So I was thinking the other day…yeah I know…it’s wierd.
When you say Nuclear people throw their hands in the air and say “UNSAFE…” and shut down, wanting to hear nothing.
But…do these same people realize that Subs and Carriers in our own Military use Nuclear power with a HIGH degree of safty, and have done so for YEARS and YEARS.
I know nobody wants a power plant in their back yard as well. So why don’t they build a few plants out where nobody lives or cares (New Jersy?? hehe), and pipe in the power???
Whats the REAL downfall…besides a MELTDOWN?? And to anyone who says “A MELTDOWN is bad enough” I say “Well they aren’t supposed to MELTDOWN, Oil Tankers aren’t supposed to crash, people aren’t supposed to trip and fall. Shit happens!” But is FEAR of a meltdown enough to just REMOVE the option for this potentially wonderous powersource from our minds???
erics, this ain’t no place for a rant, or a debate. What, precisely, is your General Question? Please keep in mind that if you state it with all the inflammatory rhetoric of your initial post, I will close this thread so fast that it generates heat.
I don’t think Manhattan sleeps. Hey just like the city
I think it is a great idea, maybe build it on an offshore platform, though it would be hard to defend. How 'bout some of that gov’t land in AZ, they parctally own 1/3 the state, don’t they?. Other thoughts come to mind- how 'bout an orbiting space station that geneates power and beams it via microwave, kind of like the solar satalite theory but use nuclear fuels instead, or on the moon - but we would need relay satalites for when the moon is on the other side.
For the occational accidents, I think that nuclear fuel is cleaner overall then fossil fuels and we would not be so dependent on forein oil.
I’m sure there is someone around here with more extensive knowledge, but until they show up…
Firstly, nuclear plants can’t be built just anywhere. The reactor is just a high-tech boiler, creating steam for turbines that drive the electric generators. In addition, most nuclear reactors use water to help cool the reactor core. Thus a substantial supply of water is necessary, so the plant is usually located near a river or tidewater.
Secondly, it is preferable to build power plants as near as possible to area for which they are supplying power, to minimize transmission losses.
Even rural areas of New Jersey are not all that empty, btw.
Two things:
Radiation hazards during operation (there have been numerous minor releases radiactive material at otherwise ‘safe’ facilities).
Disposal of radioactive waste, ranging from spent nuclear fuel to entire reactor cores. The US has not yet come to grips with the need to dispose of the components from its oldest plants, and there is considerable debate over where and how to do so.
If you are seriously interested in further study, try RADLINKS at:
I think that the biggest problem with Nuclear Power is public opinion. The generations of the 50’s and 60’s were brought up in the shadow of the Mushroom Cloud.
One side of the Gov’t said that the Atom is our friend… look at the marvels of the atomic age! Atomic power, and… uh… luminous watches and clocks…
The other half had them doing duck and cover drills, and reading pamphlets with titles like “How you can survive the First Strike!” and “Build your own Bomb Shelter.”
People have been afraid of Nuclear Anything for the last 50 years. In time it will fade, and then mayhaps we can use this power source… until then we’ll keep on polutting the sky and ground with poorly designed and ineffecient power stations.
From what I’ve read, the amount of nuclear wastes is minimal, and the risks of a nuclear accident (a meltdown is almost impossible) are minimal with a properly built and maintained facility.
Eventually, orbital power stations will happen, and high effeciency solar power, and pocket fusion will be real. But before all that, we must work to rid the American… nay, Global consciousness of old Ned Ludd.
I have heard that the biggest tragedy of the publics opinion of Nuclear power has been the lack of Research. As with anything new, as more reserarch is done, things become safer and better.
Had Nuclear cought on in a big way…who knows how safe and wonderfull it could be by this time.
The biggest problem with nuclear power is the cost. It’s just cheaper to build and run a coal or oil facility. The whole ‘to cheap to meter’ thing was just BS.
I agree with labdude. The answer to the question, “Why don’t we just (fill in your easy solution)?” is almost always economics. If corporate America could make money with nuclear power plants, there would be one on every corner.
Even today, nuclear power receives some rather substantial subsidies from the federal government; take away the subsidies and it would make even less economic sense.
