US Nuclear Power Industry Poised For a Comeback 853
ThousandStars sends us to The Wall Street Journal for a report that momentum for nuclear energy is waxing in the US. "For the first time in decades, popular opinion is on the industry's side. A majority of Americans thinks nuclear power, which emits virtually no carbon dioxide, is a safe and effective way to battle climate change, according to recent polls. At the same time, legislators are showing renewed interest in nuclear as they hunt for ways to slash greenhouse-gas emissions. The industry is seizing this chance to move out of the shadow of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and show that it has solved the three big problems that have long dogged it: cost, safety and waste."
Grrr... (Score:5, Insightful)
I really hate the comparisons of Three Mile Island to Chernobyl. Three Mile Island was an example of a failure at a nuclear facility that was solved correctly. Chernobyl was an example of a failure that was caused by extraordinary stupidity and handled as badly as you could handle such an incident.
Re:Grrr... (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course the public won't understand something as complicated as nuclear reactors. Science is over their heads.
Me: "I work on stem cells in adult mice"
"Average" citizen: "Stem cells? You're going to hell, euthanizing senior citizens is wrong!"
Me: "Wow... I don't... uh, I'm going to..."
Re:Grrr... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Grrr... (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh I'm sorry, that's an incredibly stupid thing to say.
It seems to me, being relatively uninformed about nuclear power, that there are significant differences between computers, a technology which has gotten cheaper, and nuclear power, which you say will get cheaper. How exactly WILL a free market ever do anything on power when we're still talking about huge power plants and inevitable government bureaucracy basically granting a monopoly? Are we going to see two competing nuclear power plants per town? Why aren't we seeing that with coal?
These aren't hypothetical questions, I honestly don't know. What I do know is that the answers aren't obvious, so you have no leg to stand on acting as if his concerns are stupid. You pro-nukers always seem so angry whenever anyone questions nuclear power, it makes me wonder why you're so sure that nuclear power is beyond question. What's your real motivation? Are you trying to make nuclear power look less interesting? Because I have very little motivation to become educated on the pros of nuclear power when you guys act like it should be obvious already and anyone who isn't wearing a "I love nuclear power" button is an idiot.
Re:Grrr... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuclear Technology has come a looooong way in 40 years. That's something to stress to the anti-nukes.
The waste is another sticking point to the anti-nukes now.
Re:Grrr... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really. The facts are on the side of the pro-nuclear groups. We can SOLVE the nuclear waste issue by building more nuclear plants...
If we build a modern generation of feeder-breeder reactors that are something close the 97-99 times more efficient than the old breed and can consume previously generated nuclear waste as fuel.
Re:Grrr... (Score:5, Informative)
If we build a modern generation of feeder-breeder reactors that are something close the 97-99 times more efficient than the old breed and can consume previously generated nuclear waste as fuel.
Unfortunately, it seems that we are not, and will not, be building any breeder reactors because people in the government are still freaked out about the fact that they temporarily produce weapons-grade waste. So, while everything you said is true and how I wish the fuck heads in the DoD would stop screwing us over, it doesn't look like that solution is going to happen any time soon, making the anti-nuke position a lot more reasonable.
Re:Grrr... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but the waste will be far less radioactive than the waste produced by older-style reactors. And radioactive waste is significantly easier to corral than the CO2 being barfed into the atmosphere by coal-burning plants.
Re:Grrr... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure you could scrub all that stuff and just exhaust hot air, but then you have got to deal with it in piles.
Re:Grrr... (Score:5, Informative)
absolutely correct.
The facts are still on the side of the pro nuclear camp.
"Dangerous Nuclear Waste" of the old plants remains active for thousands of years, we can't really be sure to contain it for that long.
Once fully processed through feeder-breeder plants, the waste will be of two types.
1: almost non reactive with a half life of hundreds of thousands of years. Its about as dangerous as normal granite.
2: highly radioactive stuff with half lives of decades, the stuff will be decomposed and safe after about 2 centuries. We can build safe containment sure to last that long.
Re:Grrr... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually the half-life of Pu-239, the primary waste from once-through cycle reactors, is 25000 years. It is a potent alpha emitter and a dose of roughly a microgram (inhaled) is enough to give you lung cancer. Ingested via other means and it is an iron analogue to the body so is a potent cause of Leukemia. Much more dangerous than granite.
From reading about the waste products of breeder/burner reactors the first daughter product was after 600 years, still within the range of human engineering but it's important to be realistic about the time frames and the actual potential for harm (which is still a very potent risk). But your right, a shorter half life means it is more radioactive, and a lot of people here are getting that wrong because the article gets it wrong.
Re:Grrr... (Score:5, Interesting)
Couldn't it be dropped into a undersea subduction zone, where the tectonic plates meet?
Circulation of very heavy metals at the deeper locations is going to be almost zero and there's no (?) biological activity that could bring it into contact with our biosphere...
Re:Grrr... (Score:4, Insightful)
Would you like to live near a Nuclear power plant?
1: yes.
2: Depending on where you are and what you mean by "near", you already do.
Different waste. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
"You can't recycle the fuel indefinitely, eventually you will have waste. And eventually it needs to be dealt with."
But that waste you eventually have to deal with is almost completely different stuff. Instead of being a highly radioactive mess for a hundred thousand years, it's a much less radioactive mess for a thousand years (and during that last 500 years, it's pretty 'cool' anyhow). I don't know about you, but I suspect we *probably* have the engineering know how and materials science to contain stuff safely for 500-1000 years. I don't think anyone really thinks we currently have the knowledge to solve the problem of containing waste safely for 100,000 years.
I'd much rather try to solve the problem of containing waste safely for 1000 years than 100 times that.
Re:Grrr... (Score:4, Informative)
There are three basic categories of nuclear waste:
High Level waste, which has a high degree of "radioactivity" but usually has very short half-life, so in a few dozen or hundred years, you're back below background levels. Thing like Strontium-90 or Cobalt-60. Which although useless for power generation, are actually very useful in other fields, so some of this isn't even waste.
Low level waste, which has a long half-life, and consequently low radioactivity. Some of the container materials might be affected like this. Keep in mind that Depleted uranium is also technically low-level waste, and makes an excellent radiation shield.
