Setback For Small Nuclear Reactors: B&W Cuts mPower Funding 165
mdsolar (1045926) writes with news that funding for the mPower, a Small Modular [Nuclear] Reactor, has been cut due to the inability to find investors interested in building a prototype. From the article: "The pullback represents a major blow to the development of SMRs, which have been hailed as the next step forward for the nuclear power industry. ... All told, B&W, the DOE, and partners have spent around $400 million on the mPower program. Another $600 million was needed just to get the technology ready for application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for licensing. ... B&W plans to continue low-level R&D on the mPower technology with a view to commercial deployment in the mid-2020s, said CEO James Ferland. But without a major shift in the business environment and in investor perceptions of the risks and rewards associated with nuclear power, that seems fanciful."
KickStarter? (Score:2, Redundant)
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Add the challenges of competition with natural gas bringing down electricity prices considerably along with a continued weak economy and therefore lack of demand growth, the high cost of building the first SMRs puts them out of reach.
Large reactors make more sense. They cost less per
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Wouldn't it be more accurate to say the Large reactors make more sense in some situations?
If all you need is 50 MW, building a 1 GW plant makes no sense. If you have a projected growth of 25MW per year, and you are bumping against capacity, you have the choice of building out a 50 MW mini-nuke every 2 years or a 1 GW plant every 40 years, the time-value of money on a big plant will kill you for production costs in the short term.
Maybe the modular plant will actually be cheaper once your start producing them
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Wouldn't it be more accurate to say the Large reactors make more sense in some situations?
Yes, that would be more accurate. There may be global markets where the SMR makes more sense, and certainly if there were an easy path to permit an old fossil site for SMR, then that would be an option. However, the permit path is challenging and costly, and the global market is not clear.
I actually like some of the very small "battery" SMR designs better than the mid sized ones, as they may have enough niche market appeal to support them, but again regulatory constraints add to the challenges for succes
Re:KickStarter? (Score:5, Insightful)
I wish Slashdotters wouldn't use the word "ponzi scheme" to mean "thing I don't like". It's got a very specific, very informative meaning that's being casually eroded out of laziness.
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Do not mistake ignorance and intellectual incompetence for laziness. They're hard at work screwing up.
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What? A Ponzi scheme bilks successive waves of investors to enrich the originator and hide the malfeasance from earlier investors. How is that remotely like Kickstarter?
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Rather than Ponzi scheme, the proper term for Kickstarter would probably be "confidence scheme" or "confidence trick".
Still a water cooled, solid fuel reactor (Score:3, Informative)
Still insisting on the same basic concept that gave us reactors that use just 0,5% to 1% of mined uranium and have the concept of a meltdown.
Even the most advanced water cooled reactor today still does that.
B&W mPower reactor is just a smalled version of the same.
When will this people learn ?
We need a breeder / near breeder reactor that is able to use bare minimum 10% of uranium mined, or much more.
liquid fuel instead of solid fuel, with the fuel molten in the coolant means meltdowns are impossible and heavy neutron poisons (noble gas fission products) can be collected from the reactor quickly, resulting in minimal neutron losses, the lower the neutron losses are, the better the fuel burnup can be (increasing that 0,5% to 1% utilization to much higher levels), plus the less neutron poisons are kept in the reactor, the less excess reactivity exists on the reactor, minimizing the risk of prompt neutron criticality scenarios.
That's why I don't support any reactor except for molten salt or molten metal coolant designs.
The AP1000 and similar Gen III+ are plenty safe enough for my taste, but if you honestly discuss even the most remote risks a gen iii+ reactor with non technical people, they will still be against nuclear power. Plus water cooled reactors demand lots of expensive active safety systems like hydrogen+oxygen recombinants, pressurizer, emergency spray, emergency water injection, the list goes on, making the reactor far more expensive than necessary. Perhaps with the mPower being a much lower power reactor, it can do away without some of those systems, but they can't all be eliminated unless the reactor has low pressure operation (only possible with molten salt or molten metal cores).
