First New Nuclear Plant in US in 30 years 838
Hugh Pickens writes "With backing from the White House and congressional leaders, and subsidies like the $500 million in risk insurance from the Department of Energy, the nuclear industry is experiencing a revival in the US. Scientific American reports that this week NRG Energy filed an application for the first new nuclear power plant in the US in thirty years to build two advanced boiling water reactors (ABWR) at its South Texas nuclear power plant site doubling the 2700 megawatts presently generated at the facility. The ABWR, based on technology already operating in Japan, works by using the heat generated by the controlled splitting of uranium atoms in fuel rods to directly boil water into steam to drive turbines producing electricity. Improvements over previous designs include removing water circulation pipes that could rupture and accidentally drain water from the reactor, exposing the fuel rods to a potential meltdown, and fewer pumps to move the water through the system. NRG projects it will spend $6 billion constructing the two new reactors and hopes to have the first unit online by 2014."
Sounds sensible (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Hypocrisy (Score:2, Informative)
READ FIRST (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.epa.gov/waterscience/fishadvice/advice.html [epa.gov]
http://www.environmentaldefense.org/documents/3370_MercuryPowerPlants.pdf [environmentaldefense.org]
thank you for your time
US sources of energy (Score:5, Informative)
Coal-fired plants - 49.0 percent
Nuclear plants - 19.8 percent
Natural gas-fired plants - 19.2 percent
Petroleum-fired plants - 1.8 percent
Conventional hydroelectric power - 7.1 percent
Solar, wind, etc - 3.1 percent
Re:Here's why: (Score:1, Informative)
The native Americans, French, Spanish, British, Mexicans, Canadians, Hawaiians, and Filipinos might have a little something to say about that. Do you know nothing about American history at all? We've been violently expansionistic for hundreds of years.
Re:Sounds sensible (Score:3, Informative)
If you think that one sounds good, have a look at this paper on liquid metal cooled reactors:
http://nucleartimes.jrc.nl/Doc/ICONE13-50397.pdf [nucleartimes.jrc.nl]
Essentially the safest reactor by far is the lead cooled fast reactor. It uses molten lead as a coolant in a non-pressurised vessel that doesn't have any tubes entering or leaving bellow the lead surface, making a loss of coolant accident virtually impossible. Thermal expansion of the fuel will shut it down well before dangerous temperatures. Because lead has a high thermal conductivity and heat capacity it doesn't need any pumps to circulate the coolant, natural convection from the temperature difference is enough. Thus even a complete loss of power, loss of pressure in the pressure vessel, and failure of the control rod shut-down system, will not damage the core.
As an added bonus it can operate with a fast neutron spectrum, allowing it to destroy the long lived isotopes of nuclear waste, leaving only fission products that decay bellow uranium levels within 300 years. It could even be used to destroy existing waste from PWRs. And the cost? Well, because it doesn't need any cooling pumps or pressurisers for the primary loop, can operate at high temperatures with good thermal efficiency, and due to the modest size of its containment structure, it is expected to be one of the cheapest design of all reactors, putting it bellow many fossil fuel plants even before carbon quotas are taken into consideration.
Really, pebble beds are good and nice, but it is nothing compared to some of the designs in the pipeline...
Re:Sounds sensible (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Boom (Score:3, Informative)
Where is that being done currently? All I found was this [ccnr.org]:
- The West Valley plant was deserted by its owners in 1972, leaving 600,000 gallons of high-level liquid waste and 30,000 gallons of radioactive sludge as a legacy to the State of New York. Solidification of this waste has been estimated by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission to cost about $500 million, once they solve the associated technical problems, which (it is estimated) will take a minimum of 14 years.
- Occupational exposures to radiation were very high at West Valley. In 1971, almost 1000 transient workers were hired to keep exposures to the 162 full-time workers down. Nevertheless, over three-quarters of the full-timers were over-exposed.
- Radioactive effluents into the environment from West Valley were very high. Concentrations of strontium-90 in local creeks were from 1000 to 10,000 times higher than projected. Over 65% of all the available Iodine-129 (half-life 17 million years) was released, either as a gas of liquid, showing up in the thyroids of wildlife and in cow's milk.
Yummy.Re:Does Nuclear Energy Really Make Economic Sense? (Score:3, Informative)
This is already built into the cost of every kilowatt-hour consumed by those purchasing nuclear power. Unlike coal, oil, and even solar and wind, the cost of interring the waste from nuclear power is built into the cost from the onset.
Also keep in mind that half-life is generally inversely proportional to the amount of energy something radiates. If an isotope, like U238, has a half-life of 4.5 gigayears, then it is, for all intents and purposes, stable. The stuff that has a half-life in the range of tens of years is the dangerous stuff.
Re:Does Nuclear Energy Really Make Economic Sense? (Score:3, Informative)
The DOE has guaranteed to monitor and control the radiation output of Yucca mountain for a million years. That's right, 1 million years - it's the furthest out the government has planned anything.
We have spent $2 billion to study the geology of Yucca mountain, and there is no concern of someone getting hurt by any catastrophic event.
This is paid for, in part, by selling electricity to the tax payer from DOE's reactors.
Re:Boom (Score:5, Informative)
No nuclear power plant can blow up in a nuclear explosion. First, the enrichment level of nuclear fuel for power plants is far too low to be able to cause an explosion, and second, even those reactors that use highöy enriched fuels have fuel elements in configurations that are unsuitable to create explosions. Remember that atomic bombs both need a very high enrichment level and a very precise shape to be able to explode. That's why it is difficult to produce atomic bombs.
