You guys are messing with me. That’s not nice.
Now. How do we get this thing started?
Are Soviets the only ones capable of being stupid? The fact is that it only takes a little bit of stupid to fuck up a whole region forever. I’m not saying this should count nuclear power out, but let’s not get arrogant about thing. Nuclear power plants are run by humans and humans- American or Soviet- fuck up.
I’m about 99.0% they’ve got redundant safeguadrs in place th protect against human fuck-ups. Not perfect, but better than either TMI or C. They say they learned a lot from both accidents. Oh, and what was that other one? Diablo Canyon? The one they built upside-down? :rolleyes: I wish we had a “shakehead” smiley.
We need to do something, and conservation is not an option. This is the most viable plan I’ve heard yet.
It didn’t take a little bit of stupidity; it took systematic stupidity, the kind that would lead to disaster with any technology; even stone age types can start a forest fire, after all.
Going by memory : Chernobyl was built without a containment dome ( illegal here, and would have immensely lowered the damage all by itself ), made with flammable graphite control rods ( not done here ), staffed with people chosen for political reliability instead of competence, had most of it’s safety systems taken offline, then was deliberately overloaded as a “safety test”. You aren’t likely to find that sort of combo outside of a place like the USSR; that’s why it happened there. It took FAR more than “a little bit of stupid”.
Not to mention that with some of the new, safe reactor designs mentioned by others, such a disaster is physically impossible.
And, the region is not “fucked up for all time”; the wildlife is already rebounding nicely.
You also have to weigh the “possibility” of a nuclear disaster with the certainty of the pollution and deaths caused by conventional generation. How many die each year in coal mines?
Have any regions been ‘fucked up forever’? Is Chernobyl in that category? To date, Chernobyl has cause 56 deaths. As industrial accidents go, this is a pretty low death count. As the people age, I’m sure the incidence of cancer will increase among some, leading eventually to perhaps 2000 deaths from cancer among older people, although earlier estimate were much higher, so future estimates may come in lower. This is terrible, but Chernobyl is far from being destroyed forever. In fact, two of the reactors there are still operating.
The deaths due to Chernobyl are the only deaths ever reported from civilian nuclear power generation. Let’s compare that to, say, coal mining. In the earlier part of the century, there were about 1000 coal mining deaths per year. Now it’s down to around 100. Thousands more have died from black lung disease. The EPA has said that up to 24,000 people per year die prematurely due to pollution caused by coal plants. That’s 10 Chernobyls a year.
[quote=xtisme]
One question I have though…what are the current estimated reserves for uranium or other potential nuclear fuels? I’ve always heard they were fairly small. What kind of time estimate do we have if the US goes, say, 80-90% nuclear in the next 20 or so years? How long could we sustain nuclear power at those levels? Anyone know?[/xtisme]
Enough to give us power essentially forever. Cheap uranium in the form of high-grade reserves may run out, but unlike oil, Uranium is everywhere. You can get it out of seawater, and there’s enough uranium in seawater to power the entire world for maybe 4000 years. It would very very expensive, but an important thing to remember is that the fuel cost of uranium is only a small portion fo the cost of nuclear power (about 4-5%). So even if uranium were 20 times more expensive, the cost of nuclear power would only double. And 20 times the cost of today’s uranium is the rough estimate for what it would take to extract it from seawater.
But even without that, there are enough known reserves today to last maybe 80-100 years. But if demand soars and the prices goes up dramatically, you can expect exploration to increase and currently unprofitable mining areas to be exploited.
Then there’s reprocessing spent fuel and waste, which is also expensive but which can be done, and extracting uranium from phosphate deposits, which is cheaper than getting it from seawater (but not as plentiful).
All in all, I don’t think we really have to worry about running out of fissile materials. Long before that happens, I think we’ll have plenty of alternatives.
Plus during the safety test a new, inept manager was brought in and several of the people working the controls refused to work with him, claiming what he was doing was too dangerous.