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This project demonstrates why we don't have breeder reactors. There is no money, no-one wants to invest. The demand just isn't there, with several countries moving away from nuclear or looking likely to downsize. The financial risks are huge.
Other types of reactor all have their own issues, which further add to the financial risk investors are looking at. On the other hand you have renewables that are in high demand, where the market place is still open for people to come in and take a share, and where the
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This project demonstrates why we don't have breeder reactors.
Vladimir, he says: "What do you mean 'we', Amerikanski scum?" [wikipedia.org]
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I'm not disagreeing with you on the basic premises; we should be moving the tech forward. You need to stop worrying about the pressurized system though, and stop using that as a reason to not build more nuclear plants. Conventional fossil fuel plants (modern ones) operate at higher pressures and temperatures than nuclear power plants, where they have traditionally maintained lower temperatures, intentionally, because of the limitations of the zirconium cladding. The risk of failure of the pressurized sys
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It's not a reason not to build them. I would live at the border fence of an AP1000/ESBWR/new CANDU site without issue.
The real concert is Gen II reactors on areas with serious tectonic activity. Even tornadoes / hurricanes are not an issue for old reactors.
But Westinghouse / GE / Toshiba / Hitachi are investing zero on molten salt reactors, with GE / Hitachi insisting on the S-PRISM concept with it's big issue on sodium coolant fires.
Huge conflict of interest between the current solid fuel reactor business
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When will this people learn ?
When you demo your brilliant design that doesn't suffer from those problems, and from all the problems that your panacea has. Let me know when you schedule your presentation, thanks.
Um, we already have. EBR-II [wikipedia.org] started in 1965 [youtube.com], and it worked perfectly for 30 years until it was shut down by Clinton in 1995.
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his comment may or may not be stupid, but its anonymity has nothing to do with it.
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AC posts ignorance and expects everyone to worship him. You didn't contribute anything but negativity to the discussion. You didn't even give a reason why his comment wouldn't work. You gave us nothing.
At least the OP had some interesting points that could be worth looking up on Google at the least that helped educate me a little.
You, gave me about as much information as your average (no, your below-average) politician.
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what point?
seriously, you contributed nothing. If you were going to add to the conversation, you would have.
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They're terrible engineering designs for some major reasons.
You have an exceptionally radioactive LIQUID in normal operation. Every nuclear plant is a reprocessing plant. Historically reprocessing, meaning chemical engineering of complex radioactive caustic liquids was always the nastiest, ugliest and messiest part.
I do trust locals to run a solid-state reactor if there's a powerful safety regulator permanently on site whose paycheck does not depend on profitability, e.g. somebody who came from the nuclea
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Most of the breeder reactors I've read about have been based on the EBR I and II. In that case they are using a metal, rather than the typical oxide, fuel which means that pyroprocessing can be used instead of the horendously messy aqueous process you are talking about.
The EBR II was demonstrated to be passively safe. That is they performed tests that demonstrated what would happen in a full power loss or circulatory system failure. In all cases the reactor shut down the nuclear reaction safely and without
That's because there's already one on the market (Score:5, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Molten Salt's coming. (Score:5, Interesting)
India is decades away. Perhaps China might make it happen before 2030. A big part of China and India's effort is an academic / jobs program. I'm not saying they are incompetent, but they are not results focused. I'm hoping to seeing the first molten salt reactor circa 2025, in commercial operation. For now I'm going out on a limb, but a few years we'll know the credibility of that project with more certainty.
