Westinghouse Unveils Small Modular Nuclear Reactor (reuters.com) 183
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: U.S. company Westinghouse unveiled plans on Thursday for a small modular reactor to generate virtually emissions-free electricity that could replace coal plants or power water desalinization and other industries. Rita Baranwal, the Westinghouse Electricity Co's top technology officer, said the reactor, dubbed AP300 for its planned 300 Megawatt capacity, will not use special fuels or liquid metal coolants unlike some other next-generation reactors. It will be a smaller version of its AP1000 reactor, several of which are operating in China, and which are ramping up in Georgia at the Vogtle plant, after years of delay and billions of dollars over budget.
Despite hurdles for new nuclear, Baranwal was confident. "We've kept it simple, designed it on demonstrated and licensed technology, and I think that's one of the advantages that we have with this concept," she told Reuters in an interview. Westinghouse, owned by Brookfield Business Partners, plans to start constructing the reactor by 2030 and have it running by 2033. So far the design for only one SMR, planned by NuScale Power, has been approved by U.S. regulators and it still needs permits.
Westinghouse did not reveal how much the first reactor would cost, but said later units would cost about $1 billion. The company, based in western Pennsylvania, has had informal talks with parties in neighboring states Ohio and West Virginia about the potential building of AP300s at former coal plants. Westinghouse also hopes to sell reactors to countries in eastern Europe, even though nuclear power critics have expressed concerns that developers and governments should think carefully before building new nuclear plants anywhere near the region. They noted that Russia took the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine, the site of repeated shelling.
Despite hurdles for new nuclear, Baranwal was confident. "We've kept it simple, designed it on demonstrated and licensed technology, and I think that's one of the advantages that we have with this concept," she told Reuters in an interview. Westinghouse, owned by Brookfield Business Partners, plans to start constructing the reactor by 2030 and have it running by 2033. So far the design for only one SMR, planned by NuScale Power, has been approved by U.S. regulators and it still needs permits.
Westinghouse did not reveal how much the first reactor would cost, but said later units would cost about $1 billion. The company, based in western Pennsylvania, has had informal talks with parties in neighboring states Ohio and West Virginia about the potential building of AP300s at former coal plants. Westinghouse also hopes to sell reactors to countries in eastern Europe, even though nuclear power critics have expressed concerns that developers and governments should think carefully before building new nuclear plants anywhere near the region. They noted that Russia took the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine, the site of repeated shelling.
At last! NNS is attainable! (Score:2)
I'm going to go get mine now! [youtube.com]
No welfare (Score:2)
Re:No welfare (Score:5, Interesting)
There are massive subsidies for fossil fuels as well as renewables. Let's do nuclear too.
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Wind is now subsidy free in Europe. Offshore and onshore.
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Hah
Government-owned nukes won't be subject to the same safety regulations as private ones. They'll just cover up mishaps and move right along, nothing to see here! See Hanford etc.
Honestly if gov't can't run a plant safely (Score:4, Informative)
But again, if gov't can't run a safe nuclear power plant, nobody can. So then nuclear is not a viable option.
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Austerity will happen again, and then?
Solar & wind are fine for our needs (Score:2)
But I like how you put that in a list of things I said to make it sound like I said it. Nice Rhetorical trick. Are you a professional troll or do you just do it so much that you've learned these tricks on your own?
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It's fundamantally dishonest to drag Hanford into the discussion on nuclear power. It was a first gen weapons manufacturing plant.
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Yeah... You might want to read a few books about one Admiral Hyman G Rickover and the operational records of his reactors; and then reconsider the BS you just wrote.
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Economic, not physical, viability (Score:2)
Re:Economic, not physical, viability (Score:5, Interesting)
Economics are the key.
On the other side small reactors are easier to site, they need less cooling water for one example. They are easier to control, the negative temperature coefficient is larger because the surface area to volume ration is larger, and emergency cooling is easier, less total heat to dump.
