Nuclear power

So today I was sitting in the EBR 2 which is an amazing feat of engineering and science. The thing eats nuclear waste from other plants to power itself and although it has been invited to melt down twice, including doing what happened at Fukushima, it politely declined each time. The reactor could be sustainably powered by uranium taken from sea water indefinitely. The thing has been shut down and scheduled for disassembly and congress cut the funding for its successor in 1993.

It seems to me that a lot of folks are scared of nuclear power due to lack of understanding and a lot of scary media. However if we’re going to stop using coal and other such systems and are serious about decreasing Co2 emissions Nuclear is really the only way to go. Solar panels are expensive and inefficient and to have enough to power the world would require untold ecological destruction by covering the land with ugly panels. A similar thing could be said about wind power, the number of wind turbines would be staggering.

Do you agree with the idea that safe nuclear power should be pursued and if not what alternative do you see?

Safer nuclear power should be pursued, but the main safety problem now is ensuring that the plants are built, maintained, and operated properly. New plants can probably be built that could reduce the potential for harm sufficiently even when the inevitable fuck ups occur, in theory, but nuclear plants cost too much money to assume everyone will do what they’re supposed to do to make that a reality.

Yes, we should be building them everywhere we can and researching next generation reactor technologies.

“Next Generation?” It’d be nice if we could even just use current generation designs. Most if not all currently operating NPPs in this country are using 1950s-1970s technology.

I think we should build new reactors, and take coal-fired plants, and the oldest nuclear ones, offline, and we should keep doing that until we can generate all needed baseload power without fossil fuels.

Yes.

This is really the sad part of this saga.

It is quite possible (but not a given) that sometime pretty soon the world will have to choose between some serious assed global warming, not having nearly enough power, or building a bunch of nuclear reactors post haste.

But because nobody has really bothered to invest even a modest amount to try out various reactor designs and see what works well and what doesn’t IFFF we do decide we have to build a shitload of them fast, they will be old shitty designs.

This. So much this. Right now we (the collective royal we) have our heads stuck in the sand, figuratively sucking at the fossil fuel we have left.

Nuclear energy is safe and has lower environmental impact than burning hydrocarbons. Alarmists who point at events like Fukushima to justify why we should build no new reactors miss the point. It’s why we **need to build **new, more failsafe reactors and stop depending on the designs from the 70s. As a reference, construction of the Fukushima NP plant began almost exactly 40 years ago on March 16, 1976, completed in 1982.

Yes doesn’t really do it justice. Maybe bold, large font, all caps, in red.

Older reactors should be phased out and replaced by newer ones and researching thorium reactors to see if they make better sense from a security/safety perspective.

Yes.

But being generous and optimisitic, it would probably take 5 years to design a new reactor, 5 to build it and probably 10 with it running to figure out what in the design works, what doesn’t work so much, and what was just a good sounding idea that was just plain wrong.

Thats the thing. We COULD be on a fifth or six generation reactor design by now. We COULD have tried out a dozen or two interesting/innovative designs. We COULD have a really good idea of what we need to do and how to do it should the call come out for “nuclear reactors…we need em good…we need em fast…we need em NOW”.

But we don’t have that. We have experience with second/maybe third generation reactors that are basically the bastard step children of the military industrial complex that had other priorities.

The collective we have pretty much sat on our asses for 40 years research and development wise when it comes to nuclear power, and that lost time isn’t something you can make up for.

Yes.

While I don’t share the OP’s apparent disdain for solar and wind sources, transitioning to them exclusively would take an unacceptably long time, if it is even possible at all. I think we need new nuclear facilities to help us quickly phase out fossil fuel plants (and older nuclear designs), while still pursuing diverse sources of renewable energy in high-opportunity areas.

INL has been researching this for a long time. It’s why we’ve have 52reactors. Thisdesign was what we came up with but congress decided to cut funding for it 3 years before completion. Because it was never finished they can’t build similar reactors because the design has to be proven first. GE is actually building a proof of concept now so that they can go ahead and use the design but it should have been done in the early 90s. The TREATreactor is particularly cool, it’s basically a reactor to see what happens at energy levels that would cause a normal plant to melt down.

I love this post.

People say Chernobyl proves nuclear power is unsafe. That’s a bit like buying a car with three wheels and no seat belts, deliberately driving it into a tree, and then claiming that it proves all cars are unsafe.