I'm talking about Terrestrial Energy Inc of Canada, Dr. David LeBlanc brainchild. His molten salt presentations are the most end goal oriented ones, focusing very clearly on getting to the market instead of selling an optimal idea. Giving up many optional features for minimizing certification issues to the greatest extent possible. Focusing on the minimum design that will be usable with an order of magnitude better fuel burnup, safety, simplicity and cost than typical large water cooled reactors. The full LFTR design is a great idea, filled with design challenges and regulatory issues along the way. Dr LeBlanc design is derived from the ORNL DMSR. LFTR design as advocated by FLiBe energy is on the other end of the spectrum.
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India is has almost completed construction of what you say is "decades away".
Are you talking about the PFR at Kalpakkam [wikipedia.org]?
Or the AHWR at Bhabha [wikipedia.org]?
Because neither of them is a molten salt reactor.
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Both projects are solid oxide fuel. One Heavy Water Thermal, one Sodium Fast reactor.
Running Thorium on water / heavy water cooled reactors in solid fuel format gives marginal benefits over uranium fuel. And it's nothing new. The Shipping Port reactor ran it's last fuel load using Thorium. That was decades ago.
It's mostly interesting for countries that have little uranium reserves and ample thorium ones.
But it still keeps using very little of the mined nuclear materials, since fuel swells with noble gas fis
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That's an oft-repeated myth. The fact is that India has just recently entered Phase II of their 3-stage nuclear program (spanning at least a century in total).
"According to replies given in Q&A in the Indian Parliament on two separate occasions, 19 August 2010 and 21 March 2012, large scale thorium deployment is only to be expected '3 – 4 decades after the commercial operation of fast breeder reactors with short doubling time'.[66][31] Full exploitation of India’s domestic thorium reserves w
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Molten Salt's coming. Patented to the hilt by the worlds biggest patent troll.
Given the work China and India are doing on molten-salt Thorium cycle reactors, I can't see why anyone would spend another dime on a pressurized water reactor again.
Given the patent portfolio that Nathan Mordvold holds on molten-salt Thorium cycle reactors, I can't see why anyone can afford to spend another minute thinking that thorium is going to be economic.
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Re:Molten Salt's coming. (Score:4, Insightful)
Because there are engineering designs for pressurized water reactors which work and decades of experience making them, and molten-salt cycle reactors intrinsically dissolve large amounts of high-level waste in a liquid in normal operation---(water soluble too sometimes)---and make every nuclear plant also a horrifyingly nasty radioactive reprocessing plant.
I'm for fission (not because it's great but because coal and global warming are much worse), but I like my megacuries encased in zirconium, and very solid.
Re:Molten Salt's coming. (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't see why anyone would spend another dime on a pressurized water reactor again.
Because so far no-one has managed to demonstrate a successful commercial scale thorium reactor. All the research ones have run into severe problems. There are still many technical problems to be solved, which will require a lot of money. The only people willing to take on that kind of risk are governments looking to build a nuclear industry and research base from scratch, i.e. China and India.
Even if China or India do demonstrate a working design don't expect to see it in the US any time soon. One of the biggest problems is decommissioning a highly contaminated reactor at the end of its life, and so far it looks like they are saying they will figure that out "later". Good luck getting that past any other country's regulator.
Re:Molten Salt's coming. (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't see why anyone would spend another dime on a pressurized water reactor again.
Because so far no-one has managed to demonstrate a successful commercial scale thorium reactor.
Lots of people seem to think that all thorium reactors are molten salt.
No.
People are planning/have already tried burning Thorium in:
Pebble bed reactors
CANDU
Sodium cooled breeders
PWR's
BWR's
Accelerator driven reactors...
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Sure, but name one in commercial operation by a for-profit company (because the US would never stand for the government doing it) that uses Thorium as its primary fuel, and gets all the purported benefits that are often mentioned on Slashdot like being impossible to melt down.
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Small is silly (Score:2)
Direct money toward large nuclear reactors!
Who the hell wants a ton of little reactors all over the place that when they run out of fuel we basically bury it and hope no one stumbles upon it.
Stick with the big plants, just use the new safer designs and BUILD them. This was a complete waste of money. This idea was never going to fly and still won't. As a strong proponent of nuclear power, I don't even like this idea (due to the waste left behind.)
