First New Nuclear Reactor In a Decade On Track 575
dusty writes "Plans to bring online the first new US nuclear plant since 1995 are on track, on time, and on budget
according to the Tennessee Valley Authority. TVA had one major accident with a coal ash spill of late, and one minor one. The agency has plans and workers in place to have Unit 2 at Watts Bar, near Knoxville, online by 2012. Currently over 1,800 workers are doing construction at the plant. Watts Bar #1 is the only new nuclear reactor added to the grid in the last 25 years. From the article: 'TVA estimates the Watts Bar Unit 2 reactor every year will avoid the emission of about 60 million metric tons of greenhouse emissions linked with global warming. ... TVA began construction of Watts Bar in 1973, but work was suspended in 1988 when TVA's growth in power sales declined. After mothballing the unit for 19 years, TVA's board decided in 2007 to finish the reactor because it is projected to provide cheaper, no carbon-emitting power compared with the existing coal plants or purchased power it may help replace.'"
Less radioactive waste, too (Score:5, Interesting)
A nuclear plant also produces less radioactive waste than does a corresponding coal plant. Of course since the latter doesn't fall under the authority of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the radioactive substances in coal ash (like thorium) just get dispersed into the environment along with the stuff that stays toxic forever like arsenic and mercury.
Re:I enjoy nuclear power (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Just Takes One (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the keyword here is could. I can imagine many disasters that could cause enormous damage too, but the question is how likely they are to happen. What is more likely, a meteor strike, or an accident in a nuclear power station of such a magnitude as to render US uninhabitable? I don't know, but lets say they are comparable. If so, we should be willing to spend as much money on protection against meteors as we are on not using nuclear power, including, arguably, the cost of our military operations in the middle east, the increased danger of terrorism (potentially nuclear too) etc. Either way it's a cost/benefit analysis and you have to look at both sides of the equation.
Re:Just Takes One (Score:3, Interesting)
Plus, since the feds own the vast majority of Nevada (>85%), it was already illegal to inhabit those areas, anyways. I'm not bitter; I'm just Nevadan.
Re:Less radioactive waste, too (Score:5, Interesting)
I've often wondered what would happen if they changed that.. A recent Newsweek article was talking about how at the very end of the Clinton Administration, they ruled Fly Ash a hazardous waste, but it was via Executive order (just like we complained that bush did the last few weeks of office) and was undone by the next administration. I wonder what would have happened if that designation was passed "properly" and allowed to stand the last 9 years or so.
Re:I enjoy nuclear power (Score:5, Interesting)
Couldn't agree more.. The best way to defend against a "dirty bomb" is to start refining the low level waste for recycling. I wish the terrorists luck assembling dirty bombs made of Plutonium. In reality, a very large portion of our current nuclear fuel comes from "recycled' warheads from Russia. I can't help but smile at the fact that the cold war is powering my AC on a hot day ;).
Re:Intense danger (Score:3, Interesting)
Chernobyl was not just old:
1) It was built with a dual purpose: Power generation AND weapons materials production - this led to design safety compromises
2) It DID have a lot of safety precautions, but the operators disabled them to run an experiment. Based on your car analogy, this would involve ripping out the ABS controller, removing the shock absorbers, removing the swaybar, slashing the brake lines, then going for a ride.
Re:Thorium reactor (Score:3, Interesting)
Breeders have been tried, to the extent of about 20 billion dollars, over the last 40 years. All have failed. It's really hard to make something that can run with the very high neutron fluxes for years and years. There are only so many different materials and alloys to choose from and they all tend to fall apart after a while with 10^38 neutrons per cm^2 per second buzzing thru them.
In addition we may have passed the point of no return re breeders-- i.e. if we had breeders right now, there isn't enough uranium left to run the current bunch of reactors and breed any usable amount of new material.
There's also the slight problem of building plutonium-burning reactors and not losing a few kilos to the bad guys.
Re:Just Takes One (Score:3, Interesting)
Quibble. President Reagan lifted the ban in 1981 [wikipedia.org].
Externality (Waste Disposal) (Score:4, Interesting)
"TVA's board decided in 2007 to finish the reactor because it is projected to provide cheaper, no carbon-emitting power..."
Where does the waste go? (TBD) What is the cost of waste disposal? (TBD) Have they factored that cost into their calculations? (No)
Re:Meh (Score:3, Interesting)
I loved it when I was in the Navy and all the protesters against Seabrook, and no one stopped to think that there were at least 4 mobile reactors at the shipyard across the river at any given time back then.
Well, reactor, not plant (Score:3, Interesting)
With that said, I do think that we need to continue with AE esp Geo-thermal and Solar Thermal. Both are capable of base load power, which is really what is needed.
