US To Build Nuclear Power Plants 622
An anonymous reader writes "President Barack Obama has announced more than $8bn in federal loan guarantees to begin building the first US nuclear power stations in 30 years. Two new plants are to be constructed in the state of Georgia by US electricity firm Southern Company."
Re:some facts about nuclear energy. (Score:5, Informative)
>> 1/Nuclear energy does not make economic sense. http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=50308 [ipsnews.net] (translation: it is expensive)
>> 2/Having to store waste for over 100000 years is not what someone with any common sense would call 'green'.
>> 3/limited liability. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act [wikipedia.org]
>> 4/fuel-dependency
5/If we don't use nuclear we'll be using *coal*, not wind or solar or unicorn farts. Those techs must be, and are being developed but we need power _today_.
Re:That's good (Score:2, Informative)
Re:some facts about nuclear energy. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:That's good (Score:5, Informative)
Plus, unlike coal emissions, we can actually USE the waste material and reduce it by reusing it in reactors-- if it is radioactive, that means it is emitting radiation, which can either be used in additional reactors, or worst case in radioisotope thermoelectric generators (not very efficient, but its an option). With smog and CO2 emissions, we can do....what again? Bury it so that it can leak back into the atmosphere after a while?
Seems to me, if youre going to have a fuel source that has a waste product, the BEST thing you can ask for is that it deliver it in a prepackaged, stable, reusable form rather than as a useless aerosol.
Re:some facts about nuclear energy. (Score:3, Informative)
1) Conveniently ignoring the external costs (read: pollution) that traditional fossil fuel plants have. Further their units looks highly questionable: $88 bucks per Mwh isn't far off 8 cents per kwh. That isn't far off the national average over here in the US. That they try to disguise it with strange units makes me suspicious.
2) You don't have to store it, but we would have to man up about the nukes problem. Waste = fuel to a breeder, but that means plutonium.
3) Limited liability can be a good thing. Given that (practically) everyone in the country benefits from having electric power, using the taxpayers as insurance isn't strictly a bad thing. Note that they'd be paying it anyway either in increased pollution from fossil fuels (if no nukes) or in their electric rate (with nukes but no limited liability) then you're paying it anyway.
4) See 2. Also see oil. Really wind and solar too. You may be depending on the Sun, but it isn't truely renewable. It'll go out in a few billion years.
Re:New Nuclear Technologies (Score:1, Informative)
The tech to accomplish most of these (including the most important one - burning unenriched fuel) has been around since the 1960's. Read on CANDU reactors - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU
Re:some facts about nuclear energy. (Score:5, Informative)
Read this.
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/sewtha.pdf [cam.ac.uk]
Seriously.
Actually read it.
It looks at all the options in a realistic manner.
Re:That will help us in 2060 (Score:4, Informative)
Not quite true. One of the most storied, protested nuclear power plants is Seabrook Station in New Hampshire. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seabrook_Station_Nuclear_Power_Plant [wikipedia.org]
The first permit was granted in 1976. It took 14 years to get to full power, due to a lot of red tape and a ton of protests. I can recall being in high school at the time construction was nearing an end and there were a ton of protests even then, mostly centered around the evacuation plan or lack thereof.
So the date will probably be 2025, given that it will take at least 10 years to build the thing.
South Texas Project (Score:3, Informative)
The South Texas Project [stpnoc.com] is building two new units at its existing facilities near Matagorda Bay.
-l
Re:some facts about nuclear energy. (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is companies can't get loans from banks because it costs lots of money to build a nuclear power plant and loans that were provided were defaulted. That's why the US says it will guarantee them.
Re:What plant design? (Score:3, Informative)
First Article I read said AP1000 reactors.
Also, this is going in at a site of 2 other reactors, so there will be alot less NIMBYism than if it was a new location.
Re:some facts about nuclear energy. (Score:1, Informative)
>> 2/Having to store waste for over 100000 years is not what someone with any common sense would call 'green'.
Some people argue that having the waste in a solid transportable form is an advantage.
Re:some facts about nuclear energy. (Score:3, Informative)
The US does in fact have gigantic coal reserves.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_producing_regions [wikipedia.org]
Re:some facts about nuclear energy. (Score:5, Informative)
I've spent several hundred hours researching this issue. Frankly, you're wron.g
>>1/Nuclear energy does not make economic sense. http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=50308 [ipsnews.net] (translation: it is expensive)
The actual cost of the plants they're building in the south are half this. And a lot of the cost has to do with NIMBYs and (ironically enough) environmentalists, who ought to all be very pro-nuclear. The actual cost of nuclear per KWH is the only source comparable to coal. Dirty coal. CC Coal Plants are 2x to 3x the cost per KWH of dirty coal.