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They are wanted for two reasons.
1. small is cheaper. You can build a 100MW reactor for much less than you can build a 1500MW. It costs less to refuel. When it does go down for maintenance or repairs, it costs less to replace the power it was producing (the scale of the backup plant capacity is smaller). We are having problems getting the high cost 1500MW plants built; so, by making the cost an order of magnitude lower, it is hoped we can get the industry moving forward again
2. Cost savings, consistenc
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20 miles from me are 3 incomplete reactors (Score:2)
They were in a rush to get them up, a popular story was the critical job of building the dome to one of them, 24 hour round the clock overtime to gold plate that puppy. A friend of mine was studying to operate the reactors when in class they were told to grab their stuff as they no longer had a job and don't let the door swing into you on the way out. The dome was later cut up and sold as salvage, as was the rest of the equipment used.
"Energy Northwest (formerly Washington Public Power Supply System) is a United States public power joint operating agency formed by State law in 1957 to produce at-cost power for Northwest utilities. Headquartered in Richland, Washington, the WPPSS became commonly known as "Whoops" due to over-commitment to nuclear power in the 1970s which brought about financial collapse and the second largest municipal bond default in U.S. history."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... [wikipedia.org]
A lot of people got hurt over that one.
Small reactors (Score:2)
Some small nuclear reactors can be quite stable and run for a long time...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Too Little, Too Late (Score:5, Insightful)
Solar panels have dropped in price by 65% in the last two years. They're expecting another 60% price drop by 2020, and efficiency isn't being sacrificed - it's only getting better, with 25% being achieved in the lab now. Research is also much cheaper - researchers ask for grants such as $5 million or $15 million, not the $1 billion mentioned in the article.
Combine wind farms, hydro power, solar thermal, and the recent improvements with storing energy, both as potential energy and in batteries, and I doubt any one will want to invest in "small" nuclear reactors, either now or 10 years from now. Solar panels aren't the fix for everything, but they will make it uneconomical to put in place big, expensive nuclear reactors, which are only small and cheap by comparison to even bigger ones.
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Regarding capacity factors and storage, there's a study from University of Delaware [udel.edu] that concludes:
Renewable energy could fully power a large electric grid 99.9 percent of the time by 2030 at costs comparable to today’s electricity expenses, according to new research by the University of Delaware and Delaware Technical Community College.
If you're basing your remarks on capacity factors numbers from older tech, keep in mind that these are improving, e.g. offshore wind can easily have capacity factors of 50-55%.
But it's true it requires investments, and it probably won't happen until old plants need to be scrapped anyway.
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That study (which I just skimmed, I'll read it in more detail tonight) says that to supply 72GW of peak electrical demand with 99.9% reliability we would have to build 230GW of wind and solar capacity and build an energy storage system (they suggested hydrogen) of 51GW peak capacity (2.47GWh). For the times the renewables cannot meet demand, the study calls for maintaining 28.3 GW of fossil fuel plants and supporting infrastructure available, which is nearly the entire 31.5GW average load for PJM's custome
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Solar panels have dropped in price by 65% in the last two years. They're expecting another 60% price drop by 2020, and efficiency isn't being sacrificed - it's only getting better, with 25% being achieved in the lab now
And they only generate power about 6 hours a day and not at peak need times. BTW peak need is between 5 and 7 pm not at solar noon.
PVs are not the problem storage is and that is not improving anywhere near as fast. Throw in clouds, rain, and or snow and you should see the issue.
Nuclear makes
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With ~150,000 megatons(*) worth of fission byproducts lying about, waiting for the next accident/natural disaster/Loss of cooling/war to be released into biosphere. The last thing we need, to is increase that inventory above the ~5,500 megatons we currently are producing each year.