As for Three Miles Island and Fukushima, those should be used as advertisements for how very safe it really is.

The biggest mistake environmentalists made back in the 70’s and 80’s was misinforming the public on the dangers of nuclear power. Now they have probably doomed us all.

Yes.

The irony burns. Or at least causes an unpleasant rise in sea levels.

There is no realistic long-term plan for energy generation that does not include nuclear power as a major component. No, it’s not perfect. Yes, we should be putting as much as we can into other sources. But right now, it’s the only thing that can replace coal, and we desperately need to replace coal. Coal is worse than nuclear in literally every way, including the production of radioactive waste.

I’m an electrical engineer, and I used to work in a power plant. It was a coal fired plant and not a nuke plant, but still, I do have a pretty good idea of exactly how a nuke plant works. The only major difference between a nuke plant and a coal plant is how you generate the steam. Once you get to the turbine, everything from there on out is basically the same.

I don’t pay much attention to scary media, and I don’t have a lack of understanding about nuclear power.

That said, I don’t think nuclear power is the greatest thing since sliced bread. In my mind, it has two main problems. First, we really don’t have a good way of dealing with the nuclear waste. Second, as long as you have nuke power you are going to have accidents. Anyone who thinks we can build new, accident-free reactors is deluding themselves. The accidents may not be terribly common, like maybe once every few decades, but they are going to happen.

Unfortunately (at least for my arguments) I don’t have anything better to suggest that we use in their place. The “green” energies just don’t make enough power to be useful. Wind farms don’t generate much power. Hydroelectric destroys the ecology downstream from the dam, and taxes are already over-allocated water supplies.

Solar plants actually do work pretty well in sunny places like the southwestern U.S. And by solar I don’t just mean photovoltaics. There are plants running that focus mirrors onto salt piles, turning them into molten salt and storing a huge amount of thermal energy. That energy can then be extracted by running water through the salt (in pipes) and converting it into steam. You heat up the salt during the day, and the residual heat in the molten salt continues to make steam at night as well, so this method doesn’t suffer from the problem that photovoltaics have, which is that they only produce power while the sun is shining. All you need is enough sunlight on average to keep the salt hot enough to stay molten.

Unfortunately, solar doesn’t work as well in less sunny areas, like the eastern U.S. where I live.

So, for the rest of the world, do you want horrible nuclear waste that will contaminate parts of the world for tens of thousands of years, along with the occasional nuclear accident? Or would you prefer to to avoid the nuclear waste problem by ruining our atmosphere and our entire ecology much more quickly by burning fossil fuels? Either way, it’s not a great choice.

Do a calculation.

Assume most of the world gets its power from nuclear. From that figure out how much of the planet becomes a nuclear wasteland that you can’t live in for X thousands of years.

Then compare THAT to most of the planet getting in deep doo doo due (heh) to global warming.

There’s two big issues with nuclear: safety and economics.

And by safety, I just don’t mean TMI. The entire process from mining to storing of wastes.

In previous threads, I’ve likened current nuclear energy methods to the very early days of pyramid building in Egypt. First they built mud brick ones that collapsed. Then stone ones but with too steep of sides which collapsed. Then they finally got it right and the big ones at Giza are still standing. We’re still in the mud brick phase. Maybe we will get to a Cheops-class system going eventually.

And because we are so far from getting all the bugs worked out, the total economics are horrible. It isn’t regulation and tree-huggers, it’s still inherent in the system.

People who think that it’s all safe and cheap are not well informed of the reality. Unfortunately, these same people get nasty in forums such as these.:frowning:

True. We also don’t have a good way of dealing with greenhouse gasses, and as long as you do anything at all, you are going to have accidents.

I pick “bury the waste in Yucca Mountain in stainless steel casks with walls six inches thick and/or stuff it up Harry Reid’s ass, and accept the risk of a practical solution causing maybe one or two deaths per year on average every year over the risk that causes several hundred deaths per year on average every year and isn’t practical”.

The AGW types talk a good fight, but when it comes to actual action they don’t do shit. Which is better - to deny AGW and support nuclear power like the GOP supposedly does, or claim AGW is a huge problem and oppose nuclear power like the Dems do?

Regards,
Shodan