U.S. Chooses Four Utilities to Revive Nuclear Industry

[misslexi]

From the WSJ:

"Four power companies are expected to split $18.5 billion in federal financing to build the next generation of nuclear reactors -- the biggest step in three decades to revive the U.S. nuclear industry and one that could vault the utilities ahead of some of the sector's strongest players."

This should be fun to watch.

[dagwood55]

Well, that was the obvious solution to the nuclear power industry's biggest problem... financing. If we think it's a national imperative, we pony up. I wonder what sort of interest rate we're giving them?

Next, they'll have to get serious about where to store the waste.

Yesterday, someone, I think it might have been you, misslexi, responded to a post objecting to funneling cash to corporations for their green projects vs encouraging individual ownership of green power resources.

I'm firmly on the side of distributing ownership and generation. We have enough concentration of electric power and financial power as it is. If we're going to run a Federal program, I'd like to see people liberated and more independent.

While, technically, "farm" power production may be more efficient (I think that was your argument), distributed production benefits the taxpayers directly (a plus), enhances home values (another plus), keeps the projects small and manageable and probably employs more people (yet another plus) and it has civil defense benefits.

A neighborhood or home with local production separated from the grid still has the capability to run vital services for itself at least during daylight or when it's windy.

Local power production also eases the strain on the grid, as less power need be shipped from a single or limited number of sites (although additional local home-based storage of 2-4KWH/home for peaking use would be much more beneficial).

It would also be good if individual taxpayers could pool together any individual tax credits to form local co-ops. That way, some economies of scale could be realized while still offering ownership benefits to taxpayers. There's draconian restrictions on home wind power production here but a co-op could get a nearby site and build power production facilities to help meet individual homeowner needs.

I don't just want independence from oil, I want people to be more independent, generally, and to keep more of the money they earn. With energy prices sure to rise, the ability to produce their own energy (heat, electricity), is a great long-term investment in an individual's future.

And, as a bonus, energy produced on this scale is the scale suited to developing nations. If we develop the technology and expertise for our own benefit, we can then make money exporting it.

[Texas]

Republicans will cheer, even though it goes against everything they believe in. It's an endorsement of centralized, government financed socialism. Ironic.

Oh? Next generation? So, it doesn't produce nuclear waste that can be easily converted into fissionable material or used in dirty bombs? Great! Oh wait.

Now, all the countries of the world can also get their nuclear industries fired up because this also endorses the concept that going nuclear is a great way to go and a great way to spend government dollars. Say goodbye nuclear proliferation programs. How can we now, with a straight face, tell others not to have reactors. It’s a friggen joke.

Got to love billion dollar subsidies! I say, drop all subsidies, use government funding to do basic research and let the markets decide what power systems are used.

Can someone explain again why we need these reactors? Can someone explain to me how we can predict 10 years in the future as to what amount of electricity generation we will need? We tried that in the past and ended up mothballing many reactors (midway thought their construction - costing billions but never generating enough electricity to light a light bulb).

Oh, so we now have a plan for all of the waste we already produced? No? Great!

Let the games begin. Chu needs to go back to school and get his MBA. He already understands physics but doesn't understand finance or our energy history.

I predict massive cost overruns, unintended consequences and ultimately complete project failure. No big deal, we do it all the time. Par for the course. These reactors, if completed, will never be turned on. In ten years renewable technologies will be far superior in cost, performance, safety, speed, etc.

I hate to see all of this capital go down the drain when it would fund so much needed research like advanced solar cells and practical electrical energy storage. Real, renewable and sustainable energy technologies. Pity. Again, par for the course.

[misslexi]

dagwood, 'twas not i.

The article went on to wax-poetic about how the French, even China have leapfrogged the US in nuclear generated electricity.

Some are fond of comparing the US to other countries and happy to point out our lack of foresight and the like.

So what's the deal with France and nuclear? Have they figured out what to do with the waste? They are the nuclear energy poster child, are they in danger? Life suck over there?