The Navy ran S5W reactor plants for decades, then moved to the twice as big S6G for more decades. The S5G and S8G reactors can run at low power on natural circulation, so a whole group of problems from loss of flow don't happen as long as gravity still works. Small reactors do have a long history.
Not everything follows the usual scaling rules used in chemical engineering that dictates that one big one is cheaper than two little ones.
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SMRs only need less cooling water because they produce less power. While it's true that they require a cooling pool rather than a constant supply of water from a river or the sea, if you want to match the output of traditional reactors you need a lot of pools.
They aren't just random swimming pools either, they have to be extremely resilient and constantly monitored. If they leak the reactor can melt down. Not ideal in parts of the world that experience earthquakes, for example.
I'm sceptical that in the end
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The pool of water is to protect the reactor, not to protect the lives of people. If the water is lost then the reactor could melt down but a meltdown does not mean radiation or material escapes containment. A meltdown will be expensive so they will want to take reasonable measures to prevent it. If this is a problem in earthquake prone areas then they will have to take measures to protect against that. We build things in places that get earthquakes, things that could cause considerable loss of life if t
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Exactly, they need to build a large containment building for each reactor and its pool. Since each reactor only produces a few hundreds of megawatts max, it's suddenly looking pretty expensive.
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Not everything follows the usual scaling rules used in chemical engineering that dictates that one big one is cheaper than two little ones.
Except big ones are cheaper than two little ones. Best estimates so far for SMRs have put them at a cost that is anywhere from 5x to 20x that of a large scale nuclear facility in per MWh generated terms.
Even here you're talking about reactors significantly larger in terms of thermal output than the ones you're comparing them to.
Westinghouse is quoting a mythical $1bn for an as yet to be optimised / economies of scaled production run of these 300W reactors.
This is the same Westinghouse that quoted $6bn for 2
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Except big ones are cheaper than two little ones. Best estimates so far for SMRs have put them at a cost that is anywhere from 5x to 20x that of a large scale nuclear facility in per MWh generated terms.
Well, theoretically. As we've seen, big projects (not just nukes) tend to run over budget and time. Smaller projects are easier to manage and account for contingencies. When building many identical reactors you can also learn from the process and improve it, vs making one huge one per decade.
China is building SMRs now. Let's build a few dozen and see how that goes.
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Not everything follows the usual scaling rules used in chemical engineering that dictates that one big one is cheaper than two little ones.
Nuclear reactors absolutely do, and it has nothing to do with chemical engineering. It has to do with inspection costs, site design costs, per-unit fueling costs, site security costs, and per-unit decommissioning costs (if you don't plan and account for the full cradle to grave lifespan, you are doing it wrong.) It doesn't cost only 1/3 as much to weld and inspect a pipe that carries only 1/3 as much coolant. It probably costs 2/3 as much. By making the same shitty design smaller, they're going to have all
If only... (Score:2, Insightful)
If only we would build these at the same pace that wind and solar plantations get built, we wouldn't have an electricity supply problem.
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If we could build these at the same *cost* that wind and solar plantations get built we wouldn't have the problem. The problem with pace is largely related to the desire of the product. The reason the nuclear industry is in the state that it is is because they largely didn't have customers who instead opted for cheaper solutions which left the industry in tatters.
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This SMR in TFS is literally twice as expensive per MWh as what Westinghouse has quoted for an AP1000. And that $1bn is some mythical future endgame, not the cost for today's technology. Today's cost from companies who have actually been awarded contracts for SMRs have come in between 4x and 10x that of classical nuclear power, which itself ranges anywhere from LOL to ROFL more expensive than wind and solar.
Your understanding of nuclear is laughable. Your understanding of SMR outright made my cry and my bel
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We need different kinds of reactors for nuclear to be even a medium-term solution to our hunger for more electricity.
Global readily available uranium sources will be tapped out by the end of the century at current consumption rates and their typical use scenarios.
We're still using gasoline at scale after a century, and we're looking to replace it with something that we currently expect will run out in less than a human lifetime. That seems pretty short sighted.
