Your information is a few decades out of date for the US. The process here is that the design for plants must be approved separately. When a company wants to build a reactor they apply for a combined construction and operating license (COL) for a design that is already approved.
Given this, the delay in getting a COL is unconscionable. The only explanation I have for this is that the NRC has been taken over by Prohibitive Procrastinators as described by C. Northcode Parkinson in the essay the “The Law of Delay”
Since power companies aren’t in the business of building nuclear power plants, they are in the business of selling electricity, sooner or later they go away and build a coal or natural gas plant that doesn’t require NRC approval.
Molten Salt Reactors are plainly the way to go for dealing with nuclear waste by burning them up in to their more stable decay products and extracting energy from them at the same time. Double win.
Not only that we can use this design to breed common Thorium in to Uranium 233, giving us thousands if not millions of years of clean and inherently safe energy.
Why can’t we bury nuclear waste in subduction zones deep underneath the ocean? Wouldn’t getting it dragged to below the crust of the earth be better than throwing it under a few thousand feet under some dirt? I mean we’ve sent enough nuclear material to the oceans bottoms already :-/
China is building nuke plants as fast as it can. It currently gets less than 1% of its electricity from nuke, and their most optimistic projections are to raise that to 6% by 2020. No, that is not an ideal solution for much of anything. At the prodigious rate they’re building, they are also looking at shortages of fuel, equipment, qualified plant workers, and safety inspectors. China can do virtually nothing about global warming in ten years, and realistically you’re looking at centuries, not decades for them to increase their share of nuclear power to a point it would make much difference.
You must be joking. You think we could build enough nuclear power plants in 10 years to make any difference when it currently takes at least 10 years to build one. Cecil’s recent column about this put a figure of around 8000 nuclear power plants being required. Better get busy on that.
If disposing of nuclear waste were that easy, we’d be doing it, wouldn’t we? Are you proposing Australia take the whole world’s nuclear waste? And you have plans on how to transport it all there safely?
Comparing coal & nuclear waste is apples and oranges. Stand within a few meters of nuclear spent fuel and you’ll recieve a lethal does in a few seconds, and you will be dead from acute radiation sickness within a few days. Coal waste? Not nearly so.
Air pollution for coal-burning plants, according the American Lung Association, results in some thousands of deaths world-wide, per year. Pollen does too. Asthma and allergies are serious problems that result in thousands of deaths per year. Driving a car results in thousands of deaths per year. Breathing the exhaust fumes from cars, trucks, motorcycles and aircraft kills thousands per year. Cooking, especially high-temp frying, gives quite possibly, 1000’s of people lung cancer and other life-endangering respiratory problems per hear. Eating too much red meat kills thousands per year. Airborne viruses and bacteria kill thousands per year.
What is important is to keep in mind is what the actual risk to society is. People die in car crashes all the time. Yet, the risk to society is actually very low, and that’s why we’re all allowed to keep driving anyway.
A nuclear disaster results in 100’s of thousands of evacuees, it devastates whole economies, eventually can result in 100’s of thousands of cancers, birth defects, mutations and a whole assortment of lingering, chronic diseases, renders large areas of land previously used for habitation, food production, fishing, etc. uninhabitable. Quarantining the area for decades or centuries, cleaning, remediation, all run to the 100’s of billions of dollars per accident.
This is an unacceptable, and unforgivable risk to society. Never mind the proliferation risks of nuclear waste and especially reprocessed nuclear waste. Canada gave India its CANDU technology and they used it to turn right around and build hydrogen bombs. Essentially every country that has obtained civilian nuclear power technology has turned around and developed a nuclear weapons program. Assume nuclear energy is the solution to global warming, then also assume every little po-dunk dictatorship on earth is going to have a thriving nuclear weapons program.
coremelt so much for your desire to keep this a facts thread.
The GQ answers to your questions are pretty straightforward.
No it does not take 40 years. There is a question of throughput however. Currently at least there is only so much capacity worldwide at the extant specialty forges. Even the nuclear advocacy organization The World Nuclear Association documents the limits of this capacity and that new capacity won’t be created until orders are in hand. It is a choke point.
And yes please lets stick to facts on these, Nuclear Waste can be talked about in GQ, I’m asking about the actual volume produced if molten salt reactors and CANDU heavy water reactors were used to re-process fuel. That’s a GQ question.