You want to know what doesn't make economic sense? Anything that costs more than double or triple the current cost of energy. Guess what that includes? All green technologies. Solar costs roughly 6x to 150x the cost of coal.
Look up the costs yourself, and become educated. This is a mix of government, industry, and hippie cost estimates:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/electricity.html [doe.gov]
http://bravenewclimate.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/eiaenergy2016.png [wordpress.com]
http://climateprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/nuclear-costs-2009.pdf [climateprogress.org]
http://www.energy.ca.gov/2007publications/CEC-200-2007-011/CEC-200-2007-011-SD.PDF [ca.gov]
http://des.nh.gov/organization/divisions/water/wmb/coastal/ocean_policy/documents/te_workshop_cost_compare.pdf [nh.gov]
>>2/Having to store waste for over 100000 years is not what someone with any common sense would call 'green'.
The waste problem is a social construct, not a technical one.
>>3/limited liability. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act [wikipedia.org]
It's a good thing. Because of idiot movies like the China Syndrome, people think that nuclear power is dangerous, when nuclear plants are actually quite safe. Even left-wing France produces the lion's share of its power through nuclear, and has done so very safely for the last 30 years. Compare this with the huge numbers of people killed every year in coal mining accidents and indirectly through the radiation released into the atmosphere by coal.
>>4/fuel-dependency
There's plenty.
Re:some facts about nuclear energy. (Score:4, Informative)
Just chapter 11 will do http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c11/page_68.shtml [cam.ac.uk], or even just page 71 http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c11/page_71.shtml [cam.ac.uk].
Summary: Gadgets and other devices on standby consume a tiny fraction of that consumed by heating, lighting, transport and other activities. The major energy savings come from better insulation, more efficient transportation, and just doing less. Whatever we do has to be on a big scale, and renewables/efficiency savings alone (for the UK), means a _lot_ of turbines/panels.
The rest of the book is well worth reading though, it brings what many of these debates lack - meaningful numbers in context, such as http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c10/page_64.shtml [cam.ac.uk]. The website is http://www.withouthotair.com/ [withouthotair.com]
Re:Good. Its about time (Score:2, Informative)
Natural gas, is heavy, and a large leak would cause a huge explosion. ( that is why nobody is willing to build a tanker to transport Liquified natural gas).
err - nobody [ship-technology.com] will build a LNG tanker?
Re:some facts about nuclear energy. (Score:3, Informative)
Yup. Too bad the IFR (Integral Fast Reactor) program was killed. If I recall correctly, the half-life of its longest-lived waste was something on the order of 50-100 years, and it extracted on the order of 70-90% of the energy available in its input uranium, instead of something like 5-20% (what typical LWRs are capable of). (Again, this is *if* I recall correctly, it has been a while since I read the IFR literature.)
Re:Good start, but we need more (Score:5, Informative)
And a loan guarantee simply means that a company can get a lower interest rate because investors know that in the event of default, the government will take over servicing the bond.
However, the actual value of such a guarantee is far, far less than the principal value of those bonds. In fact, it can be treated as a put option on the assets of the firm that is being financed with the bonds (calculating that value required making a number of assumptions about those assets and their value to another firm, their alternative uses, ongoing income generation capabilities and so on).
The value of this guarantee in this case is probably no more than a few hundred million dollars (i.e. a few percentage points of the principal amount). You can also simply estimate it by looking at the difference between the interest a similar firm would pay and what a government bond would pay, since that reflects the market's valuation of the default risk inherent in a firm like this.
This is a drop in the bucket from a stimulus perspective, and a drop in the bucket of our nation's energy infrastructure.
Re:from the wikipedia page (Score:3, Informative)
In short, that same article basically says you can use different thorium cycles to make bomb making much more difficult. This article is also fairly old. Wired did a more recent one (obviously not a scientific journal. http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/ff_new_nukes/ [wired.com] )
From the article that line is taken from
Re:some facts about nuclear energy. (Score:4, Informative)
What are we going to do with the waste? Until I hear a good answer to that question, nuclear power just doesn't cut it from my standpoint. Obama's nuclear plan, just like the rest of his policy, and US government policy in general, is shortsighted and leaves the burden on our kids. If we put 8bln into real solutions, we'd be able to build one.
