of other brokers saying Saddam should burn *more* oil (10-15 E.Vs:)). I wonder how the belief is sustained that that sort of thinking evolves us as a species and whether we will be fit enough to survive whilst this type of thinking continues.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't really call three reactor shutdowns 'large scale'. At issue is when the reactors were/are demolished what and how much radioactive isotope is released? This is why demolishing the reactor is a more energy intensive process than building it in the first place. For example, Yankee Rowe, was a controlled shutdown of a functioning reactor. It cost half a billion dollars to clean-up and it was only 137 Megawatts, less than a quarter of the size of TMI-2. You have to wait decades to allow the *really* radioactive elements to decay. This is because new and highly radioactive elements are created in the reactor core. It's still not something that has been addressed in an industrially proficient way that makes the sites safe or 'greenfeild'. Considering the 104 reactor sites around America are multi-core the United States will be looking at a conservative estimate of a quarter of a *Trillion* dollars, at todays prices, on reactor decommissioning alone.
While the cost is a concern, decommissioning the reactor core has to be conducted so that it doesn't release any of the new radioactive elements free to bio-concentrate in the food chain. That's why the major feature of all reactors should be that they are built underground so they can be sealed up and entombed as is. But you know all this.
I think you will also find that the spent fuel is still on the sites.
I would expect it to. Like people, nuclear reactors are complex beasts. Having turbulent youths, relatively stable middle ages and maturity followed be a march into decrepitude. The problems are flushed out when the reactor is new, runs with relatively stability during maturity, then suffers problems as it gets older. Inevitably it *has* to be shut down, cooled down, then demolished.
Unfortunately thats the ideal situation that does not apply to the real world. In reactor design economics trumps good engineering. Besides we've had this conversation before regarding nuclear industry recommendations for improving reactor design. But since you have provided me with an opportunity to address the points you left me with before;
So you've had plenty of time to visit your safe deposit box and it was on your mind - what did the insurance paper say?
All we need to know is that it is some number greater than zero.
I understand you were making that point, however it's not relevant to the issue at hand. There are no commercial reactors of the 440 odd around the world fueled by uranium that can be fueled by thorium. Thorium based reactors are a completely different technology stream.
That's great but it doesn't change anything so to re-iterate;
So we would have to have a waste repository designed, constructed and operational before we even start talking about Thorium based reactors.
Indeed. A major problem that affects reactors (Breeder, PWR, ABWR etc) is the pressure vessel suffers from neutron bombardment which 'embrittles' it. This results in the eventual breakdown of containment. This is unavoidable with current construction methods/materials and is why I often cite that the types of reactors that *have* to be built if we are going to continue with this technology *cannot* be built with our current materials technology. Thorium based reactors raise different infrastructure issues.
ad hominem, first line. We're off to a great start already.
So you're saying that all the problems with ultracentrifuge technology has been solved, it's commercially implemented on an industrial scale in America and that Paducah has been shut down. Before you call me a liar you could send some links supporting your claims as they look like fiction to me.
citation please.
George W, is that you?
I guess you just don't get it, later I might address some of your other points but I'm short on time so I'll summarise. You have provided no evidence to support your assertions. What I provided you were the facts as discovered. If you are going to persist with ad hominem attacks your "argument" really has no credibility.
Well insurance companies won't insure Nuclear Power. That is the purpose of the Price-Anderson act, to limit liability so investors would put money into Nuclear power. It was originally set to expire in 1967 once the industry had proved itself safe. Evidently it hasn't. The continued existence of the Price-Anderson act illustrates that professional risk assessors consider the risks involved in the Nuclear Industry too high to be financially viable, so the federal government stepped in with a remedy. The Nuclear industry would not be able to exist without the protections the P-A act afford as no sane investor would expose themselves to that level of liability.
Actuaries and Risk Assessors are professionals in the insurance industry and their assessment of the Nuclear Industry is that they won't insure it without the Price-Anderson Act. They're not 'against' Nuclear power, they're just paid to asses the risks, professionally.
Speaking of subsidies the 2005 U.S energy bill provided another $13 billion dollars worth of subsidies this round to 2021 and re-authorised the Price-Anderson Act to underwrite the Nuclear industry with $600 Billion of Taxpayer money and closer to a trillion dollars if you factor the huge amount of land you are going to lose from a single accident.