We shouldn't build any more traditional nuclea
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Global readily available uranium sources will be tapped out by the end of the century at current consumption rates and their typical use scenarios.
This sort of problem almost never turns out to actually be a problem. As readily-available sources decline, the price rises and other sources are identified and techniques for exploiting them invented. Very often, this results in greater supply and lower price than before we approached depletion. In this case, for example, we could ultimately fall back on extracting uranium from seawater. Right now, our methods for doing cost orders of magnitude more than mining it... but the cost of fuel is negligible for
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50 year ago we had 50 years of available oil reserves. Today, we still have 50 years of available oil reserves. 50 years from now, we will still have 50 years of available oil reserves. That is how far ahead it is practical to look, not how much is actually left.
I can just see ... (Score:2, Funny)
Small? (Score:2)
I expected a somewhat transportable item, not another building.
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That is the nuclear industry for you: Lying when they open their mouths.
Modular (Score:2)
Modular means the main reactor components can be mass-produced and shipped to the site, unlike current, meaning 1970's produced, reactors that are all assembled on-site.
You are probably thinking of micro-reactors, which are self-contained and roughly the size of a small passenger bus. There are a few of those designs getting ready for deployment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Nuclear (Score:2)
1 solar/wind watt does not equal 1 nuclear/gas/coal watt.
You have to normalize the numbers. For wind/solar that depends on location.
Capacity factor is used. Nuclear averages about 93%, in the lower 48 USA average solar is 24.7%, Massachusetts is 15.6%, in Germany about 11.1%. Canada is even lower. America is also massively different, solar in the southwest is going be better than northeast.
So for x watts of generation, nuclear needs 1.0753x watts, solar needs 4.04x watts solar in Germany needs 9.009x watts,
Re: Nuclear (Score:2)
Do you have anything specific that you disagree on, because I would like to hear? Basically everything I've said is some combination of fairly straight forward, obvious, and/or referenced.
But, if your just another "alternative facts" nutjob like most anti-nuke people, I would rather not waste my time. Considering your response, I'm leaning heavily towards you falling into the bad faith actor category.
Hmm... doing some math. (Score:2)
Westinghouse did not reveal how much the first reactor would cost, but said later units would cost about $1 billion.
So... Elon could have bought 44 of these instead of Twitter. Don't know which would be the better investment, but am guessing the ROI would be about the same. :-)
Undoing mistaken mod. (Score:2)
Is this thing a SMR? (Score:2)
The information on this design is limited but I'd say this thing barely qualifies as an Small Modular Reactor (SMR) if it does at all. It just looks like a sized down reactor fully integrated into a building and looks to be far to large to transport. My understanding of SMRs is that they are designed to be small enough to be transported, so that the reactors can be manufactured in a separate main factory and then shipped to various power plants where they will be used along with other reactor modules at t
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> If it's anything close to the current estimates of a nuclear reactor then it's already better than wind and solar.
Ummm, what?
The current estimated price of a nuclear reactor from Westinghouse is over $30 billion for 2x1117MW, or $13.25 per watt.
Currently, utility-scale PV in the US is being installed for $0.95 per watt. I'll add 4 hours of battery and use the US-fleet average 25% CF.
So now just type those values into the NREL LCOE calculator and we get 10.1 cents/kWh for nuclear and 4.6 cents/kWh for P
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The current estimated price of a nuclear reactor from Westinghouse is over $30 billion for 2x1117MW, or $13.25 per watt.
Currently, utility-scale PV in the US is being installed for $0.95 per watt. I'll add 4 hours of battery and use the US-fleet average 25% CF.
So now just type those values into the NREL LCOE calculator and we get 10.1 cents/kWh for nuclear and 4.6 cents/kWh for PV.
So, again, what?
The thing is that these are fantasy numbers. Nobody has 4 hours of storage, let alone days of storage that are actually necessary for a renewable grid. If you don't have days worth of storage, you still need fossil for firming, at which point you're not achieving net-zero emissions not to mention all the capex you have idling.