Fuel. Stuff which has enough energy to be harmful for any length of time, has enough energy to be usefully extracted. Whether by further fission in a reactor after processing, or as the active element of a radioisotope thermoelectric generator.
Re:Grrr... (Score:5, Informative)
Well, since you asked...
Assuming one heavy waste atom per neutron converted to energy, and for the sake of argument let's say these atoms have an atomic weight of about 300:
1 neutron x c^2 = 1.67e-27 kg x 9e16 = 1.5 e-10 J/atom =
1.5 e-10 / (300*1.67e-27 kg) = 3e14 J / kg pure waste
Now, granted the efficiency with which we can extract pure waste from the rest of the spent fuel rod knocks down by a few orders of magnitude that figure. I don't know that number, but let's call it a thousand. So we have 3e14 J / metric ton waste. That's 3e5 GJ/metric ton.
For reference, total electricity produced per year in the US (source: DOE, http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat1p1.html [doe.gov]) is about 1.5e19 J / year = 1.5e10 GJ / year. If we're going to use all nukes, that would amount to 50,000 metric tons per year of the contaminated stuff, assuming 1 kg pure waste pollutes 1 metric ton of spent fuel.
Now, for coal:
1/2 of our electric output is coal right now. That's 0.75e19 J/year of coal. Coal uses a chemical reaction, not a nuclear reaction, so the mass of hydrocarbons is far greater than the number quoted above. For simplicity (and since I never took organic chem in college), let's approximate it by saying it's all clean-burning methane gas. ie CH4 + 2O2 = CO2 + 2H2O. The internets tell me (at http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~wilkins/energy/Companion/E06.1.pdf.xpdf [ohio-state.edu]) that this reaction yields 55 GJ/ metric ton methane.
Dividing through,
7.5e18J/year / 5.5e10 J/ton = 1.4e8 ton methane burned per year. Coal has higher energy content, but I'm going to make the unfounded guess that the inefficiency of the generator will balance out my assumption of using methane.(Corrections from chemists are welcomed.)
To review, we can spew out 1.4e8 ton of carbon (roughly), or 5e4 ton of dilute (factor of 1000) radioactive waste. So now the question is, how much radiation in that 1.4e8 tons of carbon. (http://www.docstoc.com/docs/4991532/radioactive-elements) tells me this is on the order of 10 ppm for thorium. So that's about 1.4e3 tons/year of pure thorium vs 5e1 tons/year of pure radioactive waste.
Again, corrections to false assumptions and math mistakes are most welcome from people who actually know what they're talking about more than I do (I'm an EE/software guy from 9-5).
Re:Grrr... (Score:5, Funny)
Don't play with reactors, right. got that.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Hell, with modern pebble bed reactors, you can do just that and the reactor will just power itself down.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Stop perpetuating that myth.
Chernobyl was all about a star scientist developing an inherently unsafe design and successfully suppressing all critics even as they come up with some simple and easy to implement solutions to increase the safety.
On a reactor designed according to even the soviet safety standards of those days the experiment would have been safe to begin with. Unfortunately RBMK wasn't.
Re:Grrr... (Score:5, Interesting)
Chernobyl blew up because the operators tested the emergency cooling facilities at 200Mw instead of at 750Mw like the test scenarios proscribed AND after they Xenon poisoned the reaction. By the time the were able to restart the reaction there was a shift change from the more experienced crew (who were dead tired by this stage) to a less experienced crew.
Stubbornly the manager persisted with the test, we know this can only be the case because of the shift change, they didn't recognise the danger of the ratio of control rod extraction to low thermal power output was because they were creating steam voids in the reactor core. No water, no reaction moderation. When they tried to scram the reactor the graphite tipped control rods displaced the little the steam was doing to moderate the reaction, thermal power spiked to 30Gw and ***BOOM***.
From memory 750Mw was proscribed because of the time it took to spin down the cooling system for the reactor down was matched to the start-up time of the diesel pumps that would take over. Operator error introduced a new failure-mode into the system and as all these reactors age, those failure modes will change up to and beyond the time for decommissioning.
In other words, the engineers specify sequences for a reasons based on the characteristics of the machine. This is of course just from memory the Chernobyl wiki [wikipedia.org] probably does a better job remembering than I do.
Re:Grrr... (Score:5, Informative)
Close but no cigar. While you describe the technical reasons, you ignore the human reasons and just assume that the manager and his crew were suicidal. They weren't.
The manager used to work at VVER type reactors before he started at the Chernobyl powerplant. He studied the manual of RBMK and according to manual the reactor was similar to operate. There was nothing about positive void coefficient or xenon poisoning in the manual. Minimal safe thermal power also wasn't specified. And of course there was nothing about SCRAM possibly could cause a runaway reaction - such a condition may not exist in any reactor built according to some safety standards.
So while the manager chose to run the experiment on a different thermal power rating, he did it in the knowledge that the procedure was still safe according to the reactor manual.
But let's go a couple of years back before the accident.
Anatoliy Aleksandrov - three times Hero of Socialist Labour (a degree of distinction similar to Hero of the Soviet Union), 9 times awardee of the Lenin Order, director of the Kurchatov Institute, was the project manager on the RBMK project. Nikolay Dollezhal - two times Hero of Socialist Labour, 6 times awardee of the Lenin Orden, director of the Research and Design Institute for Power Engineering was the chief engineer of the project. Both of them were among the highest decorated soviet scientists, both of them designed pretty much every soviet nuclear reactor and a good part of soviet nuclear armament. Both of them were getting older and set in their ways.
They were warned that their RBMK design was faulty in many ways. They ignored the warnings. The near-accidents at the Leningrad and Ignalina power plant were classified and the proposed solutions of making the RBMK design safer so the accidents wouldn't happen were also classified.
Then came the Chernobyl disaster. Both scientists blamed the reactor crew and the political bureau sided with them - they couldn't blame such high decorated scientists and had to find a scapegoat. But silently the reactor user manual was updated and so were the reactor control rods. Also, Dollezhal was forced to retire (Aleksandrov was over 80 in 1986 so he was retired already).