Solar power doesn't require such a construct to be viable, or to exist. So let's not go waving the Fraud word around because the real fraud perpetrated is if the Nuclear power industry was forced to cover it's own liability and fund itself it would cease to exist.
I don't think you can say that considering the amount of land mining takes and that the Chernobyl disaster consumed 2640 Square kilometres of farmland and 1900 sqkm of forest. How energetic would a solar array that large be?
Then allow me to assist you. From NEA-IAEA, Uranium 2003; Resources, Production and Demand;
Total Identified (formerly Known Conventional) Resources (RAR & Inferred (formerly EAR-I) Resources) in both the under USD 80/kgU (about 3 804 000 tonnes U) and under USD 130/kgU (about 4 743 000 tonnes U) categories increased significantly compared to their 2003 levels, although it is important to note that the bulk of these increases were not the result of new discoveries but were the result of re-evaluations of previously Identified Resources in light of the effects of higher uranium prices on cut-off grades. Identified Resources in the under USD 40/kgU increased by about 13% compared to 2003, mainly due to increases in this category reported by Australia, Brazil and Niger. Total Undiscovered Resources (Prognosticated Resources (formerly EAR-II) & Speculative Resources) in 2005 amounted to about 10 000 000 tonnes U (tU), a slight increase of about 25 000 tU from the total reported in 2003.
At the end of 2004, a total of 440 commercial nuclear reactors were operating with a net generating capacity of about 369 GWe requiring about 67 320 tU. By the year 2025, world nuclear capacity is projected to grow to between about 449 GWe net in the low demand case and 533 GWe net in the high demand case. Accordingly, world reactor- related uranium requirements are projected to rise to between about 82 275 tU and 100 760 tU by 2025.
What this boils down to is there is approximately 21 years (1453000 tU) of soft ore uranium at the worlds current consumption of 67000 tU per year (provided it's found of course). After that point only hard ore sources remain which is where the cost goes up. But the issue is not the cost it's Net Energy Return. You have to process so much rock to get so little uranium and it takes so much energy to get the ore in the first place. 2.4 gigajoules per ton for soft ores and 5.5 gigajoules per ton for hard hard ores. To get a kilogram of uranium you have to process 500 tons of hard ore (almost no soft ore left) - and even that is assuming an extremely optimistic extraction efficiency approaching %50 AND assumes you have a high grade ore. Even then you still have to factor the energetic remediation of the mine tailing.
Then there is the discussion about enrichment, without touching on the energy efficiency of that process, demolishing a decommissioned nuclear reactor has not successfully been performed safely on a large scale yet. Nuclear industry proponents tout the amount of energy that can be extracted from a gram of Uranium but rarely factor the *Net Energy Return* of the Nuclear fuel cycle, associated infrastructure and the long term storage of toxic waste.
One thing that is not immediately obvious is that greenhouse gas emissions from the Nuclear industry include Chlorinated Fluro-Carbons (CFC114) a greenhouse gas 20,000 times more potent than C02. Whilst it's equivalent effect is slightly over 8 megatons of C02, more potent is the destruction this compound causes to the ozone layer and it's eventual effect on Phytoplankton which creates more breathable oxygen than the Amazon.
I think many people are enamoured by the technology and the "idea" of it. It's only when you take a critical and honest view of the entire cycle do you come to the inevitable conclusion that commercial nuclear power is not viable as there is no net energy return.
Meant to mention it in my last post. The spent fuel stream is thallium-208, a gamma emmiter - very nasty stuff to deal with - very hard to deal with. So we would have to have a waste repository designed, constructed and operational before we even start talking about Thorium based reactors.
To understand why the words of Dixie Lee Ray, former head of the Atomic Energy Commission, proclaiming that the disposal of nuclear fuel would be "the greatest non-problem in history" and would be accomplished by 1985, yet here we are in 2010, over twenty years past that date and still there is no high level waste disposal site anywhere.
Thorium based reactors are a completely different technology stream from existing reactor technology and commercially undeveloped. If you are going to include thorium reactor technology with existing reactor technology then wouldn't it also be valid to ask if the spent fuel would be handled any better than the existing Nuclear industry? It's promising but I wouldn't want to relate it to the mess of the current nuclear industry.
Except you are talking about a "Burner" reactor not a "Breeder" reactor and the technology for either type of fast reactor is not feasible with current materials technology. Even then you would still need a minimum of 30 years to resolve the infrastructure issues (mainly transporting the existing spent fuel) associated with it's implementation.