(*)Note: Assumes Megaton's worth of fission isotopes is created for every 0.4tWh of electricity produced by a NPP, No accounting for decay since much of the radioactive food chain isotopes, (Internal radiators, Sr-90, Cs-134,
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"With ~150,000 megatons(*) worth of fission byproducts lying about, waiting for the next accident/natural disaster/Loss of cooling/war to be released into biosphere. The last thing we need, to is increase that inventory above the ~5,500 megatons we currently are producing each year."
Really? what the heck are you talking about? Just what unit of measure are you using? Megatons? There is are not 150 billion tons of spent fuel rods?
And no reactor has 80 million tons of fuel
" The addition of those radio-isotope
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"And no reactor has 80 million tons of fuel" Bzzzt.. Just in you're totally clueless.. The Megaton's refers to Fission Bomb yield equivalent..
The worlds total N-weapon arsenal is less than a few thousand Megatons of Fission byproduct (bomb equivalence), if they were all to be detonated in one day, Note: Modern N-weapon designs are ~50%fission(dirty)/~50% fusion(relatively clean), And only a small fraction is ready to deploy in an initial exchange.
Meanwhile more than 150 times that amount resides insi
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"The Megaton's refers to Fission Bomb yield equivalent.."
Buzzzzz....Just in you are an idiot.
The radioisotope yield of a bomb is variable. A one megaton bomb detonated at the surface will produce a much larger yield of fallout than one detonated at 20,000 meters. Also different bombs have different yields of fallout based on design.
": Modern N-weapon designs are ~50%fission(dirty)/~50% fusion(relatively clean), And only a small fraction is ready to deploy in an initial exchange."
Ahnn no. I suggest you rese
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Less than 25% of US spent fuel(as of 2009) has been dry cask'd.. Most fuel (world wide) remains in common spent fuel pools.
Fukushima on 3/11/2011 had a total dry storage capacity of 408 fuel assemblies for all six reactors, verses capacity for over ~10000 fuel assemblies(~75% full) in seven spent fuel pools, with another 2000 to 3000 assemblies still inside the reactors.
Thus Fukishima's Dry casked storage represents less than 5% of total storage.. But even dry casked storage(requires maintenance) and tha
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"You have also not mentioned your ASTRONOMICAL error claiming 60 million deaths from fall out." Why should I? I included a referenced click able link, that's a lot more credible than your claims. No error on my part, just the unvarnished truth that you don't want to admit exists.
Nuclear power always has been a fools bargain, their will be no winners..
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How much of that is due to Chinese dumping?
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> How much of that is due to Chinese dumping?
About 10%. The real driver is the almost zero cost of pSi, who's market price is completely determined by supply/demand. Additional supply is coming on this year, everyone's expecting widespread availability in retail in the 50 to 60 cent range. To put this in perspective, in spite of PV being installed at record rates last year, the total amount of cash used to do it fell about 10%.
> efficiency isn't being sacrificed - it's only getting better, with 25% be
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pSi isn't an element, or a chemical... so, it sounds like you're spouting crap you don't even understand.
And this is proof positive of your lack of a clue. The situation in Germany exists because of a seriously distor
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It's all about interest rates, believe it or not. Nuclear plants simply take too long to build. You have to pay for years and years of interest before you get any income. In contrast, PV systems in Germany take 2 weeks, end to end, on average. The output may be lower, but the ROI kicks ass.
And that is the advantage of mPower, which can set up in under 2 years.
Nuclear power is not affordable (Score:3)
Another instance showing the high costs and low returns of nuclear power. Nuclear power is not affordable. It gets more expensive over time. The "learning curve" is negative. It relies on massive government subsidies and has serious unsolved problems with waste.
OTOH, solar and wind are getting cheaper and are now less expensive than nuclear.
It just doesn't make sense to invest in nuclear when solar and wind are cheaper, have fewer problems and are already scaling rapidly.
