Sorry to be “that poster” but does “support” mean that I want it getting public economic support? I’m a left leaning centrist but not sure I have an option in the poll.
I’m all for monetizing the costs of carbon and letting nuclear fairly compete for plant lifetime total costs inclusive of external costs, as a mature technology whose period of public subsidies (direct and indirect) is done. That’s a pretty strongly held opinion.
If serious analysis has it able to compete on that basis then having it as part of a diverse mix of energy generation is something I’d strongly support.
But right now natural gas is hard to compete against even if the carbon and other external costs were priced in and my impression is that many renewables’ cost arcs are looking like they’ll be ready to compete better than nuclear can fairly soon.
Is high level waste (i.e. spent fuel) from Ark I/II being shipped to South Carolina? When I was in commercial nuclear power, the low level waste from my facility was being shipped to SC, but the high level waste remained at site. The unresolved high level waste storage issue is the main reason I don’t support nuclear power.
As for dumping high level waste in the Marianas Trench, “they” better be absolutely certain it will “return to the earth” instead of coming back to bite us later. I assume it would be next to impossible to clean up a radioactive mess at that depth. There’s many places that high level waste could be sent to: deep space, the sun, buried far underground in salt mines,…etc. However if something goes wrong with any of these scenarios, you could have a huge problem to hand down to the next 50 generations or so.
And here we sit, still generating high level waste with nowhere to send it.
I’m disappointed in nuclear power. . . we have figured out how to unleash the awesome energy stored within the atom - a feat which truly must be considered one of mankind’s most spectacular achievements - and what do we do with it? we boil water!
We also brought a swift end to the largest war in the history of the world.
What we of course need, is sustained fusion power. Someday we may finally get there though in my life it doen’t seem like the time frame has gotten any closer and I’ve been following it for about 40 years now.
I am very liberal, and I oppose nuclear power because of the waste storage issue. On site storage is just insane, no one wants a secure storage facility near them, and none of the other proposals seem feasible or prudent.
I think that nuclear power would be a reasonable way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but only if some long-term solution to the waste storage issue is in place. The current “plan,” which is basically* ignore the problem*, makes the whole system unsupportable for me right now.
according to Scientific American, as of that publishing the spent fuel we have in this country would cover roughly a football field several yards deep.
that really isn’t that big. we don’t seem to have much trouble putting football fields in the middle of densely-populated areas in only a few years; surely this country has enough “middle of nowhere” regions we could fit this stuff in. once the spent rods no longer need active cooling, cask 'em up, bury 'em, and forget about 'em.
And specifically, newer types of reactors that are able to use fuel with reduced amount of processing and enrichment while achieving nearly complete burnup of fuel, require less active controls and reliance on training and maintenance for safety, and are designed to be dismantled and remediated once they are at end of useful life. Such designs, like the molten salt reactor, actually exist on paper and have been demonstrated through proof of concept, but the nuclear industry is fixed on Generation II and III designs and the inefficient nuclear fuel cycle underlying them.
No. First of all, just because the fuel itself physically fits in that volume doesn’t mean you can pack it in asshole to elbow. Aside from the thermal energy produced by still decaying fuel there is also the neutron release which will result in criticality accidents if the material is too closely packed without adequate shielding. Second, the “cask 'em up, bury 'em, and forget about 'em” plan is about as thoughtful as burying a bunch of toxic waste in an abandoned canal because who is ever going to build a suburban housing development or school on top of it? Nuclear waste–not only the high level residual fuel waste, but also the intermediate level waste produced by the ton in the fuel refining and enrichment process–is a serious issue that has to be addressed with in any scheme for a large scale expansion of nuclear fission power. Notwithstanding the costs and risks of burying ‘spent’ fuel and other waste underground and hoping it doesn’t leak into the outside environment in the next ten thousand years, there is the fact that current once-through fuel cycles use at best around 5% of the total available energy of the fissile material, which requires extracting, processing, and enriching more fuel material with the attendant environmental costs. The argument against reprocessing is the cost and waste that is produced from processing current oxide fuels, where as metallic or liquid salt fuels could be more easily processed.
There is another set of issues, however, with the expansion of nuclear power. One is the lack of a fuel enrichment infrastructure to support more use. The current US nuclear power industry is already buying fuel from foreign sources, partially because it is less expensive but also because there simply isn’t enough domestic production to feed even current demand, much less the order of magnitude increase in nuclear fission plants it would take to replace all hydrocarbon power generation. Another is the lack of skilled labor to build hundreds of plants; we’d be doing well to build and staff a dozen nuclear power plants concurrently at this point, and even then we’d probably need to import some skilled labor and incentivize students to get training as nuclear engineers and technicians. It would likely take a couple of decades even with an intensive effort to be able to build and operate several hundred new nuclear power facilities. And of course, these facilities–particularly Generation II/III systems–have a large immediate carbon footprint; while the lifetime atmospheric carbon generation of nuclear power is lower than coal fired or even much cleaner natural gas plants, the initial energy for producing and transporting materials to build a plant add significant carbon output.