Re:Hypocrisy (Score:3, Informative)
One of the most notable individuals with this opinion was then-General Dwight D. Eisenhower. He wrote in his memoir The White House Years:
"In 1945 Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives."
"The use of [the atomic bombs] at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender." Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to President Truman.
Re:unfortunate (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Boom (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Does Nuclear Energy Really Make Economic Sense? (Score:2, Informative)
The CANDU is a nice design. It will not be licenced in the US as it has a positive temperature coefficient under certain operating conditions. That is that power generated increases as temperature increases. This can lead to a very bad feedback loop. (Indeed was one of the issues that contributed to the Chernobyl accident. )
The other issue is that deuterium is still expensive so you make a design choice about spending money on enriching urainium or makeing deuterium (which is really just enriching the water). There are other options, eg graphite but that was another problem with chernobyl, graphite is flammable.
Most of the military reactors use more enriched fuel so they can be small. Low enriched uranium fuel (used in us commercial and most research reactors) was a compromise with cost and lesser risk of diversion to make nuclear weapons.
Geothermal not without risk... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Slightly offtopic (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Here's why: (Score:4, Informative)
We need nuclear, but not like this. Breeders! (Score:5, Informative)
If it's not a fast breeder reactor, it's not a solution to the energy problem.
U235 would run out within the next 60 years, IIRC, if we got all of our power from traditional nuclear powerplants like this one!
However, the world has tons of U238, so breeders could provide power for a long time. And if you made the changes necessary to run the breeders on Thorium instead of U238 (Thorium is even more abundant), then you coul provide power nearly indefinitely.
Breeders also solve the waste problem: The reason radioactive waste is so dangerous is that it still has tons of energy in it; the decay is the slow release of that energy. Since breeders extract so much more energy from fuel, their wastes have much shorter half-lives, and decay to the levels of naturally-occurring ores within a few hundred years -- which isn't great, but (1) sure beats the millennia we're talking about with our current wastes, and (2) seems to be a timescale society can handle.
We need breeders. Pebble-beds are wasteful; they (1) don't breed, and (2) generate a lot of pebble-coating waste. Anything but breeder reactors, and solar/wind/geothermal/hydro, is a waste of time. Breeder reactors are the only technology we currently have that can solve the energy problem. We should be building breeders.
Re:What, no comments? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What, no comments? (Score:5, Informative)
To simplify things greatly - Many of the byproducts (especially the final one, lead) poison nuclear reactions and make it so that if the fuel contains more than a certain amount of those byproducts, it is no longer capable of sustaining fission.
Unfortunately, most current reactor designs (including new ones) are quite inefficient in this regard. More efficient reactors get shot down for various reasons. For example, the IFR research reactor was shut down by politicians because of proliferation concerns - even though the reactor was less of a proliferation threat than even normal civilian PWRs. (They saw "breeder" and instantly thought "nuclear weapons" even though the IFR waste material would have been useless for producing weapons-grade fissiles.)
The IFR had some great advantages - It was far more efficient in terms of extracting energy from uranium, and it could burn basically any actinide (including those normally considered "unburnable waste" from other reactors). Compared to PWRs, its waste was MUCH more radioactive (bad), but significantly shorter lived (very good) - Something like 50-100 years half life for the longest-lived byproducts, as opposed to thousands of years for the waste actinides from PWRs.
Re:Call me naive... (Score:4, Informative)
Even if you can get the per-capita energy requirement as low as possible (and the trend over time is generally upward, with infrequent downward spikes as energy-saving technologies are invented), the population is still growing. Energy conservation is very much a game of diminishing returns.
They do... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Does Nuclear Energy Really Make Economic Sense? (Score:3, Informative)
he half-life of plutonium is about twenty-thousand years. Only a tiny speck of will start a fatal cancer if inhaled or ingested.
Michael, according to the US Department of Energy, the risk of plutonium [doe.gov] is somewhat exaggerated:
How are we going to store the nuclear waste in such a way that no one is hurt by it? Who will guard this facility for a million years? How much will that cost?
First, there's no reason to dump large quantities of plutonium. It's viable reactor material. Second, we can vitrify (turn into glass) nuclear waste and fix most of it in place for geological periods of time. Third, it's irresponsible to worry about a material, 40 half-lives later. That's a decline in amount by a factor of roughly 10^12. Finally, it's not our responsibility to protect people a million or even a thousand years from now from a slightly elevated risk of death. This more rational approach is reflected in how we handled our other refuse. Where's the protection a million years down the road for our junkyards, garbage dumps, and other dump sites? These present a greater risk down the road since heavy metals have no half-life. Where's the giant concrete pylons of doom that will warn future generations for hundreds of thousands of years that CRTs, rechargeable batteries, and mercury thermometers lie herein?
I think that before any new nuclear facility is licensed, its operators should be required to pay in advance for the disposal of its spent fuel. I don't think it's right that the cost should be borne by the taxpayer.
I see no problems with this requirement as long as we don't require ridiculous protection measures. Keep in mind the current approach is to dump fuel rods into a cooling pond. We probably can do better than that.IFR Test reactor was built (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Boom (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What, no comments? (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, but there is still a finite amount of resource that exists within the earth, and an even smaller finite amount that can fundamentally be retrieved in a net-positive-energy way, regardless of the tech used.
Re:Here's why: (Score:3, Informative)
Afghanistan was in the middle of a civil war--in fact, on September 9, 2001, Ahmad Shah Massoud, the military leader of one of the warring factions, was killed by suicide bombers, two days before September 11 and almost a month before the US gave air support to Massoud's faction, the Northern Alliance, helping them drive out the Taliban and their al-Qaeda allies. The only mistake with Afghanistan was losing our focus and going to Iraq.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)