Read Nuclear Power - Some Facts is a paper written by a senior nuclear energy scientist J W Storm Van Leeuwen.
It's doesn't matter whether the top continues to spin or we know it falls over. What matters is that Cobb (De-Caprio) knows he has come back to reality, eventually he will.
I suspect that the directors may have wanted to box the film in uncertainty and that once we observe the outcome the film loses it's power. Best film I've seen in many years.
No. Material Sciences prevent that. It is not possible yet to build a breeder reactor that has a similar lifespan to the fuel that is being used. Even if it was constructing such a reactor project would radically change society. Politically, the proper design process would go beyond the shallow terms of office occupied by elected officials and commercially the contracts to finance these power generation projects revolve around a 40-50 year term and would require a new legal construct to fund it. Besides, you don't want a breeder reactor you want a Burner reactor that consumes transuranics (like pu-239) into fissile ash if you are to solve the high level waste problems. It's the fissile ash that has a shorter (around 600 year) half lives that dictates the required reactor lifespan. With current stockpiles of transuranics there is about 5000 operating years of fuel for such a project. So lets be clear about this;
Any potential Reactor design would have to have a minimum 600 year lifespan to be a viable operation. Why, you ask?
1. Because the energy to build, decommission and fuel a reactor exceeds the expected energy output of the reactor over it's life if it's any shorter. I know this is contrary to many peoples beliefs but the reason is because the amount of energy extracted from the ore is a very small fraction of the energy available from the ore with current reactor technology.
2. It would have to be housed in the belly of a geologically stable solid granite mountain, like Cheyenne_Mountain as you would need to process, use and store the fuel on site and be safe from attack. When it's not possible to use the reactor anymore it would be sealed in the mountain for it to all cool thus avoiding the energetic costs of dismantling the reactor.
3. It will need a massive infrastructure project to support it to transport an estimated 70,000 tons of pu-239 from around the country (the US in this case) to the facility which itself is estimated as a 30 year project.
In the meantime you are going to need well developed wind, solar, wave and geothermal power projects to support such a long term project. Don't get me wrong, I think it could be possible, in fact I think it needs to be done as it's irresponsible of our generation to hand future generations a radioactive externality to handle the way our generation has been handed a carbon externality to handle. Anyone thinking one electrical power generation method (like nuclear) is going to solve our problems is deluding themselves and if you don't have the balls to advocate for a properly designed Nuclear facility and infrastructure the you should STFU about Nuclear power because it is not responsible nuclear advocacy.
To re-iterate, whilst necessary, a properly designed Nuclear Infrastructure is a 50-100 year project to implement and will *require* the support of wind, solar, wave and geothermal reserves. Flamebait? You may think so, but this is the reality we have to face if we want to overcome the mess of the last 50 years of Nuclear Industry. In the meantime developments such as this molten salt solar plant is exactly what we need.
You do some code type stuff that isn't a game because programming has become your video game. At least that's what I explain to the WOWers I meet at work. It's not that I don't like to play games it's just that I like to code more than playing games.
The Global Financial Crisis - no one could afford a Thermosphere.
I saw a documentary that incorporated a video of the artist at work where he took the camera to seabird after seabird (chick) killed this way. The artist most damning commentary was that the presentation of his work was to include the single caption in the viewers mind "Recycling is the answer" as recycling is the way the developed world relieves itself of the guilt associated with using plastics.
Recycled Island is exactly the same thing on a much larger scale, "don't feel so bad, we'll recycle it into a doo goood plastic island!, everything is ok, take comfort, continue to consume without guilt, don't look don't look at how utterly doomed our civilisation has become.
That's all this whole fucking article says, you may continue your consumption now.
Many years ago I had a mobile phone stolen with two cd wallets (I had loaned them to a friend who had just returned them) that contained over $2500 worth of original cd's. Stupidly the thief used my phone account which I had left active to see if they would use it. The sim pin but not a phone pin guaranteed a limited use of the phone and it was enough to track the thief to their home address where I waited.
Good sense prevailed and I left the scene and reported the information I found to the police who said I should work for them. They did nothing and now I am sorry I didn't kick the door down and collect my property. Sure it's illegal but how the fuck are they going to prove you are stealing what is already yours.
I'd be careful though, I hear that Americans tend to own guns.