FTR, if you guys are concerned about global warming one of the easiest things you can do it look up or call your power provider and ask for the green option. This will ensure that the electricity you get comes from green sources instead of things like coal. Sometimes there is a small surcharge and not all areas have it (I can’t get it in Bloomington). I don’t know if nuclear power is considered a source of energy for the green option, but I doubt it. I don’t know if there is a nuclear option you can look into to get more of your power from nuclear energy.
Since on one level or another the entire reason for this thread is global warming you can just navigate this site to see if you can purchase green power in your area and not contribute to the problem.
Many charge around $0.01 per kwh extra for green but it is a small surcharge. As I said, I don’t know/think there are nuclear options you can look into.
In the mid ninetys, I had a short gig installing video survielence systems for IAEA (International atomic energy agency) I installed several systems at the Ringhals, Sweden power station which operates 4 reactors totaling nearly 4 GW capacity.
We had an extra day after we were finished (schedualed “just in case we have problems”) so the chief engineer gave us the cook’s tour. Not what any tourist woud get.
I came away totally convinced that nuke power can be done safely and cheaply.
I was also convinced that it can’t be done under the existing american model.
It was confided to me that fuel (plutonium in this case) amounted to around 5% of the operating budget. Most of the cost of the power was capital investment. Therefore the reactors were operated not for high effiency, but for minimal stress/ maximum life, which also meant maximal safety.
The american model subsidizes capital, and forbids the use of cheap plutonium fuel. Thus operators strive for high fuel effiency, compromising safe operation.
Witness the hidious failure of Public Service of Colorado’s Ft. St. Vrain station. Totally wacko gas cooling and other stupid ideas to eak out a few percentage points of effiency. Never operated at 100% design capcity, and finally given up on after it was clear that sustained operation at reduced capacity wasn’t feasable either.
There are a number of KISS (keep it simple stupid) reactor designs that are essentially meldown proof, and have significant in service records to convince even an ardent sceptic it is dooable. Google BWR, PWR, CanDU, and PBR reactors for details.
If nukes are to prosper in the US, capital subisities must be forgone, and Plutonium fueling must be allowed. the notion of seperation of weapons and energy is just stupid. It would be far easier for a terrorist organization to aquire nuke material from former Soviet nations than to divert fuel from power generation infrastructure.
But the industry isn’t. Didn’t they manage to get a law limiting their liability passed?
Nuclear power won’t reduce our demand for oil all that much, will it? At least not until everyone starts using plug-in electric cars and trucks. For that to happen we need a breakthrough in battery development.
I agree that nuclear power is needed, but a lot of other development in transportation has to go along with it to affect our petroleum consumption all that much.
Haven’t you heard of hybrids ? Not to mention, there won’t be much of demand for electric cars if we run low on electricity.
Sure, but they aren’t a magic potion. They get what? 45 mpg? My Dodge gets about 30. And maybe you missed my statement that nuclear power is needed. That will take care of the electricity problem, at the cost of raising other problems, at least for the time being.
The problem with nuclear power will be complacency. Right now it’s uncommon in the US and strict attention is paid to all of the details, especially since TMI and Chernobyl. Given a nuclear plant on every street corner and a long record of no accidents there will come a time when some manager will ask why all this money is being wasted on these excessive safety procedures. “After all, we haven’t had an accident in 50 years.”
They will never be that common; by nature they are more efficient the bigger they are. Putting one on every street corner makes no sense.
Besides, unless you have a better power source, that’s not much of an arguement against nuclear power. You’re never going to find a magic, perfect energy source.
Count me as another voice for nuclear power. It’s actually surprising how much of a consensus there seems to be here. Unfortunately, there could be a complete societal consensus in favor of nuclear power, and people would STILL fight like hell against a reactor in their backyard. The industry and the environmental movement need to get together and start flogging the newer, safer reactors – CanDu, pebble-bed, whatever. It’ll be one terrific sell job that’s needed, though. People’s fear of radioactivity is quite visceral.
I’ll also say that in this debate, like the healthcare debate, Americans want to act like we have nothing to learn from the rest of the world. The France gets 80% of its power from nuke plants? One of those inconvenient facts that can be negated by putting our fingers in our ears.