Shortly before his death Aleksandrov more or less admitted his guilt, Dollezhal though insisted that the RBMK design was inherently safe until he died.
Re:Grrr... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah. In terms of safety, Chernobyl is like taking a Yugo, removing the swaybar, clipping the emergency brake cable, severing the brake hydraulic lines, removing shock absorbers, installing racing slicks, and going for a joyride in the snow. (Disclaimer - Yugos might not have some of those items in the first place, but hopefully you get the idea.)
TMI would be like taking an old Dodge Aries out for a drive.
Modern nuclear plants would be like driving an AWD vehicle with ABS and stability control.
Re:Grrr... (Score:4, Insightful)
Car analogies.... is there anything they can't explain?
Re:Grrr... (Score:5, Funny)
Agreed. One might even say they're the Cadillacs of analogies.
Re:Grrr... (Score:5, Informative)
And a 4th-Gen (IFR-style) nuclear reactor would, I think, be like going for a ride in an armored troop transport. IFR-style (Integral Fast Reactor [wikipedia.org]) was designed around a slightly different principle of nuclear physics, such that you aren't even trying to prevent a meltdown, because the very physics of the reaction is such that if it starts getting 'too hot', the nuclear reaction itself starts to shutdown - the temperature increase, if I understand correctlyl, prevents further fission, at which point the temperature stabilizes at a 'safe maximum', until proper cooling is restored). There's no 'active' safety systems that could theoretically fail - no control rods that might get stuck and fail to drop, or other systems that might fail.
I don't think anyone is currently planning on using that design in the near-term, but I hear that GE and Hitachi are in some sort of partnership to try to get approval for, and commercialize, small-scale reactors based on the IFR designs.
Re:Grrr... (Score:4, Insightful)
Modern reactor designs incorporate passive safety features that do not require the input of an operator or computer system to function, such as using natural circulation for the coolant system (thus no failing coolant pumps). Some designs are even physically self-stabilizing, by arranging the fuel assembly in such a way that the rate of reactions slows down if the fuel becomes too hot.
Re:Grrr... (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it's at least partly driven by purposeful misuse of it in that way by people who either do or should know better--- whether because they want to make nuclear power seem scary, or just because they or their publishers want to sell books and push documentaries. One of the first major books [wikipedia.org] on the subject uses the sensational title Three Mile Island: Thirty Minutes to Meltdown (1982), and its paperback cover [images-amazon.com] has the even more sensational tagline, "The Untold Story--- Why It Happened And How It Can Happen Again". And even that looks like a sober scholarly analysis compared to subsequent books [amazon.com] with subtitles like A Nuclear Omen for the Age of Terror.
Fortunately there are good books [wikipedia.org] on the subject. But I suspect they don't sell as well.
Re:Grrr... (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, I agree: the fear surrounding Three Mile Island is based more on Hollywood than physics. The article makes at least one other mistake:
Many environmentalists do oppose nuclear power, but they're also knocking over AM radio towers because of the scary radiation. But it's not true that many scientists oppose nuclear power. From a recent survey [people-press.org]:
So it isn't true that many scientists oppose nuclear power. A minority of scientists oppose nuclear power, just like a minority thinks abrupt climate change isn't happening. Also, strangely enough, the scientists most likely to understand nuclear power are the ones most in favor of it.
Scientists is too general a term (Score:3, Insightful)
Seven-in-ten scientists favor building more nuclear power plants to generate electricity, while 27% are opposed.
That's the thing though. From your data over a quarter of the people who are supposedly the best informed on the subject think it is a bad idea. That is NOWHERE near a scientific consensus. Scientists, as a general rule, are not dogmatic about policy and will change their mind if the evidence supports an opposing viewpoint. The fact that 1 out of 4 educated and ostensibly well informed people who are willing to change their mind when the facts dictate doing so means that the "facts" are not clear and th
Re:Scientists is too general a term (Score:4, Insightful)
I only mentioned that survey because the article's claim was blatantly wrong. I've recently driven myself insane trying to explain to climate change "skeptics" that searching for a scientific consensus isn't the way to approach scientific topics because science isn't democratic. It's about evidence. Look into the advancements in technology over the last decades and examine the science yourself. Reprocessing dramatically reduces the volume of nuclear waste, while breeder reactors can generate new fuel. New reactor designs eliminate proliferation concerns by not generating plutonium. Pebble bed reactors eliminate the dependence on active safety systems by creating a nuclear pile out of spherical fuel "pebbles" that automatically react to higher temperatures by lowering their reaction rates. Uranium can be mined from seawater. Thorium can be used instead of uranium. Etc.
Try to understand why 88% of physicists think we should build modern nuclear power plants, rather than trying to count the scientists on each side. That's a topic that gets scientists bored very quickly. Focus on the science, it's much more interesting! But, since you seem fixated on counting heads, I'll answer your other question...
The link you're looking for [people-press.org] was on that page, off to the right: "About the survey." Here's an excerpt:
As you say, medical and biological scientists wouldn't know anything about nuclear power. And they polled 5x as many of those than physicists. But they specifically said that majorities in all specialties support nuclear power, while 88% of physicists and astronomers support it. They didn't poll any engineers because this was a survey aimed at scientists.
Re:Grrr... (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. I'd really like to know what these "tree hugging Luddites" propose that we do about our rather desperate situation in terms of electricity generation.
1. Burn coal? Nope.
2. Burn petroleum. Nope.
3. Nuclear power. Nope. NIMBY
4. Hydro power. Nope, think of the salmon!
5. Wind power. Nope. NIMBY
6. Solar power. NIMBY
etc...
They won't be happy until we're back in the days of using whale blubber lanterns to read at night...oh wait....
Re:Grrr... (Score:4, Insightful)
The biggest reason Nukes cost so much is that they take a long time to complete from initial capital investment to first production of electricity. If this takes a decade, then you just doubled your opportunity costs compared to something that can be completed in a year (assuming 8% interest). This wasn't always the way for nukes. We used to be able to build them in 2-3 years. That alone would decrease the cost of nuclear by almost half (since you are mostly paying for capital costs, not fuel costs). And it doesn't require new technology, and it will allow nuclear power to take over from coal much faster.