Because the logistics of delivering waste to undersea subduction zones is considerably more complex and risk than underground storage. Also, you may be imaging these areas as being where one solid plate is diving under another cleanly, sucking everything else down with it, but the reality is that such zones are great thicknesses of crust that are slowly grinding away at one another. It would take centuries for material deposited in a subduction zone to actually be absorbed into the mantle.
A MSR designed for a complete fuel burn through cycle could reduce waste to highly ionizing but short-lived radioactives. As previously noted, the technology has already been demonstrated as a complete proof of concept, and even many of the issues with the current uranium fuel cycle processing can be minimized by using a thorium fuel. The problem is really one of development; there is still substantial effort needed to turn this into a commercial energy source, and the usual objections to using a molten salt medium (that it would be reactive if introduced into the environment, has to be kept running, et cetera) which are true but manageable.
I’m not sure how reactive molten salt would be in the environment? Wouldn’t it freeze in to a fairly inert lump? Fission products (of which there would be almost none in the Thorium blanket as it is continuously removed) would mostly be chemically combined to the Fluoride salt.
On a technical note its hard to imagine how a release to the environment might happen. It is at atmospheric pressure, enclosed in a ‘Hot Room’ which is probably filled with inert gas, maybe even underground. The chances of anything going astray are exceedingly small.
It also certainly doesn’t need to be kept running. One of the big features is the freeze plug which leads to a completely passive shutdown if there is any sort of emergency or power loss. The core is passively cooled in a drain tank and as they found in Oak Ridge’s MSRE it would freeze up over a weekend, ready for restart when needed.
I had a relative who worked on the Bellefonte reactor which your friend is probably referring to. Oddly enough, TVA was going to restart the building effort with 4 reactors being slated to be built but ironically the costs of the recent coal ash accident they had lead them to scale the project back to a single reactor again… there we go 'round the mulberry bush. I suspect that project will outlive us all.
Not sure what your friend means by too dangerous. When evaluating the risks from nuclear power there seems to be a different standard applied than there is to anything else that humans do. For instance, it looks like a single organic farm in Germany caused 24 deaths recently. Did Germany shutter all of its organic farms? That one farm nearly caused as many deaths in one episode as the entire nuclear industry worldwide throughout its history (depending on whose figures you accept… but you get the point). If you add up the rest of the deaths due to organic farming it would be many orders of magnitude worse. But Germany committed to shutting down all of its nuclear plants because of Fukushima.:smack:
Airline pilots routinely absorb more radiation than the reactor operators. It is hard to know why there are such levels of paranoia associated with nuclear power. Some of it is how nuclear power is associated with nuclear weapons I guess. Some of it is due to the inherent Luddism of environmentalists… who were the prime movers behind scotching the US nuclear plant building efforts. And part of it is due to that wretched China Syndrome movie… made by scientifically illiterate hacks… coming along at the time of Three Mile Island that seared itself into the collective consciousness.
The reason you don’t see a lot of companies pushing to build nuclear plants besides the regulatory burdens, licensing and liability issues is that they do not make economic sense. Other sources of energy are cheaper. Windmills and solar make even less sense so if your goal is to make a list of bad options then nuclear is the best of a bad lot I guess. The start-up costs of nuclear are huge and there is no guarantee that their lower operating costs will put you ahead in the long run given how governments seem to start and stop operations depending on the political climate. Before you did any sort of build-out you would have to politically neuter the opposition.
The waste problem is similarly a completely political one. There are options for storage… lots of perfectly good deserts and salt caverns laying around being useless and drawing welfare checks could be put to good use.
But you start from a completely false premise if you are wanting to build reactors as a solution to “climate change.” The climate will always change and good to luck to you if you wish to stop it with nuclear reactors or anything else. I assume you mean AGW and since we are only discussing scientific and factual questions here there is really nothing left to say on that topic.
No, because fear mongers delay every proposed solution. It’s incredibly hypocritical to oppose every nuclear waste site and then in the next breath complain that there aren’t any.
Thats true in western democracies. It’s not true in China, and it’s not true in India. Even though India is a democracy, there is almost universal support for Nuclear power. Partly that’s because the new middle class there never experienced our paranoid 1970’s and partly that’s because as a matter of national pride they have to have Nuclear because Pakistan does.
I call bullshit on nuclear storage. We are silly sideways with desert area space. dump it there in any container of your choosing. if they look like they’re going to leak, stick them in a larger container. If those leak stick them in an a larger container. Lather rinse and repeat as necessary. They don’t have to be hermetically sealed in titanium and tucked inside a multi-billion dollar tunnel in a mountain. put them in area 51 where it’s heavily guarded by people authorized to shoot intruders. Done.