The Lazard's LCOE analysis that constantly got quoted has been updated with thees firming costs and it's much more competitive than it looks like if you just ignore the inconvenient pa
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Who cares if the sun doesn't shine at night
They've also apparently never heard of transformation of energy. No reason that the unused sunlight during the day cannot be:
1. Used to pump water uphill, release it downhill to create power
2. Store electrical power in batteries
3. Store the thermal energy in a liquid
4. Store the power in kinetic energy such as a flywheel
Every time I head the phrase "You can't watch football because the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing!" I just thought how much of a fool
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They've also apparently never heard of transformation of energy. No reason that the unused sunlight during the day cannot be:
1. Used to pump water uphill, release it downhill to create power
2. Store electrical power in batteries
3. Store the thermal energy in a liquid
4. Store the power in kinetic energy such as a flywheel
No, everyone has heard of it. But this shit isn't free and always gets excluded from the conversation in order to make it convenient.
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No, it is great. But the lower costs that always gets cited for the great ROI and the reason to build PV/wind is highly misleading.
Re: So what's the ROI? (Score:2)
1 solar/wind watt does not equal 1 nuclear/gas/coal watt.
You have to normalize the numbers. For wind/solar that depends on location.
Capacity factor is used. Nuclear averages about 93%, in the lower 48 USA average solar is 24.7%, Massachusetts is 15.6%, in Germany about 11.1%. Canada is even lower. America is also massively different, solar in the southwest is going be better than northeast.
So for x watts of generation, nuclear needs 1.0753x watts, solar needs 4.04x watts solar in Germany needs 9.009x watts,
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Bravo! well put!
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Your numbers fail because you are equating one watt at a 25% capacity factor to one watt at 90% capacity factor. We'd have to build out 3x or 4x more solar in watts to get the same annual energy output per watt of nuclear fission.
We'd likely use storage with nuclear fission to manage the peaks and valleys of demand, that means not needing to overbuild as much nuclear generating capacity. This is helpful if we assume energy storage is more costly than an overbuild of generating capacity, an assumption that
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To be fair, *estimated* at one billion with the as-yet-unbuilt design fresh from the drawing board. That's almost always the most favorable view of costs for an idea from that point onward.
Safety isn't what's holding back the nuclear industry; it's economics. So a new reactor design that didn't look, on the drawing board, dramatically cheaper and faster to build would be pointless. If anything, it's not the dollar figure, but the lead time that's a the killer. A conventional light water reactor takes ove
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Safety isn't what's holding back the nuclear industry; it's economics. ... It's an extremely high risk bet on the future price of electricty, and with all high risk investments you have to discount your expected return.
I think you're right that it's a matter of economics (assuming that this thing can be built and that it will work). First, there's economics for the buyers. 300MW for one year is 2.628 billion kWh, which at the $0.16/kWh average residential retail price comes out to $0.42 billion per year. There are obviously electrical loses and other derating factors, but those numbers suggest a break-even time of a few years, which is reasonable. Second, there's economics for Westinghouse. I don't know the engineeri
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> which at the $0.16/kWh average residential retail price comes out to $0.42 billion per year
Power plants are paid the wholesale rate, not the residential rate. The delta between the two is taken by the various levels of distribution.
The wholesale rate right now is about three cents. So that's 80 million a year, not 420 million, and that makes the payoff time well over a decade, not including financing or inflation, either of which would put you underwater.
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>>Safety isn't what's holding back the nuclear industry; it's economics.
To be honest it is fear that is having an economic impact, which is holding back the the industry
This fear comes from propaganda foisted on the public by "environmental groups", that receive money from the fossil fuel industry to hamstring a competitor, nuclear power [environmen...ogress.org]
It is hard to tell which anti-nuclear voices are shilling directly for fossil fuel industries, and which are just useful idiots repeating the lies while motivated by t
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> And this one is $1 billion
I clearly explained the difference between the base cost and the cost per watt, which requires that super-complex concept of "division", and you completely failed to understand it?