The biggest reason they have taken so long to build is that the safety regulations changed [i]while the plants were being built[/i], so it slowed down the construction to a stand-still. We shouldn't have this problem today. And, we can build plants even faster if we can get nuke-plant-assemblylines going, which would allow greater quality control measures (and therefore safety) and decrease the costs per power plant. This is how we can cleanly and cheaply and quickly and safely power the future.
Oblig. Mr. Burns. (Score:5, Funny)
"Congratulations Homer! You've turned a potential Chernobyl into a mere Three Mile Island!
Do the math (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a reason nobody is investing in this great deal.
The interest on a $8B loan at 8% is about 1.8M per day.
The amount of power made is about that much, at the wholesale rate of .10/KWH
And that's not counting the cost of uranium, labor, maintenance, decomissioning, or insurance .....
Not to mention that it takes many years to build one, with the 1.8M accruing each day.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Then perhaps it should be built as a power-coop?
You know a nice non-profit, perhaps even given a government loan?
Re:Do the math (Score:5, Insightful)
It costs that much because of the Anti-Nuke crowds hysteria requiring accounting and maintenance practices which would make the gordian knot look like a half-winchester. This is similar to the logic that it costs less to give a mass murderer life then death. Ask the Chinese if it costs more to keep someone in a cage or execute them behind the courthouse.
Throw in enough adjudication and bureaucratic nonsense and just about any activity can be rendered economically unsound.
Re:Do the math (Score:5, Informative)
Ask the Chinese if it costs more to keep someone in a cage or execute them behind the courthouse.
Given that the Chinese are turning around and selling the organs of the executed, I'd say that helps the balance sheet a little.
Do the math, a real example (Score:5, Informative)
I'll expand your idea to my local utility, Progress Energy in Florida. Progress Energy estimates that a two reactor plant is going to cost $17 billion (http://www.newsobserver.com/business/story/993686.html)
At an 8% cost of capital, that is 1.36 billion a year. With a 35 useful lifetime of the plant, there is an additional .5 billion a year to repay the capital. Throw in some of the other costs you mention (fuel, labor, property taxes, etc) and let's say the plant needs to earn 2 billion a year with no profit for the owners.
The reactors are two Westinghouse AP1000 which produce 1154Megawatts each (http://www.ap1000.westinghousenuclear.com/). If I recall correctly, nuclear plants are running about 90% of the time these days. That means the plants will produce in the ballpark of 2 reactors * 1154 MW * 1000Kw/Mw * 365 Days / Year * 24 hours /Day * .90 (availability derating) or 18.1 billion kilowatt hours per year. Given our cost estimate of $2 billion dollars per year, that works out to 11.04 cents per kilowatt hour.
Your 10 cent per kilowatt cost estimate is very close!
The scary thing is that I'm old enough to have lived through the last wave of nuclear plants being built. They almost all came in at two to four times the original cost estimates. If that happened again, we are talking wholesale electric rates of 22 to 44 cents per kilowatt. Solar PV (being stored in banks of lead acid batteries for night use) is already cheaper than 44 cents per kilowatt.
Re:Do the math, a real example (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll expand your idea to my local utility, Progress Energy in Florida. Progress Energy estimates that a two reactor plant is going to cost $17 billion (http://www.newsobserver.com/business/story/993686.html)
At an 8% cost of capital ... our cost estimate of $2 billion dollars per year, that works out to 11.04 cents per kilowatt hour.
This reasonable cost analysis illustrates the TRUE fundamental reason why nuclear power construction has been dead since the 1970s: the high capital cost. Coal power currently costs around 4 cents per kilowatt hour. Under current regulatory conditions coal power plants are always cheaper to build which means not only do they produce electricity more cheaply, but the risk to the utility is lower since the payoff on the investment is faster. And utilities are generally under a legal requirement that their investment decisions pass the muster of regulators who represent the rate-payer -- if the decisions are not found to be reasonable from the rate-payers view point the utility CANNOT recover the investment! In effect this regulatory regime prohibits the construction of nuclear power plants for practical purposes.
Reforming this situation requires at least one of the following:
Currently item 2 has been the only technique put into practice, and only spottily.
BTW, there is no inherent reason to suppose that huge cost overruns are an inevitable part of nuclear power plant construction. The common occurrence in the 1970s was an artifact of several conditions of the time: high inflation and thus punishing interest rates, the immature regulatory environment (safety changes were needed at the time, but this has been stable now for over 25 years), and immature (one might say poor) plant design. The first few plants might still be prone to overruns, but it is reasonable to expect this to disappear with practical construction experience.
Re:Do the math (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Do the math (Score:4, Informative)
>Modern pebble-bed reactors include maintenance, decomissioning, and uranium as a part of the initial cost.
Please point to a single working pebble bed reactor.
The last one built by the Germans was a big flop.
It's ridiculous to try to compare things that have been around for 30 years with experimental concepts that have not made any progress in 20 years.
Re:Do the math (Score:4, Informative)
No, the German Pebble Bed Reactor worked perfectly for 21 years. It didn't generate much power because it was only a demonstration reactor to prove the technology.
In a way it was the accident at Three Mile Island that shut that reactor down. One of the pebbles got stuck in the mechanism a couple of weeks after TMI - when the newspapers were full of "nuclear accident" scare stories. There was never any danger but the politicians decided to shut it down due to public pressure.
Re:Do the math (Score:5, Informative)
Except for the last week or so, when a pebble got stuck in the recycling system and the operators had to unclog the system manually, causing primary-circuit helium to be released in the atmosphere. One accident every 21 years does not cut it.
Also, there are significant issues with using helium as a primary circuit fluid. When water was used, you were pumping a liquid; for helium, you need a gas compressor, which is a significantly less efficient unit. Also, efficiency considerations practically dictate to use an axial compressor, which is the kind most sensitive to compressor surge. A surge in a large compressor can melt its casing in seconds. And guess what, the conditions in which surge occurs in compressors are those closest to high efficiency, where the compressor is supposed to operate.