What are we going to do with the waste? Don't know. What should we be doing with the waste? Reprocessing it like everyone else in the civilized world already does.
First, a word about modern reactor waste. If you just look at the crappy Westinghouse reactors the President announced loans for and don't even consider recycling all their waste (and we can do vastly better), the per-capita waste over the 60+ years life of the plant fits in a Coke bottle. Take a better design (CANDU, for instance), get less waste. Reprocess the waste you do get (which you can do multiple times in a CANDU reactor), get even less. So the actual level of waste we're talking about over a lifetime on a per-capita basis fits in a bottle of soda. Do what everyone else does with the waste and you end up with far less.
Second, the President has not specifically addressed what we're going to do with all our soda bottles of waste, but "senior" people dealing with the issue are supposedly telling journalists behind closed doors that they're looking at a number of possible solutions and that any final result will probably have to include reprocessing. If we were smart, we'd build a bunch of CANDU plants and feed our existing "waste" into them as fuel. CANDU plants are remarkably flexible. We can feed our existing waste into them now, take apart decommissioned nuclear weapons and feed their nuclear material into the plants later, and then switch either to natural uranium or to thorium. The CANDU plants would simply continue churning out clean, safe power throughout the whole process.
China's building CANDU plants right now (among others). Some CANDU projects have already been completed (either on or ahead of schedule and either on or under budget). To the best of my knowledge, the remaining CANDU projects in China are all ahead of schedule and under budget. That's what happens when you do something over and over again: you get better at it and it becomes cheaper and easier to do.
Re:some facts about nuclear energy. (Score:3, Informative)
They kill birds and bats but that's a red herring since cats kill many orders of magnitude more.
I actually like wind.
It has it's place.
It just can't provide much more than 20% of the power we need at the right time in the right places without either throwing grid stability out the window or throwing away lots of the power generated.
Re:That's good (Score:4, Informative)
With coal power, talking about 'radiation' is like asserting that you're not going to ride inside a car, as cars are dangerous...you're going to ride standing on the hood of the car.
Seriously, people. Solar and wind cannot supply our needs. Do the math. We can work on that, sure, but we need power now.
Oil and gas are just bad ideas all around. Gas prices are already high enough.
And as for coal...good grief, people. Do you know why coal's so cheap? Well, a) safety regulations are lax, so people die mining it, b) They mine it by blowing the tops of mountains, c) it reduces more radioactivity materials in a year than all radiation ever released in the US due to the nuclear power industry.
Re:some facts about nuclear energy. (Score:4, Informative)
But pretending that all the problems are solved with fossil fuels by pumping back into the ground is naive at best, and ignorant at worst. You have not idea of the scale of even a 1GW power station. And you can't replace a 1GW plant with 1GW of wind turbines or solar... you need either massive storage facilities and/or massive over generation capacity...which results in expensive electricity.
Re:some facts about nuclear energy. (Score:3, Informative)
Not complete true. Minnesota has had a moratorium (a "ban" if you will) on new nuclear power plants for 15 years. If it's against the law to build it, credit is the least of your worries.
Not sure about other states.
Re:That's good (Score:3, Informative)
But proliferation concerns are overrated at best.
Re:some facts about nuclear energy. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:finally (Score:3, Informative)
Re:New Nuclear Technologies (Score:3, Informative)
Terrapower, a project of Gates buddy Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures, on their Traveling Wave Reactor:
http://www.intellectualventures.com/docs/terrappower/IV_Introducing%20TWR_3_6_09.pdf
also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor
Re:you guys as a whole (Score:3, Informative)
The correct answer to #1 is 0.
0 people were killed or seriously injured by the Three Mile Island accident. The amount of radiation the average person in the area received was roughly equal to that received during a normal chest x-ray. The max anyone got was less than what you get from a year of celestial background radiation exposure.
Scientific studies and reports compiled in 1981, 1990, 2000 - 2003, 2005, 2008, and many others in between all found 0 causal link between the Three Mile Island nuclear accident and any deaths. The 2000 - 2003 study by U-Pitt looked at radiation exposure information gathered from 36,000 people living near the plant at the time of the accident, yet it found "no consistent evidence" linking the Three Mile Island incident to an increase in cancer or mortality rates.