Plants are given limited liability from damage caused by nuclear accidents. This is over and above the limited liability extended to shareholder-owned corporations.
The government handles the long-term disposal of nuclear waste. Admittedly, they haven’t done the best job of this, seeing as they haven’t finalized a single waste site so far.
(And Nevada is hoping they won’t settle on Yucca Mountain.)
When I visited England in 1987, I noticed a lot of nuclear power plants. I hear Japan has a lot of nuclear power plants also.
Maybe one reason we don’t have so many nuclear plants in the U.S. is that we have such an abundance of cheap oil. Great Britain has the North Sea oil fields, but judging by what you have to pay for British gasoline, their supply of oil isn’t anywhere near as plentiful as ours. And of course Japan has no local oil deposits.
Roadwhore’s nuclear listing can be some rather dry, but still illuminating reading for the uninvolved but curious.
The spent fuel is one of the major concerns of all Plants. Nukes are refueled on an 18 to 24 month cycle I believe. This is not all the fuel in a reactor mind you, but only a portion. There are many locations that still store all the spent fuel from their 20 and more years of operation. There are risks involved of course, but many would tell you that these risks are rather small.
Nukes are not exactly profit leaders in the industry. Some of the analysts can make it appear that there is no actual profit in nuclear generation. This may be true.
A silly number based on a large sampling:
Generator rpm = 1800
Generator output varies from design depending on many circumstances.
Power is sold at many different rates.
A real-world average is that for every single revolution, fifty cents worth of saleable energy is produced. I can’t back that up with the core numbers, but it is accurate enough for barroom chitchat at the minimum.
Do you have any figures on total fuel-related cost of nuclear versus coal versus natural gas you would care to share? Because I really do think that the total fuel-related cost at the busbar for nuclear does beat even most coal plants.
The biggest problem with building a nuclear plant is simply public opinion. The vast, technologically illiterate public who get riled up over what Peter Jennings says on their TV (which never lies), and goes forth to drive public policy decisions based on their horoscope and “good horse sense” and an urge to “save the children”. :rolleyes:
Sometimes I really think about moving to that cabin in Montana and writing my manifesto…
Do nuclear plants really create nuclear waste? The fuel that they dig out of the ground is already radioactive. It seems to that once they’ve gotten energy out of it, there would be less radioactivity. Obviously the fuel wasn’t that big of a problem when it was in the ground. Why noy kust put it back?
Not true at all. I want my OWN personal nuclear power plant right in my back yard. One scientist suggested a scheme for making small nuclear electric generators about the size of a furnace, you’d buy one and install it for about 30 years of power generation, and when the nuclear material was depleted, you’d trade it in for a replenished unit. I’ll take one, please. I’d rather be “off the grid” and using my own electric generation capacity.
Yes, nuclear power plants generate quite a bit of waste:
a) Uranium (the fuel) is not particularly radioactive. U-238 has a half-life of 4.46 billion years; U-235 has a half-life of 704 million years. Also, in the ground, even in ore deposits, it’s not particularly concentrated. (Though there was a report of a recently discovered “natural reactor” that may have undergone some fission in the ground long ago.)
b) When fission reactions occur in a nuclear reactor, “fission products” are produced (from the split uranium) that tend to be highly radioactive. We are not extracting all possible energy out of the fuel. (That would require matter-antimatter conversion.) We are just exploiting the fact that we can sustain a nuclear chain reaction with uranium. The fission products tend be quite a bit more radioactive than the uranium we started with, though they MUST contain less overall potential energy, according to the laws of thermodynamics.
c) Operating nuclear power plants produce copious amounts of neutrons. These have the unfortunate effect of irradiating stable elements present in the reactor construction, and turning them into radiative isotopes. For example, the element cobalt is used in valves and bearings because of its extreme hardness. When irradiated by neutrons, stable cobalt-59 is converted to highly radioactive cobalt-60.
d) Any material in contact with radioactive materials is potentially “contaminated” and must be handled as such. This includes clothing, bags, wipes, etc. Any maintenance produces tons of this.
All of this waste, however, should be compared to the hundreds of millions of tons of pollutants that coal and other fossil-fueled plants belch into the air year after year…