In addition, when water from the secondary circuit leaks into the primary circuit's helium, there are risks of reaction between water and graphite pebbles if the temperature is too high (I suppose you can figure out what happens). In Germany, they were lucky they were running at about 500 degrees when that happened in 1978, but it took a year to dry the core.
Re:Do the math (Score:4, Insightful)
>Please point to a single working pebble bed reactor.
>Okay, how about this [wikipedia.org] one, based on the "failed" design you mentioned earlier... Details here. [wired.com]
You get your information from Wikipedia and Wired?
FYI: Under the best of circumstances those are less than reliable sources. And the Wikipedia article refers to a 2005 experimental reactor, and "plans" for a bigger startup in 2013.
And no need to put quotes around "failed", it failed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300 [wikipedia.org]
Re:Do the math (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is the nuclear decommissioning costs aren't clearly understood.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_decommissioning [wikipedia.org]
This I've heard is the real problem with Nuclear power - not the waste issue. The plants can only operate so long before they have to be decomissioned and the costs of decommissioning so far have been tremendously low. France has spent 500 million EU just trying to decomission a single plant:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brennilis_Nuclear_Power_Plant [wikipedia.org]
If they can solve the decommissioning problem, then I'd be in favor of more nuclear power. But building more plants that might cost billions to decommission doesn't sound too good to me.
Cost of capital in the US (Score:3, Informative)
You were questioning the 8% cost of capital, here is a recent example of a utility paying 6.7% for 30 year bonds.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601203&sid=a8gdNh70aH5k [bloomberg.com]
Since my example had no profit for the utility, we can assume the 1.3% between the 6.7% and the 8% used in the example is the profit for the utility.
8% seems spot on to me. Am I missing something here?
Power comes from resources. (Score:5, Insightful)
If nukes are not economically feasible, why does France get ~80% of their power from them?
Because they made a policy decision to do so based on their particular economic situation and resources. I give them kudos for doing it but like any policy decision it has it's upside and downside. France has been trying to privatize their energy sector recently but the primary energy company EDF is still 70% owned by the French government. Were it private to the degree the US energy sector is, the liability costs would be more difficult to justify.
Countries have to use what they have. The US, Russia and China are INCREDIBLY rich in coal deposits. The US is to coal what Saudi Arabia is to oil. The US has about 27% of the known deposits. This makes energy derived from coal cheap in the US compared to France which has virtually no coal of its own. Hence US policy is going to favor coal more than French policy and nuclear in the US becomes less attractive thanks to the economies of scale coal has achieved in the US.
Coal is an economic fact - like it or not (Score:4, Insightful)
Coal releases every year more radiation into the atmosphere than all the nuke power accidents combined.
True but when you have a quarter of the worlds supply of coal, it's going to be an economic factor whether it hurts the climate or not. Global warming is a huge issue but there is NO economically feasible scenario whereby coal will not be a major part of the US energy supply for the next 30+ years. I don't like it, and I suspect you don't either but coal is here and we'll have to deal with it. There simply is nothing available, not even nuclear, that can scale large enough to take coal's place in the US economy in the next few decades.
Lots of greenhouse gases too -and so it will not be a long term feasible solution if we are to solve the global warming problem.
Not with present or near-term technology, I agree. Good area for research.
Nuke and solar power will be long term solutions, and probably solar will be the best.
The answer is a diversified energy supply (nuclear, solar, wind, hydro, and yes even fossil-fuels) with careful emissions controls on the dirtier technologies. Nuclear and solar are not magic cure-alls but they should have an important part to play in the mix and definitely should be a bigger part of our energy policy. I absolutely agree with you on that.
Hooray! (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Just visit antique stores, perhaps you'll find one with an extra vial of radium paint in the back of the clock.
http://www.dangerouslaboratories.org/radscout.html [dangerousl...tories.org]
Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good. (Score:4, Insightful)
The difference between chernobyl's RBMK design and and our operating relics is already rather significant. Also, we have organizations in the US, such as the United States Navy, which are at the forefront of safe reactor design and operation.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It's funny that the article talks about how much things have changed in the last 20 years. I had a buddy that was a nuke in the navy and when he got out he turned down a nice job offer because he didn't think civilian operations were done well or safely. That was in the mid 90's.
Best stop-gap availible (Score:3)
Until renewable energy sources mature and gain public acceptence (solar is relativly inefficient and expensive, and Americans seem fond of complaining about "ugly" windmills), nuclear power is the best option we have.
Re:Best stop-gap availible (Score:4, Insightful)
I think most energy experts consider it the "bridging" option. If coal is unacceptable, geothermal too difficult in many areas, hydroelectric already all but maxed out in much of North America (and not exactly without substantial environmental repercussions of its own), and wind, tidal and solar technologies still some ways until maturation, then we're left with nuclear power. Maybe by the end of the century other technologies (in particular better capacitors which make alternative technologies much more sensible) will see reactors phased out, but at the end of the day, nuclear power is the only way we can generate large amounts of electricity with a minimum of environmental and climate impact. If we wait around for the alternative technologies to mature, we're probably going to spend another twenty or thirty years puking CO2, enriching states that would just as soon send suicide bombers to knock out Western office towers and train stations, and generally making the ultimate transition away from fossil fuels all the more difficult.
The environmentalists are just going to have to suck it up, and that's all there is to it. The world is going to need a lot more nuclear reactors over the next half century, and if every industrialized state out there is going to throw money out the window in the hopes of restarting the economy, then it would make sense that using those dollars to kick start nuclear power is just about the best thing one could do.
1968 controls technology (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's tragic that a plant from that era has come to symbolize nuclear power for the entire nation when the technology has advanced so considerably. If we applied that line of reasoning to automobiles, we'd close all the freeways because the Corvair was unsafe.
Good Luck With The Red Tape.... (Score:3, Insightful)
I hope the folks planning to establish new nuclear facilities hire a damn good group of lawyers. They are probably going to need it.
No Co2! (Score:3, Funny)
Let's hope so (Score:5, Insightful)
The simple truth is that nuclear power is good technology that solves a variety of sticky problems. Anti-nuclear propaganda films irrationally scared the public in to rejecting a highly beneficial and useful method of power generation. With the passage of years, the public has come to the realization that the sky isn't falling and that a modern, safe nuclear power system is good economics and good social policy. We should celebrate this return to sanity: it's reason triumphing over irrational fear.