Maybe we should send an emissary to do a French "man in the street" series to see what the average person there thinks about nukes.

[Texas]

Oh, the French nuclear industry is running perfectly and with low cost? Why don't you just Google it! Let's start with their "recycling""



"The dirtiest French nuclear site -- with the cleanest of reputations -- is the vast reprocessing plant at La Hague on the Normandy coast. The nuclear industry has successfully cast reprocessing as "recycling," but nothing about reprocessing could be further from the collections of newspapers and soda cans that recycling conjures in the public's mind's eye.

La Hague takes in irradiated reactor fuel -- domestic and from other countries -- and, through a chemical process, separates the plutonium and uranium for theoretical reuse as new reactor fuel. The plutonium is mixed with uranium to make a fuel known as MOX.

However, fewer than 20 French reactors use MOX fuel, which in turn can handle only minimal proportions of plutonium, and the waste these reactors produce cannot be reprocessed. Since all reactors also produce plutonium during the fission process -- as much as 40 atomic bombs worth per year, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council -- the net reduction of plutonium by MOX reactors is virtually zero and contributes nothing to the recycling of waste fuel.

Instead, 80 tons of surplus plutonium remain at La Hague in the equivalent of hundreds of soda-can-size containers. About 30 tons result from imported irradiated fuel from client countries, most of whom have now canceled their reprocessing contracts. This is despite a French law that mandates reprocessed waste fuel be returned to its country of origin.

Most of the uranium isn't "recycled" either. Ninety-five percent of the mass of spent French reactor fuel consists of uranium that is so contaminated with other fission products that it cannot be reused as reactor fuel at all (although France ships some of it to Russia). The vast majority of the uranium from reprocessing -- nonfissile uranium 238 -- cannot be recycled either and will need to be permanently secured.

Furthermore, reprocessing creates huge volumes of liquid radioactive waste and radioactive gases. These are simply dispersed into the sea and air.

As much as 100 million gallons of liquid radioactive waste a year is pumped from La Hague into the English Channel and has radioactively contaminated the seas as far as the Arctic Circle. These liquid wastes have been measured at 17 million times more radioactive than normal sea water according to an analysis by a French laboratory at the University of Breme."


http://www.alternet.org/environment/..../?page=entire


Let's keep going until the full story about the wonderful French nuclear industry is a bit more clear. Folk, it's not like there are 50 or so shining concrete building producing perfectly CO2 free power and grass is growing everywhere else. Hardly! Read up on the mines, the wastes sites, the costs, etc. Get the full picture and extend that to us. We already have almost twice the number of reactors as the French have. Now multiply by many times, all over the world. Nice picture? No, I don't think so either.

[misslexi]

If the waste is this treacherous, I sure hope someone in the "watchdog" media asks the tough questions before we pour $18.5B down a toxic rat hole.

[Jason M. Hendler]

You can't beat nuclear for its massive baseload power output - rain or shine, windy or still.

We must push forward on all front to achieve energy independence first, then segue to more purely renewable forms of domestic energy.

[Texas]

Originally Posted by Jason M. Hendler

You can't beat nuclear for its massive baseload power output - rain or shine, windy or still.

We must push forward on all front to achieve energy independence first, then segue to more purely renewable forms of domestic energy.

You don't have to beat nuclear, it beats itself. Yeah, it's great when it's running but like the Japanese powerplant that went down for over a year with no warning, nuclear can also be a real pain for utilities. You see, even though solar is intermittent, you can predict with a much higher degree of certainty how available the energy will be.

I know it sounds crazy but we know, for example, that the sun will shine in the desert for at least 300 days out of the year with 99.999 percent certainty. If it didn't, the sun just burnt out and all life on earth would soon die anyway.

What about the nuclear power plant? Who knows if there will be an inspection issue, earthquake, terrorist attack, uranium mine issue, etc.