A power plant should be substantial enough to survive a serious tornado and I don’t see that happening with solar or wind turbines (not that there’s anything wrong with them). We need to have a power source that we can depend on for the next 50 years. Technology will always bring us something new down the road but we need real power plants that can be depended on in the short term. Since the logical short term solution shifts transportation fuel over to electric then it’s even more important that we stop waffling around and just do it. It’s already old technology that doesn’t need reinvention or improvement.
The other reason not to chuck nuclear waste into subduction zones or shoot it into the sun or other silliness is that it’s useful and will probably get more so other time.
Seems we are constantly coming up with more efficient reprocessing methods so todays waste is tomorrows new fuel source. Never mind the uses in creating radio-isotopes for medicine.
If we ever do crack cold fusion, who knows what exotic combination of radio isotopes it might use up? The “mr fusion” at the end of back to the future, a tiny nuclear fusion reactor that runs on ANY radioactive material at all, is not beyond the realms of speculation in 100 years time.
So yeah that whole million years of protection and inventing new symbols that don’t need any knowledge of existing languages for yucca is rampant government spending gone wild. We’ll be retrieving those “wastes” for future usage within 100 years in practise.
Speaking as an Australian, I can see two problems with that:
1: Americans like to imagine that outback Australia is a huge empty nothingess. It isn’t. It’s sparsely populated, but it isn’t empty. There are some pretty big towns there, and a lot of it is used for grazing cattle. Even the deserts aren’t Sahara-type sand deserts, they’re arid scrubland. It’s owned, it’s occupied, and it is an important part of our national economy.
2: Fuck the fuck off with your nuclear waste. Let’s put it in your backyard instead. I feel quite confident that I speak for the entire country on this matter.
Has it ever occurred to you and your like-minded friends that if just about everyone but you opposes something that maybe it’s not the great idea you think it is? Ever? Ever even once?
I’m a little tired of hearing about how this 70-year-long nuclear renaissance isn’t happening because hippies sue.
If hippies had that kind of power I can guarantee you we’d all be living in love communes, smoking pot all day and wearing hand-loomed organic tie-dyed togas or something.
You people haughtily scoff at moon landing deniers and 9/11 conspiracy theorists and holocaust deniers and bigfoot chasers and ghost hunters but then you sit there screaming about the hippy conspiracy to doom nuclear power. It’s sad.
Obviously this isn’t GQ anymore, but I don’t how it could have been anyway. Questions like “nuclear is too/more/less dangerous?” don’t get GQ answers.
Because power plants are incredibly huge and complicated beasts which have to be designed for site-specific conditions. Even coal power plants, a technology which has been around for a century or more, are pretty much custom built once you exceed “tiny” size. The closest you can come to an assembly-line plant is getting a CT on a skid, and even there you’ll still have custom design for some of the components around the CT such as the switchyard.
When my company builds a coal power plant it takes hundreds of full-time folks in the design departments at least a couple of years to get it done. Any power plant over “tiny” size (> 25 MW) is not going to be able to use off-the-shelf parts. When you have things like drums and boiler tubing and steam headers which weigh hundreds of tons have to be moved to site by river barge, you better believe no one can afford to crank out 10 copies to keep in stock.
I don’t work in the mechanical design departments but even in the best case where a client orders 2-4 coal units at the exact same time, still each one of them is essentially custom-built, in that many of the major parts must be created from scratch. The resulting differences may be small, but they’re there. I’ve now been to about 75% of the utility-sized power plants in the US, and done in-depth studies on hundreds of them. Marmaduke Surfaceblow proclaims “there’s no such thing as sisters!” and he’s correct. I have on my computer right now the major CAD drawings of 2 boilers ordered at the same time, to the same spec, at the same site, sitting 100 feet away from each other, and I counted dozens of significant differences in construction just between the two.
Some of these changes are improvements. For example, in one real case the welders discovered that a specification for economizer headers didn’t allow a good enough clearance to work back in that area, resulting in hundreds of hours of paid overtime for them. The design of the next unit, sitting right next to it, changed radically to reduce this effort. Even if you forced the boiler OEM to adhere religiously to the exact, same design from plant to plant, the custom fabrication aspect of it creates changes just from how one welding crew puts tubes into a header versus how the other crew does it.
The “Manhattan Project” built the first large scale reactor for producing plutonium at Hanford, Washington. It took them about two years from groundbreaking to production. And that was doing something that had never been done before, with workers who were trained on the job.