"peak uranium"? (Score:4, Interesting)
I've heard from a physicist, that we have only so much easily refinable uranium/plutonium to last until 2050 or so. Wikipedia says 100 years which, while not a reason to stop doing it, seems pretty low to me. After that we'd have to go to lower-yield thorium fuel cycle (breeder) reactors which would last a while.
Of course he's not a nuclear physicist/engineer. Anyone have the scoop? Would these current power plant designs be adaptable?
Re:"peak uranium"? (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Those are reserves, not resources. (Look up the difference sometime).
2. Breeder reactors extend this 20-fold.
3. Thorium extends this further 5 times so that now we're looking at 5000 years of *reserves* (e.g. the amount that can be economically mined at present day price)
4. There are billions of tons of uranium in seawater.
5. Finally, advances in nuclear fission based power generation technology are a prerequisite for nuclear fusion.
Some more information:
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/cohen.html [stanford.edu]
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Progress for nuclear power (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a supporter of widespread nuclear power. However, the industry hasn't solved two major issues:
-Hazards of mining the fuel
-Political viability of fast breeder reactors
If we could get robots to mine the fuel, great. Right now, mining heavy, radioactive material is a hazardous occupation with long-term health effects.
Fast breeder reactors are the way to minimize nuclear waste to easily manageable levels. It is also an efficient generator of weapons-grade fissile material. The international community has proliferation concerns associated with this.
I hope to see these issues addressed in the future for ushering in widespread nuclear power along with solar, wind, and geothermal energy.
Re:Progress for nuclear power (Score:5, Interesting)
1. You overestimate the radioactivity of uranium ore. There are entire towns built on uranium deposits and they don't experience any measurable ill effects.
2. Some designs of breeder reactors like IFR (also called ALMR) cannot create usable weapons-grade fissile materials. The risk of someone stealing fissile materials from a breeder reactor is lower than that of someone capturing an ICBM site, or stealing a complete warhead.
It's true (Score:3, Informative)
He has more contracting work at plants all around the country than you could shake a fuel rod at.
Nuclear power is green power (Score:5, Insightful)
Even without further technological advance, nuclear power will suffice for several millennia. It produces zero emissions (except a little hot water) and produces a tiny volume of solid waste that doesn't escape into the environment. It runs silently all day and all night. If you were handed a datasheet for a nuclear power plant with the source of power blacked out, you'd jump at the chance to build the thing.
Nuclear power produces long-lived, dangerous waste, doesn't it? Dangerous and long-lived are mutually exclusive when it comes to nuclear materials. That's just the way the science of radioactive decay works. After being taken out of the reactor, the waste that remains can be reprocessed into more fuel. But if it isn't, then you can leave it in a cooling pond for a few years, and after that point, it's safe enough to handle, store, and bury. There are far worse industrial outputs than cooled-down nuclear waste.
But it's still dangerous and we have no place to store the waste! What's wrong with a cave in the middle of the desert? There's no water table. The area is seismically stable, and there's no life where we want to store the waste. And by itself, nuclear waste will do nothing. It won't make your children glow in the middle of the night. It won't contaminate your crops. It won't do anything because it's inert.
What about the risk of nuclear meltdown? Won't that destroy cities? Well, what about steam boiler explosions? What about refinery disasters? What about train disasters? Do those keep your up at night? They all killed people regularly back in their early days. But we don't worry about them now because improved safety technology has reduced the risk to an acceptable level. The same principle applies to nuclear power: another disaster like Chernobyl could never happen to even a 1970s-era American reactor, much less the far-improved versions we have today. The risk of being injured by a nuclear meltdown today is on par with being injured by lightning.
Wait -- won't we run out of fuel? Don't we only have reserves for a hundred years? You don't understand how much energy is contained in nuclear fuel. You need so little of it that the fuel is dirt cheap. The price of uranium could increase a thousandfold without affecting a nuclear plant's bottom line. And because uranium is so cheap, there's been very little prospecting. The reason our proven reserves are relatively small is that nobody has been looking very hard, because uranium is dirt cheap. In fact, for the past few decades, the nuclear power industry has been running on decommissioned nuclear warheads. That's how little fuel you really need for nuclear power.
Sure, nuclear might be okay, but wind power! It's decentralized, and therefore better! And it appeals to my philosophical sensibilities because it's not a big evil industry!Wind power can't provide baseload power. Plus, it's limited by the number of sites with good winds. You can, on the other hand, build as many nuclear plants as necessary without severe geographic constraints. As for nuclear being centralized, big, and therefore evil: big isn't necessarily bad. Properly regulated, a huge nuclear plant can provide inexpensive power to millions far more efficiently than many small ones, or thousands of turbines, coal-fired power stations, and natural gas generators. Furthermore, there's no particular reason nuclear stations need to be private per se: consider the Tennessee Valley Authority model.
If nuclear power is so great, why does it take two decades to build one, and why does the government have to subsidize the insurance?In terms of physical build time, it only takes a few years to erect a power plant. The delays come from hysterical opponents using every possible legal avenue to block new nuclear plants. The complaints have no basis in fact, but the courts have to hear them just the same. Often, legal delays are so severe that projects are abandoned altogether (which is, of course, what op
Environmentalist's Fallacy (Score:5, Insightful)
It goes something like this:
In reality, X produces far less overall pollution than Y.
I've seen this argument used to oppose:
All of these are great technologies. If we're ever to make any progress, we have to learn to think past the environmentalist's fallacy.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I use this fallacy all the time, but as a joke. Or to prove the point that nothing can offer a perfect solution and that some pollution has to be tolerated.
You forget the argument against methane. It's a very strong greenhouse gas. Of course people like to ignore that it is in such small quantities that there are other green house gases that have a larger overall effect. (water vapor being the worse one I believe, so quit letting those oceans evaporate into clouds)
Follow the money (Score:5, Interesting)
Who cares about polls? The laws of physics don't care about public opinion. Neither do the laws of economics.