Yeah, this one costs much less, **because it generates much less power**.
Are you really *that* stupid?
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If you're spending $1B on something, I would hope that the labor building it wasn't cheap but rather well-skilled.
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And then there's Microsoft Windows which has definitely cost $1 billion, but clearly the people behind it aren't well-skilled.
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The people who programmed Windows were/are well skilled. It's the management that's incompetent.
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The chief architects of NT in its early days were astonishingly competent people.
I don't know whether the people in those chairs now are as competent, or not.
I do know they're not as scrupulous as I want them to be.
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Dave Cutler was an architect of VMS before taking over WNT development [wikipedia.org]
V +1 = W
M +1 = N
S +1 = T
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Except it was OS/2 NT development, first version to boot up was OS/2 v3 NT (or was that OS/2 NT v3), at which point due to the success of Win3.x compared to OS/2, they shifted to Win32 instead of the Presentation Manager and eventually released Win NT v3.1.
The agreement was IBM and MS would work on OS/2 v1, IBM would do v2.x (32 bit) and MS do v3+ (a rewrite). Last version of IBM OS/2 was internally 2.45, with Warp v3 actually internally 2.3
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Did you forget to switch accounts before replying to yourself?
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I thought just fine before I posted thanks. What I thought was that it looked like someone replying to themselves as if they were someone else, but they forgot to switch accounts to make it look like someone else agreed with them. Typically, when replying to yourself to add something, you should add a note explaining why you're replying to yourself such as "I forgot to post the link" or sometimes "post too long, had to split it into two parts". Don't get annoyed at me for your mistake.
Re: So what's the ROI? (Score:2)
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Ah, I see the identical user names weren't enough of a give away that they were adding something to their previous post. Don't blame others for your own lack of awareness.
??? It's right there in my post. I was very clearly aware that they were posting in reply to themselves with the same username. I'm not sure what confusion of ideas or lack of reading comprehension or just basic logic failure could lead you to believe that I didn't notice that both posts had the same username, but felt compelled about the poster not switching usernames. It's just very odd to reply to yourself like that. I was just commenting on the oddness and also on the fact that we do seem to have more t
Re: So what's the ROI? (Score:2)
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No, I forgot to post the link.
--sean-it-all
It's right there in their post. They made a mistake. Posting in reply to themselves was an attempt to fix the mistake. Since they did not include that information in the reply post, that compounds the mistake. I'm not saying this is some terrible thing, but they did make a mistake which made it look like someone having a conversation with themselves. It's not unusual to be questioned about that. I find it interesting that you, a completely different user, seem to feel so affected by this.
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Yeah, the video that fails econ 101.
He fails to account for inflation. If you consider it, the numbers invert.
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Do you have suggestions on videos, papers, or whatever, that can demonstrate the economics of nuclear fission vs. other energy sources and take inflation into account?
What you claim does seem plausible but I'd like to know just how much inflation impacts the numbers. If governments want to see that their citizens have ample supplies of energy, and inflation is somehow an obstacle to that, then perhaps there are some government policies that could be put in place to mitigate how inflation impacts energy sup
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Truly you have raised the discourse.
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Maybe instead of screeching you could address some of the issues.
TFA has no detail, but the design seems to be similar to the NuScale one. "Passive" safety, in that you don't need a water pump in the event of an accident. However, you do need a pool of water, which has to be protected just as well as a traditional reactor. It can't leak in the event of an earthquake or accident, and it has to be monitored.
They also don't mention the fuelling arrangement, but the NuScale design needs refuelling every 2 years
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In any case, they just announced plans to develop it, so it won't be ready for prototyping for many years to come, before they can apply for a licence. It won't be done in time to help us avoid catastrophic climate change.
2050, the target date for net zero, is 27 years away. That is lots of time no matter how hard you try and hold it up. Too slow was a lame excuse decades ago, and it still is.
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How many of these would be required? 300 MW with the world usage about 22 TWh (2019 number). Seems like a lot over the 15-20 years between getting a prototype, licensed, and ramping up production and 2050.