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New Designs Not Required... (Score:2)
These small reactors already are designed and in production:
The S6W and its line of small [wikipedia.org] reactors are reliable and safe. The rector compartment on a typical submarine is about 30' in diameter and 30' in length.
These generate ~ 50 Thermal Megawatts which translate into about 40,000 horse power or about 29 megawatts of electricity.
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My memory is really fading.. The S6g provided ~ 148 thermal megawatts which is ~ 45 megawatts of electricity. Although the Rankine cycle is pretty much fixed you can build more efficient turbines and steam generators that do not have to exist in the very tight confines of a submarine.
A bunch of idiots (Score:2)
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suitcases that generate megawatts of Xrays "FOR BIRD WATCHING."
Better idea: sell them to the DHS, so law enforcement vehicles can be equipped with them in order to Xray all vehicles on the street looking for suspicious materials
Re:I have a project (Score:4, Insightful)
So you hate nuclear power and have no interest in properly learning about it, instead taking your knowledge from Hollywood sensationalization of radioactivity and nuclear power. We find those by the bucket nowadays. The difference is most don't dare speak, because the aren't sure. Those that actually think they got it right are the most dangerous.
Here is a source for serious information on nuclear power, without any BS:
https://class.coursera.org/nuc... [coursera.org]
Re:I have a project (Score:5, Informative)
There is no such thing as a non-radiactive tritium reactor. That is a fact and a law of physics.
There is also no such thing as a non-radioactive sandwich, that's a fact and law of physics. (C-14 [wikipedia.org] for instance.) What has that got to do with anything? That you use scare words like "unbelievably dangerous", "terrorists" and "suicidally stupid" only makes you seem less informed. You are just a greenpeace troll. Nothing to see here.
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You are just a greenpeace troll
Not everyone that wanted to keep the Japanese and Norwegians from slaughtering sentient marine mammals or the French from irradiating Polynesian atolls prefers coal, oil and ecologically-disruptive hydropower to responsible nuclear technology (thorium-salt and pebble-bed designs come to mind)... nor should you even assume that they're all "bleeding heart left-wingers who want the government to save us" so you can take your blatant generalizations and over-used memes and stick them back where they clearly ca
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The point is radioactive != dangerous. Just as projectile != lethal weapon.
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Sure radioactive means dangerous, but dangerous != harmful. There is always risk. Gasoline is dangerous, you handle it carelessly and you can get a big explosion. Refineries are dangerous. Coal mines are dangerous, etc. The question is not "is it dangerous", but how dangerous is it? How can we mitigate risk? Is it worth the risk?
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Fair point.
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The positive side of that is that people are already shipping expensive rockets to terrorists and they just lay them down on bits of wood to launch instead of sticking them in tubes - thus making them less accurate than a rocket from the mid 1800s. What would such a person do with plutonium? The cleanup of a satellite crash in Canada showed how easy it would be to deal with a "dirty bomb" so that's not much of a problem.
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Chernobyl had the exact same effect of a very large dirty bomb. Probably at least 10 times the dirty bomb size predicted by likely terrorist scenarios. So far it killed around 100 people and caused a few thousand cancers.
Far from the scenarios of tens of thousands of deaths. Ok, so Chernobyl wasn't in Moscow or NYC, but the Green Peace alarmists managed to predict one million deaths.
Until nuclear regulatory agencies accept logical arguments that radiation safety standards are way too stringent it will lead
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Re:I have a project (Score:5, Insightful)
Alone the thyroid treated children in germany are already far over 10,000.
Given that the thyroid cancer rate in the US (for example) seems to be about 13 per 100,000 people year and the population of Germany is about 81 million we'd expect about 10,530 thyroid cancer cases in Germany per year.
So 10,000 cases in children since 1986 is pretty damn low.
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That where ten thousand children in the first few years after the accident. Not in total over the last 30 years. And I did not mean german children but ukrainian and russian that got treated in Germany (for free, well payed by help organizations)
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You've gotta admit that your initial comment wasn't very clear. "thyroid treated children in germany".