And the later is clearly a problem. We just went through this here in Ontario, with a new set of reactors planned to go in about 50 k east of Toronto at Darlington. Darlington A, the original set, was enormously over-budget, and if I'm doing the math right, will never pay itself back in inflation-adjusted dollars. All of us Ontarians have a little line item on our bills called the "debt retirement charge" as a result. In order to prevent this occuring again, Ontario Power Generation (via Infrastructure Ontario) demanded that the quotes include overrun insurance. That drove the price up over $26 billion.
I'm a failed physicist and I'm very much aware of the realities of nuclear power. It IS safe, and the waste is NOT that big a problem. But $26 billion is a REALLY BIG PROBLEM. I'm not the only one believing that; after the bill was presented, they cancelled the project.
Here's something to think about. Darlington A and B together would have produced about 7 GW peak. The site occupies 1200 acres, or just under 5 million square meters. 5 million square meters of 8% average solar panel will produce about 3.8 GW peak. Yeah, it's not baseload. Yeah, it's only during the day. Now here's the kicker... ready? Solar costs a dollar a watt wholesale, so the price of that plant is about, oh lets round up some, $10 billion.
It gets worse. We already get about 60% of our power from hydro. In fact, there's more _spare_capacity_ in the generator plants in northern Quebec than there would have been in Darlington. All we'd need is a cable to get it. How much? Mmmm, 500 million, tops. Newfoundland and Manitoba also have oodles of spare capacity that they would love to sell us. Arco say's there's another, ready for it? 25 GW continuous in northern Canada lying undeveloped. That's more than all the power the province uses. But they can't get a red cent to develop it, because OPG want's it all in house.
*sigh*
What about fusion (Score:4, Informative)
The Polywell Inertial Electrostatic Confinement design is showing a lot of promise, and the current estimate is the tech will be ready for commercial use in 12 years or so.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, if you talk to someone in a community that hosts a nuclear plant, the opinion is usually positive. I recently met a newspaper man from Waynesboro, GA, which has two reactors and two more on the way, and he said the plant was the best thing that had happened to the city.
Re:Yeah, sure (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Shameless sig whoring (Score:5, Interesting)
See this on a ./er's sig so I can't take credit for it, but it sums up the situation nicely: Nuclear power. Global warming. Agrarian society. Pick one.
The enviro-nazi's would seem to prefer the Agrarian society option. We can't use nuclear, we can't use coal, we can't use natural gas, we can't build more hydro -- so what exactly is going to replace the base load part of the power grid? Solar and wind will never scale that well and aren't appropriate for base load anyways. We never should have stopped building nuclear power plants. The environmentalist movement really shot themselves in the foot with that one. How much CO2 has been released into the atmosphere by the coal/gas power plants brought online to replace the nuclear ones that we never built?
We should also extend a nice fat middle finger at Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford for unilaterally abandoning reprocessing technology. How does the United States not reprocessing our spent nuclear fuel prevent nuclear proliferation anyway? Was there some third world dictator who thought to himself "Gee, I'd like to have a nuclear bomb but the US abandoned reprocessing technology so why should I even bother to try?"
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
what exactly is going to replace the base load part of the power grid?
Wind and Solar with proper energy retention mechanisms for times when they cannot provide the power needed. Take the money you would invest in ramping up nuclear and invest in basic battery research in the meantime use concepts like molten salt and compressed air to provide energy during night and low wind occurrences. Invest in basic science to provide long range power transmission so areas rich in said power can supply far off urban centers.
Re:Shameless sig whoring (Score:5, Insightful)
Or we could use the technology that we know works instead of investing in your ideas that have no existing economic infrastructure or history of successful deployment.
Seriously, build batteries? That's your bright idea? Why don't you stop and think about the environmental impact of building enough batteries to store millions of megawatt hours worth of electricty. Even if we invent a better battery chemistry that results in a massive increase of energy density there's no way that will scale in an environmentally friendly manner.
Re:Shameless sig whoring (Score:5, Insightful)
There are actually quite a few successful deployments of power-storing technology -- ones that aren't even batteries. After all, batteries are really only useful for certain applications. Capacitors are nice, but not always appropriate. On the other hand, expending unused power on a reversible, bulk physical process -- like pumping water from a low-altitude body of water to a higher-altitude one -- and then generating power from the reverse process is fairly straightforward.
Re:Shameless sig whoring (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh they don't like wind generators either. Apparently they kill some incompetent, slow bird once in a while.
As far as solar power is concerned, its just a matter of time till some environmentalist will oppose it on the basis of toxic substances produced during manufacture.
Agrarian society here we come...
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Solar thermal is a fairly good option for base load and massive scaling. Using a thermal reservoir allows continued energy production at night and cloudy days. It requires no exotic materials or manufacture processes like photovoltaic, it can use the same turbines, generators and boilers used in conventional plants. Its drawbacks are the space it takes up (not relevant in the desert) and being fragile to adverse weather (hail, tornadoes, thunderstorms, etc).
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It's been done several times. There is a study called "ExternE" that does the calculation for several methods of electric generation. Nuclear is low, especially if the calculation assumes centrifuge enrichment, although not as low as hydro. Nuclear opponents sometimes like to quote a study by a guy named Storm van Leeuwen who claims otherwise, but from what I can tell it is flawed.
Re:CO2 accounting (Score:4, Insightful)
One must take into account the amount of CO2 emitted during nuclear fuel production. Has anybody done the math?
You don't need to "do the math". Apply some common sense. Common sense tells you that it doesn't take thousands of megawatts to dig ore out of the ground and refine it. Have you ever seen the trainloads of coal that arrive at your local coal power plant on a routine basis? Do you think it takes anywhere near that amount of energy to dig ore out of the ground and process it?
Re:With Yucca Mountain closed? (Score:4, Insightful)
Nope, it will increase the need to build more feeder-breeder reactors to use up the 99% fuel content remaining in that so called "nuclear waste".
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Why not just drill a large hole into a subduction zone and drop it off in there.
Let the earth recycle it.
Then again I also never understood why if nuclear waste is still putting off energy, why not just use the waste as an energy source? Storing the waste in pools that have to be constantly chilled just seems so backasswards.
