900 Ton Containment Vessel Bottom Head Installed At Vogtle 3

Yesterday, Georgia Power announced that they successfully lifted the first part of the Vogtle Unit 3 containment vessel into place. From World Nuclear News: "The component — measuring almost 40 meters wide, 12 meters tall and weighing over 900 tons — was assembled on-site from pre-fabricated steel plates. The cradle for the containment vessel was put in place on the unit's nuclear island in April. The completed bottom head was raised by a heavy lift derrick and placed on the cradle on 1 June, Georgia Power announced." Georgia Power has a pretty cool gallery of high resolution construction photos (the bottom head is the background on my XBMC machine). Below the fold there is a video of the crane moving the bottom head into place.

What? Where?

[wonkey_monkey]

Yesterday, Georgia Power announced that they successfully lifted the first part of the Vogtle Unit 3 containment vessel into place.

Ah, good. What? This is presumably something to do with nuclear power - as it's come from Nuclear World News - but are they building a reactor or a waste site?

Is this Georgia, the U.S. state? Or Georgia the country, perhaps? Or is it actually somewhere completely unrelated to anywhere called Georgia, but where the company called Georgia Power just happen to be working?

When I was a rugrat, "bottom head" was just something I called my brother when he was being mean.

Re:Bottom head?

[bruce_the_loon]

It's a blerry summary. There's a nice wikipedia link in the first line, and it goes to the relevant section of the page, and a decent article about the whole thing. Stop wanting to be spoon-fed every little factoid and become an independent thinker.

Re:Nuclear Wessel?

[interval1066]

Yeah, you've thoughtfully provided links, that's great and all, and I will look at them; even so, I'm in the camp that's going "Wtf...?" Its a little like dropping an alien life form in the middle of your aunt & uncle's living room and you and your friends all nodding to each other going "Yeah, it all makes sense now..." and "I thought they'd look like that...", meanwhile your poor aunt and uncle are staring at the thing and going "What the hell are they talking about...?"

Re:Nukes are not economically viable without taxat

[Artifakt]

One of the big reasons they won't be profitable without state sponsorship is the military applications of enriched Uranium. The US made Energy a whole cabinet level entity chiefly because of nuclear prolifieration issues. Any effort by the far right in the US to "drown government in a bathtub" runs into the problem of how you can have a tiny federal government with a multi-billion dollar Dept. of Energy.
          ( As a small proof of these statements, the total budget for DOE 2014 is a tad over 26 Billion dollars, and the portion of it that is for dealing with weapons and prolifieration related activities is the largest single section of that total at just over 11 billion.)

                                                                                        http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2013/04/f0/FY14_DOE_Budget_Highlights_Final.pdf [energy.gov]

  (If readers want to cut to the chase, try the table on page 19). Interested people may note that the costs of all kinds of energy generation and of environmental activities are grouped together as one section, but they still come out smaller even lumped together, than the 'blowing things up and stopping other people from doing the same back at us' section does. Scientific research is smaller yet, only about a sixth of the budget. Then there's the question, how much of that environmental clean up and scientific research is actually to support the military parts of DoE activites and maybe ought to show up as another cost of war and proliferation?

        Those costs are going to be incurred so long as the US runs a Nuclear Navy, has H-bombs in its arsenal, and wants to stop various 'rogue nations and state sponsored action groups' from getting their hands on the resulting materials. Stop all civilian energy research (of all kinds, not just nuclear) and all civilian nuclear power plants cold, and you still have that 11 billion, plus its share of general administration costs, internal safety inspections, workforce health compliance, and such. The complex legal procedures for civilian nuclear involve taking fees that are supposed to help offset other DoE costs, then giving more back in exchange, more that is paid for by common taxation, so that it is very hard to say just how much of the grants actually go to the civil corporations and how much of them involves using the corps as a pass through to transfer money back to the military side.
              No other power generation technology faces this problem. We don't have to worry about the costs of military prolifieration of, say, wind or hydro technologies. But, what will happen if we start having to pay to prevent dirty coal projects in other countries? What if, for example, the US starts taking Kyoto seriously and wants to really cut coal prolifieration? About the only options we would have (short of just stopping all those nations from building enough powerplants of any sorts to keep their people alive), would be to let some of them develop nuclear plants. Those costs would then again be counted as part of our nuclear power costs. In other words, A large part of the cost of reducing other nations dirty coal emissions and greenhouse gasses would show up in the US budget as a nuclear proliferation control cost, even if the US completely stopped building or running all civilian nuclear plants on its own soil. Our economic system isn't just built to reward dangerous cost cutting, it is built to push costs that are only tangentially related to nuclear power into counting as 'Nuclear power' costs. That alone means Nukes will never be economically viable without taxation, but it's an artifact of the way we do the budget.