Most of these projects just seem to be an excuse to not do anything while the truth is that, yes they can help but shouldn't be depended on. Meanwhile this years fires have started, there's flooding in the west and the east and predictions are for a record hot summer. Maybe this year we can break 50C here
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Maybe instead of screeching you could address some of the issues.
Maybe instead of speading FUD you could actually educate yourself. To much to ask? Thought so. Get out your hip boots, here comes AmiMoJo's brand of bullshit.
You know, if we could harness the methane off the three main Trolls, we wouldn't need wind, solar, or nuclear. A endless supply of renewable, green power.
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Are you still bitching about used fuel(aka nuclear waste)? What the fuck is wrong with you? Used fuel has a total kill count of zero.
It's not exactly used fuel, but a control rod once literally impaled a guy and pinned him, through his groin and out his shoulder, to the ceiling. That's not an exact fit to what you were saying, but man does that one have repeat value!
In any case, the fragments from the reactor core at Chornobyl, which killed plenty of people, qualify as containing used fuel as far as I'm concerned. As for specifically spent fuel rods carefully stored at nuclear facilities, that's because they're spent fuel rods carefully
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The SL-1 accident was not a meltdown. It was a sudden criticality event that caused a steam explosion, but not a meltdown. It also was not caused by an experiment (not directly anyway, although the whole thing was an experiment). It was caused by the fact that the system required a manual control rod lift. Some suspect that it may have also been partly caused by a practical joke from one of the crew (the guy who ended up pinned to the ceiling) that startled the one doing the lifting (he had been known to in
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SL-1 was also not used fuel. So far you are 0 for 3 for the used fuel harming someone.
For someone with "algebra" in your name, you're not very good at arithmetic. You kind of actually have to address points other than SL-1 before you can claim I'm "0 for 3". Your reading comprehension could use some work as well. I was pretty clear that I was not including the one about SL-1 because it was really a precise fit to what was being said. Seriously though it was a guy being pinned to the ceiling through the groin by a control rod! Worth mentioning just for the ouch factor. There's also the one ab
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I don't recall numbering anything. I also don't remember insisting on the SL-1 event. I mean, I was pretty clear that it was caused by a control rod and _not_ by spent fuel. It was just a fatal nuclear accident worth mentioning because, you know, a guy got impaled through his groin to the ceiling!. Your failure to grasp this means that you fail at the Sesame "who are the people in your neighborhood" test.
As for the other two. You have not provided a valid reason why literal nuclear fuel that has been remove
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You named three examples. I added the numbers since you were unable to count to 3. Hence 0/3.
Used fuel (aka nuclear waste) has always been an excuse to continue burning fossil fuels. Yet zero people have died from it.
I think people who don't support nuclear energy are scumbags. The consequence of opposing nuclear has been climate change, 8.7 fossil fuel and biofuel deaths annually, and increased poverty.
You're the one who brought it up
No I didn't. I responded to another person who was bitching about used fuel (aka nuclear waste)
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You named three examples. I added the numbers since you were unable to count to 3. Hence 0/3.
Jeebus, aren't you clever? Counting to three. Your mommy must be so proud of you. Do you want to tell me how great you are because you can wipe your own butt? Your mommy says so. Of course, maybe when you grow up a little bit, you can also learn this tricky stuff like actually examining the things you're counting instead of just blindly counting. Maybe then you would notice that you never even properly addressed the Chornobyl core garbage containing spent fuel spewed over the landscape and picked up by Sovi
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WOW. I must have really hit nerve. Maybe you can find an example of someone who died from used fuel in order to shut me! You couldn't though. Which is why you had to resort to that long bs spiel which i'm not going to bother to read. The fact that you have to resort to ad hominem attacks and personal anecdotes about gamma detectors proves you are full of it.
tragedy is 0/3
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Used fuel has a total kill count of zero.
And how do you know that?
There is most certainly no statistics about it. And definitely the number is not zero.