It's well known that the Soviet authorities fucked up by not issuing iodine tablets in the days immediately following the accident (as iodine 131 has a half life of 8 days you better get on the job fast. Poland did and saw no increase in thyroid cancer after the accident [about.com]).
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Chernobyl Death Toll: 985,000, Mostly from Cancer [globalresearch.ca] and still counting as of (April 26, 2010) from just 6 Megaton's worth of Fission Byproduct release into the biiosphere.
Imagine what would happen if their was a significant release of the 150,000 Megatons of Fission Byproducts humanity has lying about at/in/near NPP's!
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WHO, IAEA, NIH, et al.. haven't refuted anything. The book was a compilation of several hundred scientific papers written in the appropriate non-english languages authors covering the affected area and population.
Nobody of any scientific reputation outside of those incestuous organizations agrees with any of the conclusions.
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Germany alone treated around 10k children in the years after the catastrophe, I'm pretty sure Switzerland and Italy did the same. That can easy be googled.
Regarding clean up workers: in the first weeks they died to the hundreds every day. No idea why today every one has forgotten that. Unofficial death counts go up to a million, most russians or ukrainians I know, know one or more people who died and they unisono say that minimum 100,000 people died but it might be far more.
Considering the amount of radiati
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This is nonsense. Treating 10k children by giving them prophylactic iodine and periodically checking thyroids is not treating them for cancer. Several hundred children in the surrounding area did get thyroid cancer based on the result I just re-read. Almost all of them responded to treatment (they did not die).
Hundreds did not die daily in the cleanup. A million people did not die in the immediate aftermath. The amount of radioactive material released was large; the "liquidators" received an average
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You mix up precautions with actual cancer.
And the rest of you post shows: you never eber tried to get an educated opinion.
http://www.kinder-v-tschernoby... [kinder-v-tschernobyl.de]
http://www.erftstadt-hilfe-tsc... [erftstadt-...ernobyl.de]
http://www.tschernobyl-kinder.... [tschernobyl-kinder.info]
Perhaps you like to put this one into google translate: http://www.sueddeutsche.de/wis... [sueddeutsche.de]
http://www.tschernobyl-kinder.... [tschernobyl-kinder.de]
http://ukrainischekinderkrebsh... [ukrainisch...bshilfe.de]
http://www.sos-kinderdoerfer.d... [sos-kinderdoerfer.de]
I'm to lazy to make a detailed search for the happenings from 1986 till 1995 ... you can do that your s
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"unbelievably dangerous and radioactive fuel"
OMG, and they dig it up out of the ground!!!! Who put it there, that's what I want to know. Which bastard put this unbelievably dangerous rock under my feet!?!?!?!! We need to know so we can sue them for the irreparable damage to the environment they caused.
oh wait...
4th generation reactors help clean up the mess ... (Score:2)
Relative to current nuclear power plant technology, the claimed benefits for 4th generation reactors include:
Nuclear waste that remains radioactive for a few centuries instead of millennia
100-300 times more energy yield from the same amount of nuclear fuel
The ability to consume existing nuclear waste in the production of electricity
Improved operating safety
http://en.wikipedia.org [wikipedia.org]
The "nuclear deniers" not "nuclear luddites" ... (Score:2)
... the nuclear-luddites ...
No, they are more accurately called the nuclear deniers. They are every bit as politically motivated and misrepresent science and make false scientific claims as the climate deniers, they are merely coming from the other political extreme.
NASA: Nuclear has saved millions of lives ... (Score:2, Informative)
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Since when was it ever about deaths? It's about money, and that is nuclear's Achilles' heel.
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That rant was all emotion-fuelled fallacies.
1) No-one was suggesting making "suitcase nukes" and sending them around, because nuclear bombs and reactors necessarily work differently. That's why the worst case scenario in a nuclear power plant is a meltdown, not a nuclear explosion.