For all of these reasons, it makes more sense to have a coordinated plan which phases out the most polluting of fossil fuel plants and encourages remediation and efficiency schemes while building out sustainable energy (wind and solar) as a scalable alternative while investing in research on advanced types of nuclear fission plants and building those out in stages, thereby not being locked into a single type of plant that may turn out to be less than optimum. Moving to types of fission plants that require less fuel processing and produce minimum waste through nearly complete burnup also reduces both the carbon footprint and the fuel mining and processing demand, particularly if we can transition to using mixed uranium-thorium fuels or even a predominately pure thorium fuel infrastructure. (We produce an abundance of thorium from rare earth mining and processing anyway, so up to the point that we exceed that amount it is not much of an additional burden in terms of remediation or environmental damage.) And ultimately, we can hold out hope that controlled nuclear fusion will become viable and cost-effective, although the ultimate form that will take and when it will occur are still unknowns that defy efforts at practical planning at this point.
The United States has ten operating nuclear powered aircraft carriers in addition to the fleet ballistic missile and attack submarines numbering somewhere over 100. However, these are all powered by naval reactors which, while they are pressurized water reactors of relatively similar design to one another, are not very much like commercial power generating nuclear reactor plants; in particular, they are designed to be highly compact, to not require incremental refueling, and to operate with more in the way of active control than their commercial counterparts. The Navy aggressively tries to retain (good) nucs because of the long time it takes to train engineers and operators while purging unreliable performers early as part of their institutional discipline. These engineers and technicians are also not heavily trained in the design of new reactors because they are operating and maintaining a small class of very similar types of reactor, and are not familiar with many of the safety and maintenance systems commonly found on commercial reactors.
The sum total is that the nuclear technicians and engineers you will most readily get from the Navy are most likely to be those they did not find worthy of retaining and promoting, are not familiar with the design and operation of commercial reactor systems, do not have experience in large civil construction in power generating facilities, and there are still not enough of them to make more than a modest-sized dent in the hundreds of thousands of skilled engineers and operators needed to support increasing nuclear power generation on the scale of hundreds of new plants. This is, of course, not an insoluable problem; you simply have to intentivize capable people to become engineers and technicians, and then put them in positions where they can be mentored and gain experience until they are knowledgeable enough to mentor others, but this is the work of a couple of decades to expand the set of qualified workers to the necessary scale; you can’t do it overnight by creating a “NukeCorps” program and running a bunch of bright kids through a nuclear engineering boot camp.
My understanding is that coal produces more radioactive waste than nuclear plants, except we just pump it into the atmosphere for everyone to breathe. “Burying and forgetting about it” is infinitely preferable to that, in my opinion.
Socially I’m center leaning leftist with a nasty streak of communal objectivitiness except I’m south of ignorant on abortion, fiscally I’m hard core reactionary and think the 16th Amendment should be repealed …
The poll didn’t give this option so I clicked one of the tofu-puker choices in favor of nuclear power …
We need the energy … when these billions and billions of people outside the current industrialized club start using their fair share of the energy production … we’re going to have to build thousands of nuclear power plants, burn fossil fuels like they’ll last forever, dams across every river at every bend, wind mill on every hill tops and solar panels covering every place where food doesn’t grow as well … the good news is that most of the environment on land is ruined anyway, so it’s not like humans will damage anything more with this plan … don’t worry about tidal and wave electrical generation, humans have used a sieve to removal all animal life in the oceans larger than a roof rat …
The problem is that nuclear power will be used instead of conservation … for every plant brought on-line, humans will just use more energy … fossil fuel plants will not be removed from service …
Stranger is spot on correct, we can build nuclear power plants that produce very very little radioactive waste … the breeder reactors … they’re just really expensive … ideally, we can put in Uranium-235 and pull out Carbon-12 … then just throw it in the ocean and let what little is left of the biology deal with it …
Of course, all this is out the window if we can discover how to unlock solar energy’s full potential …
Interesting. I didn’t know leftists actually called themselves leftists. I thought that was a term that immediately alerted you to the fact you were talking to a conservative.
Anyway, nuke power all the way. Just harden them to accidents and terrorism.
I think it’s absolutely dumb to move to all-electric or hydrogen without it.
for sure I wasn’t saying “go ahead and pack it all into a football-field size hole,” the article I linked made the same point you did. my (oblique) point is that the actual volume of spent fuel and associated waste is just not that big.
We need nuclear, and it’s at least as safe as any other source of energy. Let’s face it, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric and wind power aren’t enough to support industrial high-tech civilizations. And if the wheels stop, an awful lot of people are going to starve.