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2009-09-09 Fifth Column

String of Major Lawfare Defeats for Nuke Power Renaissance

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Posted by 3dc 2009-09-09 00:00|| || Front Page|| [11126 views ] Top

#1 Fine. Just wait until gas heads back towards $5/gallon then ask again.

Posted by gorb 2009-09-09 00:24|| 2009-09-09 00:24|| Front Page Top

#2 Absolutely moronic. And today China announced they are going to destroy 25 square miles of Mongolian habitat to install a solar power station.

We don't need to dump nuclear fuel. You build a reprocessing plant on the same site with the conventional reactors. You reprocess the fuel and re-use it. Once fuel comes in to the plant complex, it never leaves. What waste does result is about 5% of the volume and decays to save levels in 1% of the time of current "spent" fuel.

Absolutely moronic.

Posted by crosspatch 2009-09-09 02:21|| 2009-09-09 02:21|| Front Page Top

#3 Please use this link to view an alternative to the Nuclear Conundrum

Just think if politicians had brains not knee-jerk reactionism - What would the world be like ?

Posted by Bertie Angomoper4846 2009-09-09 05:10|| 2009-09-09 05:10|| Front Page Top

#4 I gather that much of the problem is because the industry insists on using the Palo Verde model, a behemoth of a plant that produces a massive amount of energy and waste, instead of newer, somewhat smaller designs that produce less energy, but very little waste.

China, for example, is planning to build hundreds of pebble bed reactors. Basically grapefruit sized balls of ceramic with the nuclear material in them, producing a fixed amount of heat, which directly heats inert gas that turns turbines.

They produce no plutonium, and when the balls are used up, they are dropped into a long term storage cave directly beneath the reactor, where they no longer produce enough heat to matter, and no dangerous chemicals. The building is removed, and concrete is poured into the cave. Ta-da. Radioactivity levels even 60 ft. below ground are near background.

Posted by Anonymoose 2009-09-09 11:24|| 2009-09-09 11:24|| Front Page Top

#5 No, China is buying hundreds of Westinghouse AP1000 plants.

Posted by crosspatch 2009-09-09 11:30|| 2009-09-09 11:30|| Front Page Top

#6 Not only is China buying the AP1000 plants, they are going to reprocess the fuel. India is going to start building re-processing reactors too. Japan has had them for years. Japans reactors burn plutonium. It is a different isotope of plutonium that the one that makes the best weapons, though.

See "Smarter Use of Nuclear Waste", Scientific American, December 2005. You can Google for it and find a PDF copy of the article on the web for download.

Also, you can use the fast neutron reactors to transmutate things like long-lived medical waste into isotopes that decay much more rapidly. But even producing plutonium is not a bad if you colocate the processing facility on the same site as the conventional reactors. The plutonium never leaves the site so you aren't transporting stuff around.

Posted by crosspatch 2009-09-09 11:38|| 2009-09-09 11:38|| Front Page Top

#7 And the Chinese are building them for %1500/kw while, if we can build them at all, costs us 3 times more. That's a serious competitive advantage that flows through their entire economy.

Even the Japanese are building nukes for less than $2000/kw while in the US environmentists, bureaucrats, and NIMBYs force extremely wasteful solutions that is straining the electrical grid to regional failure.

Posted by ed 2009-09-09 16:12|| 2009-09-09 16:12|| Front Page Top

#8 $1500/kw

Posted by ed 2009-09-09 16:13|| 2009-09-09 16:13|| Front Page Top

#9 There's an excellent article at the Oil Drum
The Future of Nuclear Energy: Facts and Fiction
This section was interesting:

For the largest uranium consumer country, the United States, the situation is even more amazing. The internal uranium production declined from a peak of 17,000 tons per year around 1980 to a production of 1654 tons in 2007 and 1430 tons in 2008. Last year's amount does not even allow to operate 10% of their nuclear power plants. More interesting questions should come up when one considers that currently about 50% of the nuclear reactors in the USA are operated with excess military uranium stockpiles from Russia. As the bilateral contract between the USA and Russia ends in 2013 and as Russia has currently very ambitious plans to enlarge their own nuclear energy sector, it is unlikely that Russia will renew this contract in 2013.

Posted by tipper 2009-09-09 18:56|| 2009-09-09 18:56|| Front Page Top

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