Re:I enjoy nuclear power (Score:2, Interesting)
I think the security threats are exaggerated. Highly radioactive materials are mostly dangerous to whomever possesses them...
I do not. If people are willing to use themselves as the fuse for a C4 vest in the name of some driving principle we don't fully understand, there will be people willing to take hot metals out of their lead containers and run away with them. Yes, they'll die. But they may be able to make it back to their revolutionary cell and dump the stuff into that box made out of old car battery lead. You will be able to get people willing to try to slam two chunks of radioactives together with their hands or old car springs, whatever, in an attempt to achieve critical mass. It likely wouldn't work, but you'd end up with a hell of a mess at best.
The lack of safety in handling fissile materials does not guarantee their security. It would certainly stop you or me, I'm sure, but that presumes you're not a culturally repressed unstable person who considers themselves a martyr in training. That's what scares the pasta out of me.
Re:I enjoy nuclear power (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Finally (Score:3, Interesting)
Well it's been a few decades since the last "horrible" nuclear accident. The public may be getting ready to face the music and try it again. Looking at history, it looks like the Soviet Union had the worst luck with Nuclear power and accidents. [reference [wikipedia.org]]. It seem like every time there has been a problem it has set back nuclear development by 10 years.
Re:I enjoy nuclear power (Score:2, Interesting)
IT'S ABOUT TIME!!!!!..... (Score:2, Interesting)
ABOUT FUCKING TIME!!!!!
It's great to hear about someone finally building another nuclear plant in stead of another coal- or gas-fired plant. Here in the People's Republik of Kalifornia, nuclear power is verboten, and mentioning it will get your ass drummed out of town by "newspaper scientists" and politicians who allow themselves to be led around by the nose by environmentalists who wouldn't know a rational thought if it bit them on the nose.
However, unless this is a PBMR, the problem is only half-finished. Nuclear wast cannot be stored for the thousands or millions of years that it would need to decay to a safe level. The solution would be to use a breeder reactor to efficiently reprocess the waste fuel, instead of simply storing it underground. This would reduce the amount of raw fuel production that would be needed, and would greatly reduce the quantity of radioactive waste, which could be separated into usable isotopes. Apparently, Jimmy Carted, despite his nuclear degrees, thought that it would be better just to let waste accumulate in huge quantities underground, instead of *RECYCLING* it back into usable nuclear fuel, and caved into the demands of the Greens and banned breeder reactor construction.
Here in the People's Republik of Kalifornia, Greens attack every form of power generation, except, for some reason, gas turbines.
1. Solar - Uses up too much valuable land, not efficient enough for the energy demands of the state. Extremely expensive and not useful on cloudy days. Technology not advanced enough.
2. Wind - Indefinite moratorium in CA, because the places windy enough to make them efficient are in the flight paths of birds. Banned in Altamont, CA, the windiest place on the planet.
3. Nuclear - "Sen." Feinstein has vowed to oppose any form of nuclear power. Not going to happen in CA. Feinstein refuses to educate herself on PBMRs, and instead listens to lobbyists.
4. Geothermal - Not efficient enough due to too few suitable locations (Many in open spaces and parks).
Rep. Ellen Tauscher, a Democrat from Kalifornia, is one of the few Democrats to actually see the advantages of nuclear power generation over those who remain blinded by politics. Although a democrat, I still have to give her serious props in her position on nuclear power.
Re:Finally (Score:5, Interesting)
Are there GW level reactor designs based on materials available in sufficient quantity?
A 2MW reactor using air cooling or a 800MW design that requires 1000 tons of ... meter-long nano-tubes (etc.) isn't going to help replace that 1GW coal plant any time soon.
The general problem is still thermal sinks. A nuclear plant has a thermal efficiency somewhere around 33% so twice as much energy has to go somewhere other than the power substation. Let's take a moderately small plant with an output of 500MW ... which implies 1GW (thermal) has to be dissipated. Roughly you're looking at something like 12 million cubic meters per hour of airflow...assuming a 250C change in air inlet to output temp.
Not meant to flame...i'm curious how the math makes large scale (non-evaporative) air-cooled thermal plants possible.