Meanwhile the waste from fossil fuels and biofuels kill 8.7 million
I don't think you mean waste: you mean emissions. Small but significant difference.
The amount of people dying to *waste* from coal etc. can not be very high. Likely in the same range as nuclear waste: a few dozens every year in handling accidents.
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And how do you know that?
Because in 15 years of asking that question no one has been able to provide a single name. I cannot prove a negative, but all you need to do to prove me wrong and shut me (on this single point) is to provide a name. That's all you have to do. Name one person who has died from used fuel(weapons and medical waste don't count since they are not used fuel).
I don't think you mean waste: you mean emissions.
The waste from fossil fuels and biofuels is emissions.
the amount of people dying to *waste* from coal etc. can not be very high
Hundreds of thousands of people die worldwide from coal. I have seen estimates from 300,000-800,0
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Because in 15 years of asking that question no one has been able to provide a single name.
Because if a "random guy" dies in a nuke in Japan: his name is not disclosed.
If you think no one died to nuclear waste: you are an idiot.
If you know they did and you claim no one did: you are a lier.
Hundreds of thousands of people die worldwide from coal. I have seen estimates from 300,000-800,000 a year.
They might dies from pollution caused by burning coal or in mine accidents, but they most certainly do not die by
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Nuclear fuel kills people. It's not zero carbon.
No, it doesn't. Yes, it is.
There are plenty of safe and workable plans to recycle it and dispose of it safely and securely. Of course you know this but that doesn't make for good FUD does it?
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Always plans. Just a few more billion, this time it will work.
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Yes, yes "nuclear bad nuclear bad" *Yawn* Get some fresh bullshit, this is getting old.
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Nuclear fuel kills people.
Yes it does. All energy sources kill people. If anyone bothers to look up the statistics then they'd find that nuclear power kills the fewest people per unit of energy, and when compared to many other options this margin is quite large.
It's not zero carbon.
Nuclear fission is as close to zero carbon as wind or solar, and in many cases nuclear fission produces less carbon. If energy from wind and solar is considered "zero carbon" then nuclear fission fits that definition as well. Again, it takes a minimal amount of research t
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Okay, but, again... Nobody who matters actually cares. What's your plan to get them on board?
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The real problem is they don't include waste disposal and decommissioning in the costs. Of course, neither did the coal plants (or the gas plants), and solar and wind haven't really faced it yet, but they've ALL got this problem. It's just that nuclear has it really bad.
IIUC, the small nuclear plants have a much worse spent fuel problem than the larger plants.
N.B.: In principle the nuclear waste problem is easy. Pile it all up in one place with a waterproof underpinning, and just wait for it to stop be
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I'm not sure about 150, I might plug for 200. But yes, the problem is mainly political. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist, though.
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I love these stories about cutting edge nuclear power generation technology that will never see the light of day because it's nearly impossible to build a new nuclear power generation facility.
It is a Western problem. China is building lots of nuclear.
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It will die by autoerotic asphyxiation, choking on its own red tape and process.
Is that better or worse than asphyxiation from huffing your own fossil fuel fired farts?
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No gas, no hydro, no oil, no coal, and certainly none of that nuclear.
No inertia is going to make for sketchy grids.
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The numbers they give are pure fantasy. From existing experience, they may have something built in 2045, running in 2050 and finding out the design is bad by 2055. Then they start over. Say 2070 before they can deliver and 2100 before it becomes a real factor.
You are so depressing. Not a single fact based on science, you just complain and complain and complain. And complain a bit more.
You should really refrain from talking on topics you obviously have no knowledge about, because, as your sig says: The internet does not make people stupid. It just makes the stupid ones more obvious.
You really don't have to prove this sentence right every time you post, you know. We got it the first time we read one of your comment.
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Well, if you lie and lie and then lie some more, you will never say anything true. I get it, being delusional is far more comfortable.
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Not a single fact based on science, you just complain and complain and complain.
He has been whining about scary atoms since the 60s. Probably still wearing his tie-dye and flared jeans.