2) Fukishima was not a nuclear disaster, it was a huge tsunami damaging a nuclear facility, complicating the existing natural disaster due to risks of radiation exposure. The technology being researched was not featured. There we
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A meltdown is bad enough. If serious enough, it means containment breach and release of radioactive contamination into the environment.
But actually we have living proof that meltdown is NOT the worst case scenario. I give you Chernobyl. You can have a steam and/or hydrogen gas explosion, scattering nuclear fuel rubble and other contamination all around. I give you Fukushima, another series of steam and/or hydrogen gas explosions involving scatter
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Not so much. Fukishima could have been a year old and it wouldn't have made much of a difference. Because it wasn't designed to handle the sort of disaster that was geologically common to the area.
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Re:I have a project (Score:5, Insightful)
Fukushima was a nuclear disaster. Even if you want to write off anything that happens because of Ma Nature, that doesn't matter since good management post-tsunami could have easily prevented the melt-down and massive release.
I'm sympathetic to the nuclear industry, but industry proponents really need to get a grip. Both Chernobyl and Fukushima were operated by morons. That just can't happen. It should never happen. There are plenty of smart folk, do what it takes to make sure one of them is in charge the next time a tsunami hits. Follow the damn regulations root out corruption. Bluster and sticking your head in the sand just isn't going to cut it anymore.
Re:I have a project (Score:4, Funny)
If you can figure out how to remove corruption and stupidity from governmental and/or corporate organizations you'd probably get Nobel Prizes in several categories.
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I agree, but the nuclear industry is blase about it. Putting uneducated pencil pushers in charge of nuclear reactors is not an unfortunate anomaly, it's business as usual.
Plant operators should be as well qualified as airline pilots. They should be in simulators half the time dealing with as wide a variety of fake disasters as can be imagined. They should be tested and tested and tested, and quietly retired when they can't hack it anymore.
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It would be easier if we followed the same principle as captains of ships used to have. Have an administrator, who is responsible for the running of the plant and the following of the regulations that pertain to that plant have to be on site during any emergencies. If he makes sure that people who know what they're doing are in charge of the right things, and he doesn't try to cut any corners, this won't be an overly onerous requirement. If he doesn't, well, he will get his termination notice from a doct
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> Fukushima was a nuclear disaster
Slight correction:
Fukushima was a *man made* nuclear disaster. None of what happened had to. All of the reactors were in the process of shutting down properly. Errors introduced after the fact were the cause of everything that followed. The tsunami *started* the problem, but it isn't the *cause* of what happened.
The *cause*, in the case of reactor 1 for instance, was incorrectly setting the IC valve contrary to very specific instructions in the manual. Had they not impro
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I agree, unfortunately I think that's the core of the best argument *against* nuclear reactors. We can make them safe so long as nobody does something incredibly stupid - but we're nowhere close to being able to prevent even smart people from occasionally doing incredibly stupid things.
Now, some of the self-regulating liquid salt reactors,etc. that have been proposed have potential - design the reactor so that the only possibility of a meltdown is intentional, ongoing sabotage and you have something that *
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You're mad as a hatter.
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Get rid of all subsidies and solar is in big trouble. Easy to talk about competition while you are enjoying huge subsidies. Yes, other forms of electricity gets subsidies too. I would be fine with removing every single subsidy from just coal and letting the market take its course.
You would see a surge in nuclear power projects, because solar isn't baseload and baseload is here to stay.
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It has something to do with public negative perception about nuclear power, but it isn't the real driving force. The reason the NRC has become itself anti nuclear is far more related to the millions US politicians gets from fossil fuel lobbies instead. Too many presidents have appointed people to the NRC that are committed to making nuclear power as expensive as possible. Plus it's not like the FAA is much better, I heard a saying that summarizes the FAA pretty darn well "We're not happy until you're unhapp