Re:on track, on time, and on budget... (Score:1, Interesting)
TVA actually has completed a number of projects recently both on time and under budget. Granted, the record in the past hasn't always been the greatest, but in the past decade or so, they've not done too badly. (Disclaimer; I work for TVA)
Re:Finally (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Finally (Score:2, Interesting)
16 TW on average now. In the future?
Here's my argument against solar as a long term base energy source: we have access to effectively unlimited energy on this planet, if we can just learn to harness it via fusion or some other to-be-discovered technology. What we don't have is unlimited access to land. Consider what having 5,000x times the currently available energy would mean: we could start doing things like ultra-high density vertical farming, freeing land currently put to agriculture. We could desalinate all the fresh water the world would ever need, and electrolyze enough hydrogen to power any fleet of hydrogen vehicles Detroit wants to dream up. We could easily synthesize polymers, purify metals, even transmute rare elements. All without land intensive practices like industrial farming and strip mining we survive on today. We can do all those things now, but because energy is an expensive, constrained resource, none of it is practical.
I don't believe terrestrial solar can change that significantly. Fission power can't either, but it does lead us closer to the technologies that can.
Re:Its the waste stupid. (Score:2, Interesting)
The reason is, there is no answer for a 250,000 year problem like that.
Bullshit. All you have to do is recycle it as much as you can, store it, recycle it some more if you find a new way, store it, then eventually in 300 years either dump it into the nuclear melting core of Earth or send it into the big nuclear fire ball in the sky. Problem solved, and in the meantime you haven't dumped anything bad into the atmosphere.
Re:Just Takes One (Score:3, Interesting)
The military and government reactors are already built and run by low-bidders. And yet, even with that, there has been one (1) fatal nuclear accident in the US. Three military personnel died in a meltdown and explosion in 1961 at SL-1 reactor at the INEL. So, thinking that military reactors are safer... well, in the US they have the same record for the last 48 years - 0 fatal accidents; but military loses before that...
Re:Finally (Score:4, Interesting)
and what about when the sun isn't shining.
I kind of like concentrated solar-thermal power (CSP) more than photovoltaics. And with CSP, you can basically store heat from the sun in the form of, e.g. liquid salt, and use that to run your generators at night.
Re:Just Takes One (Score:3, Interesting)
Thorium Reactors - An Alternative... (Score:4, Interesting)
The following links are to a couple of interesting Google Tech Talks on Youtube, covering the subject of Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors. Carlo Rubbia (Nobel-winning physicist) is pushing another class of thorium reactor - the accelerator-driven system.
I hope you find them of interest - they're quite long.
Re:Finally (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Just Takes One (Score:3, Interesting)
Uranium is basically harmless, radiation-wise (any radioactive material that has been around since the Earth formed is not meaningfully radioactive).
Ask the people of Cornwall in the UK (and some parts of the US, I can't remember which) about Radon. Here's a handy map:
http://www.hpa.org.uk/webw/HPAweb&HPAwebStandard/HPAweb_C/1197636998945?p=1158934607683 [hpa.org.uk]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radon#Radon_concentration_guidelines [wikipedia.org]
How the danger of Radon building up in houses to the general public was discovered:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_and_radon_in_the_environment#Radon_in_houses [wikipedia.org]
Re:Home means Nevada, home means the hills... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Meh (Score:3, Interesting)
I can't explain everyone, but I can explain why I'm for it.
One day, I decided as a mental exercise to consider all current and near term likely power sources and their environmental impacts great and small. Of all of them, nuclear technology potentially has the least overall impact. Wind farms require clearing of large amounts of land, spoil the natural beauty, and kill birds. Hydro kills fish and drys longstanding wetlands while flooding other habitats. Coal requires large mining operations, releases great amounts of greenhouse gasses and other pollutants into the environment and produces harmful slag that just gets buried with little oversight. Solar would require clear cutting to produce enough energy for civilization.
Even going solar at my house would require me to cut down the trees in my front yard which are currently providing a nice habitat for many birds and other animals as well as giving me shade and a nice view. Somehow, I just can't see clear cutting my fairly wooded neighborhood as the environmentally friendly option.
Nuclear will require some land, but that land can be reclaimed from existing coal plants. We have already mined enough uranium to last for many decades if we go with breeder technology. If we choose IFR, we can use the "spent" fuel we already have in "temporary" storage. The waste it produces will be kept away from the environment until it becomes safe in a few hundred years. Fuel suitable for an IFR is a much worse source for weapons than natural uranium ore. It would be too "poisoned" with actinides.
As for the dangers, we have to look at Chernobyl. That reactor was the most dangerous design that is still in operation and the operators still had to do practically every don't in the manual to have it become a problem. In the U.S. it wouldn't have even been allowed to continue operating under a grandfather clause because of it's inherently dangerous design. The closest example we have under U.S. safety rules is TMI which, in spite of the hype and scare headlines ultimately did no harm. Since it was built, we have figured out how to greatly improve safety.
Re:Just Takes One (Score:3, Interesting)
So getting about 50% of our electrical power from coal per year requires us to burn over a cubic half mile of coal.
I think it's clear that nuclear is the winner here.