It's ridiculous that the figures you mention don't include the reactor construction costs, I've seen them before and apply to the output of old and established reactors. The other costs that aren't included are
Even Westinghouse says that if Natural gas goes back to $3.5 per MBtu nuclear power ceases to become competitive even with artificial estimates. In Australia NSW *alone* has over a Trillion barrels in coal seam gas reserves and Hurrican Katrina disrupted gas supplies in the U.S so severely that the price is still artificially high. So it's not unreasonable to expect gas prices to fall as production increases.
M.I.T's paper "The Future of Nuclear Power" finds the cost of nuclear power from new plants to be 60% higher than coal when construction and maintenance costs of both types of plants are included.
2005 U.S energy bill and The Price Anderson Act will be a good place for you to start to understand where the subsides come from. The figures I cited come from Congressional Research Services and represent DOE R&D spending from 1948-1998 and is in 1999 dollars whereas the figure you cite differ (I haven't fully absorbed them).
I would hope these sources are reputable enough.
Is this where I make a joke about some pleasure model android thousands of years in the future not being able to ignore root commands?
Again I agree with you but maybe this is a open vs closed source observation here.
You speak of efficiency and Nuclear in the same post when reputable Nuclear scientists demonstrate that there is no net energy return from nuclear power. You can check their research I believe you will find it's been peer reviewed and constructed using using U.S government standards for industrial process measurement. So, actually, I think you will find that that thread ends with geothermal, solar and wind.
The breakdown of U.S energy research and development reported by the US DOE is roughly 60% for nuclear, 25% to fossil fuels and 15% to SUSTAINABLE energy sources. Wall Street doesn't like nuclear because its a risky investment, investors don't like that sort of risk, solar and wind are way ahead simply because the return on investment is much better than nuclear, i.e. Solar and wind satisfies the criteria that makes an investment "economically viable" nuclear power is only "economically viable" with substantial regulatory support.
In addition to what I mentioned above you can add the 2005 U.S energy bill provided another $13 billion dollars worth of subsidies revocation of the Public Utilities Holding Company Act (PUHCA) which was put into law in 1935 to stop a re-occurrence of the 1929 stock market crash, now allowing the owners of nuclear power stations to syphon money from ratepayers. Half a billion dollars worth of subsidies for procuring companies (i.e oil companies) proposing "pre-approved" reactor designs, even if they don't build it, and a 1.8 cent per kilowatt hour tax credit if they do. The reality is if the Nuclear power industry was forced to cover it's own liability and fund itself it would cease to exist. I could go on and on but the bottom line is how can America, of all countries, continue to justify this form of corporate welfare?
Standard and Poor's assessment of the Nuclear industry's financial viability "the industry's legacy of cost growth, technological problems, cumbersome political and regulatory oversight, and the newer risks brought about by competition and terrorism keep credit risk too high for even federal legislation that provides loan guarantees to overcome"
An assessment supported by Britain's Royal Institute of International Affairs "even with an explicit tax on carbon-based power generation, new nuclear power plants cannot be economical without government subsidies"
Maybe people hate Nuclear power because when they educate themselves about it they discover how bad it is.
Nuclear waste is a real problem once you understand the facts.
I still have a DB25 null modem in my toolkit - I just can't seem to throw it away.
Of course you are right.
For some reason I thought this was an old unix machine and I forget how much things have changed. Long ago I actually wrote a /etc/termcap entry for a HP700/44. In the late 80's the company I worked for was importing the terminals and there was no support for them in Xenix. I wrote the termcap sent it back to SCO and they included it without even a thank you :-( of well I guess thats what I should of expected.
I remember altering inittab files frequently do do this sort of thing, 300,1200 and 2400 baud modems. The bronze or iron age of computing perhaps?
I think if he made it a IP interface over serial and then used the DEC as a graphical terminal to the netbook that would be more interesting.
We talk in terms of As and other compounds released into nature when the worst toxicity exists in the boardrooms of the corporate giants prepared to take these enormous risks.
When I was looking for a list of oil spills and was astounded to see how many there were since E.V, they must have bought the media time. If you've ever watched a documentary called "The Corporation" (which I recommend to get a non-political idea of the structural problems our society faces) a Wall st stock broker tells of other brokers saying Saddam should burn *more* oil (10-15 E.Vs :)). I wonder how the belief is sustained that that sort of thinking evolves us as a species and whether we will be fit enough to survive whilst this type of thinking continues.