Re:With Yucca Mountain closed? (Score:5, Informative)
I've asked that question myself, for many years. For the most part, people would just say, "No, they don't do that," and ignore my response of, "Why not?"
Finally, I got an answer: those pools get near the boiling point of water, but no further, and you're not going to get enough energy for the generators to pay for themselves unless they're running on super heated steam. Yes, there's a fair amount of energy there, but it's not concentrated enough to use. Sigh!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Hardly at all. Modern Pebble Bed reactors recycle their own waste until there is almost no radiation left and only a lump of lead where the uranium should be. There's almost no waste at all in a modern reactor, and the whole thing can be shielded so well that it's virtually impossible to have a melt down from one even if things do go wrong.
In fact, places like Yucca Mountain and Hanford, if Pebble Bed reactors take off- could become MINES.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Non-issue. The main concern is the total heat capacity of the entire ecosystem, not a localized heating of a river. All energy production methods lose energy to heat. Since nuclear can reach well over a thousand degrees, it's Carnot Limit is quite a bit higher than almost anything else.
The 1 degree of change being a problem comes as an average. Since some places are known to be cooler, and other stay roughly the same, a 1 degree increase can correspond to 10 or more degrees increase in certain locations, pa
Re:Environment?? (Score:5, Insightful)
They haven't solved the environmental issues. They might have better safety, but what about the fact that they use massive amounts of water, and heat it up about a degree before returning it to the river that the plant is inevitably next to? How about the waste? They still haven't solved that one; all our old waste is still sitting on site at current plants.
Palo Verde. 3 units, no river.
The waste is sitting there because politicians refuse to deal with the issue; not because it is unsolvable. Personally, I think we should rethink breeder reactors.
Re:Environment?? (Score:5, Funny)
Personally, I think we should rethink breeder reactors.
Hell, no! Pretty soon we'd have reactors running around everywhere!
You can't build them until you can find an effective method of birth control for them!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Modern Pebble Bed Reactors recycle their water, just like they recycle their uranium.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
For decades, the typical American has exhibited an abysmal understanding of basic physics.
France and Japan will profit immensely when their companies build plants in the USA for the science-challenged Americans.
Stereotype much?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That's ridiculous. Overwhelmingly so.
Do you refuse to drive a car at night because it isn't safe to drive without headlights? No -- you drive a car with headlights, and you turn them on at night.
You're throwing out the baby with the bathwater. We can have nuclear power, and mitigate the waste danger by
Re:FP (Score:5, Insightful)
If I were President, I'd tax the crap out of imported oil, and open up Anwar and California. You might not like everything about it, but sitting complaining about EVERY SOLUTION presented is NOT an option any longer.
ANWR is just a drop in the bucket. It's so not-a-solution to foreign oil that it makes no sense to damage that ecosystem just to immeasurably affect our situation. In fact I'd much rather save that drop until a single drop would affect our situation because we're gagging for any fuel at all, a 'who cares about environmental concerns if we can't deliver groceries' situation. Heaven forbid it comes to that. But even worse is burning up our own reserves, and then having to come begging to the foreign powers we were trying to be free from.
Treating ANWR as a "solution" for today's problems only makes such a situation more likely. We need not-oil to be the solution. All the not-oil solutions you proposed are fine, great even (cept hydro simply because nearly all the best locations are already tapped, so the opportunity here is much less). But more drilling isn't the answer, because we can't drill enough to free ourselves of foreign oil. The only way to end our addiction to foreign oil is to end our addiction to oil.
Re:FP (Score:5, Informative)
Oil reserves are estimated at 5 to 10 billion barrels of oil, with the number of those barrels that are economically feasible to extract rising and falling in line with the price of a barrel.
http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs-0028-01/fs-0028-01.htm [usgs.gov]
Now let's take a look at our oil consumption...
We are the leading consumer of oil in the world, with a consumption rate of around 20 million barrels a day.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html [cia.gov]
http://www.eia.doe.gov/basics/quickoil.html [doe.gov]
Hypothetically speaking, if all 10 billion barrels are extracted in ANWR, this gives us 500 days worth of oil. This is not something that will make a bit of difference to our reliance on foreign oil reserves, especially when you consider that it wouldn't be possible to add this oil to the market all at once.
"If I may be allowed to pursue the idea of 'addiction to oil,' I think the nation just reached the point where we sold our wedding ring for one night's fix." [theonion.com]
Re:FP (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't like the two wars, then let us drill here, drill now
The problem is you're just delaying the inevitable - Oil is a finite resource. Sure, you could drill up Alaska like swiss cheese, but what does it buy you? Another 20 years? We need to move to renewables.
Re:FP (Score:5, Informative)
I partially agree with you. Though Obama hasn't really shown his colors either way in regards to nuclear power (unless I missed that, been to busy to do much news recently), I expect him to do exactly what every president since carter has (including Reagan and both Bush's) and utterly ignore it as an option.
Photovoltaic solar is currently and will likely remain a niche market due to cost to manufacture and rareness of materials (rare earth metals, etc) for the higher performing panels.
Solar thermal is generally much better than PV for large scale energy production, as it uses proven technology, and does not require batteries to produce power at night or for a few days of reduced light (the thermal mass of molten salts can keep the boilers going for some time, depending on the design and insulation of course).
Nuclear plants have an advantage over solar thermal in that they are largely impervious to hazardous weather and use much less space for a given amount of power, particularly in more northern or overcast areas.
Re:FP (Score:5, Informative)
Though Obama hasn't really shown his colors either way in regards to nuclear power (unless I missed that, been to busy to do much news recently)
Actually, he put the final nail in the coffin for Yucca Mountain [wikipedia.org].
Then he denied the feasibility of nuclear energy because there was no storage facility [newsweek.com].
Kind of circular logic.
Still dangerous (Score:5, Insightful)
Solar and wind are still underexploited resources in this country. Combine them with better use of the energy we currently make and we will be energy independent and cleaner.
Installation of residential solar generation is ideal. It places the generation at the place of its consumption. And the use of geothermal heat-exchange heating and cooling should be mandatory.