Because you know with a high degree of certainty the availability of solar, engineers can design systems that could have a much higher reliability than nuclear systems ever could. Imagine that. Soon, solar will be more "baseload" than nuclear. You will probably see this in your lifetime (depending how old you are or how soon you die).

All it will take is a reliable electrical energy storage system like batteries, caps, pumped storage hydro, etc. In fact, we have these but the cost is high. But believe this, there are some solar systems out there that have been running "baseload" for much longer than most commercial nuclear reactors ever could. Put that in your pipe and smoke it! Want one simple example? How about a remote solar powered warning sign? It has it's own battery storage and collects enough sun to power the system 24 hours a day for years! Yes, we have nuclear reactors, like on our aircraft carriers, that can run for 20 years but most commercial reactors have to be refueled, maintained, inspected, etc. They have to be taken off the grid. Thankfully, we have a lot of backup and redundancy. That remote solar system? No backup is needed because the sun will shine, eventually.

Additionally, many distributed energy sources are far more reliable than a few centralized energy sources (not including the sun - if that goes down, we are done for).

So, there is this myth of baseload. It's just that, a myth. explain the Japanese nuclear shutdown and nuclear proponents will tell you how rare that is. Then ask them what about fuel changes, inspections, maintenance and they will tell you that it's scheduled and there is redundancy. Hello! Well, you can also say that the sun is also scheduled. Right? Yeah, there might be a few more cloudy days per year than you expected but don't a lot of nuclear plants stay down longer than they are scheduled for? Man, this would blow their minds, if they accepted it. They don't. Why? Because they can't or it would destroy their reality. Isn't energy fun?

[pdt]

Originally Posted by Texas

All it will take is a reliable electrical energy storage system like batteries, caps, pumped storage hydro, etc. In fact, we have these but the cost is high.

Can't resist...your past point of view was that energy storage was no problem at all since pumped hydro is so cheap and can be located almost anywhere.

With respect to baseload power, France has a pretty reliable electric power grid dominated by nuclear power. I'm no fan of nuclear, but trying to argue that it is not a baseload power source is going to be tough to support.

Not a definitive source, but wiki says...

"Baseload plant, (also baseload power plant or base load power station) is an energy plant devoted to the production of baseload supply. Baseload plants are the production facilities used to meet some or all of a given region's continuous energy demand, and produce energy at a constant rate, usually at a low cost relative to other production facilities available to the system.[2] Examples of baseload plants using nonrenewable fuels include nuclear and coal-fired plants. Among the renewable energy sources, hydroelectric, geothermal[3] and OTEC can provide baseload power. Baseload plants typically run at all times through the year except in the case of repairs or scheduled maintenance. (Hydroelectric power also has the desirable attribute of dispatchability, but a hydroelectric plant may run low on its fuel (water at the reservoir elevation) if a long drought occurs over its drainage basin.)"

Nuclear has many cons, but it is used as baseload power without the need for an energy storage facility and has a low CO2 footprint.

[hermperez]

The waste issue is overblown, to produce all the power a person will need for their whole life will result in a golf ball size amount of radioactive waste (after reprocessing and concentrating the un-usable waste). There are reactor types that produce even less waste that that, and there is also the possibility of "burning up" such waste with neutron accelerators, Jimmy Carter put a stop to that research many years ago.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...-nuclear-waste

" the waste produced by coal plants is actually more radioactive than that generated by their nuclear counterparts. In fact, the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy. "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste

"A coal power plant releases 100 times as much radiation as a nuclear power plant of the same wattage.[7] It is estimated that during 1982, US coal burning released 155 times as much radioactivity into the atmosphere as the Three Mile Island accident.[8]
The World Nuclear Association provides a comparison of deaths due to accidents among different forms of energy production. In their comparison, deaths per TW-yr of electricity produced from 1970 to 1992 are quoted as 885 for hydropower, 342 for coal, 85 for natural gas, and 8 for nuclear.[9]"