Ah yes, the NIMBY argument.
On my first day of Navy Nuclear Power School, it was brought to our attention that environmentalists had organized a huge protest against a proposed nuclear power plant out in the desert in the middle of nowhere somewhere in southern California.
These same protestors drove back home with not even a passing thought for the 30 or so Naval nuclear reactors parked in the harbor at San Diego.
(The point was that the Navy Nuclear Power Program has an excellent safety record.)
I’m convinced that we must go nuclear so why not sooner rather than later. We should find out about the French experience and not just by Gee Whiz, Ain’t Nature Grand baloney but solid information like,how does France handle the nuclear “waste”?
From the cite it would appear that they reprocess as much of the spent fuel as they can and vitrify the rest. That “rest” is stored in a temporary place while they study the problem of permanent storage.
This has gone on for 30 or more years now and I wonder how long they can keep that up?
Hey. That’s right were I live. 
With respect to nuclear waste, the nature of radioactive decay is that waste products are EITHER long-lived (with a long half-life) OR extremely radioactive (due to a short half-life). Waste that remains radioactive for millions of years is by definition not high-level waste.
Even high-level waste could be more easily dealt with simply by reprocessing it to recover usable fuel.
Finally, all of the waste produced by nuclear power plants is miniscule compared to the hundreds of millions of tons of pollutants just spewed into the air by fossil-fueled plants.
Also, people do not appreciate the fact that radiation is ubiquitous in the environment. People in the Northeast are exposed to radiation from radon seeping out the ground (resulting from the decay of uranium naturally present in the bedrock). People living at higher altitudes (like Denver), or people who work in the airline industry are exposed to much more radiation than people at lower altitudes due to decreased atmospheric shielding from cosmic rays.
When I was assigned to a submarine, we kept radiation detectors attached to our uniform belts. Our exposure was always higher in port than at sea. The reason was that for us in a submerged sub at depth, we were shielded from all of the normal radiation sources people are normally exposed to. In fact, we had a guy once who got a large spike in his radiation exposure one month; it turned out that he had inadvertently taken his radiation dosimeter with him to the beach one day, and laid out in the sun all day with it.
My point is that low-level radiation is something we are naturally exposed to.
I consider myself to be an environmentalist, and have been in favor of the expanded use of nuclear power for years.
I’ll just say in passing that I’m surprised no one has raised the terrorism argument – you know, “More nuke plants equals more vulnerability to terrorists, etc.” Even if I’m not hugely concerned about terrorists attacking nuke plants, I’m at least a little bit concerned about people who are concerned about terrorists attacking nuke plants. It’s yet another scare tactic against an industry that’s already had to deal with plenty.
I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s so cool I should mention it again.
Canada’s CANDU reactor is especially well suited for use in producing hydrogen for a hydrogen-fueled economy. There are several reasons:
[ul]
[li]It’s extremely safe. [/li][li]The spent fuel from a CANDU reactor is particularly safe for long-term storage - its radioactivity decays to the level of the original uranium ore within 400 years. [/li][li]A CANDU reactor can burn spent fuel from current US reactor designs.[/li][li]A CANDU reactor’s moderator is heavy water - which can be produced as a byproduct of hydrogen electrolysis, making a CANDU hydrogen plant synergistic and cutting costs by 20%.[/li][/ul]
Atomic Energy Canada has estimated that 200 CANDU reactors could provide enough hydrogen to power the entire vehicle fleet in the U.S. So here’s what you do: You build a huge field of CANDU reactors in Nevada near Yucca mountain. These reactors would burn high-level waste being shipped to Yucca, which would make it safer to store and lower the overall cost of fuel. And since they are all located near the repository, there would be no issues with shipping their spent fuel around the country. They could take in water from Lake Meade, create hydrogen, and pump it around the country.
There are still technical challenges to overcome in using hydrogen as a primary fuel source, but they are of an engineering nature - no fundamental breakthroughs required. Fuel from this source would likely be more expensive than gasoline is today, but not outrageously so.