First New U.S. Nuclear Reactor in Two Decades to Begin Fueling in Tennessee | Hacker News Reader

First New U.S. Nuclear Reactor in Two Decades to Begin Fueling in Tennessee

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back of napkin calculation:

1180 MWh; 4.5 billion dollar capex; 2.4ct/kWh opex[1]; 50$/MWh income

yearly power production = 1180MWh * 24 * 365 = 10'336'800 MWh

yearly revenue = power production * 50$/MWh = 516'840'000 USD

yearly costs = power production * 1000 * 0,024$ = 248'083'200 USD

capex / (revenue - costs) = 18 years

Doesn't look like a very interesting investment choice!?

1: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/economic-aspects/economics...

Any reactor build during the TMI singularity is going to have an outrageous capex, and a better calculation would be to ignore the sunk costs and look at the figures going forward. You also need to allow for refueling downtime, these aren't constantly refuelable designs like the outlawed in the US old generation CANDU and Soviet RBMK (outlawed due to their positive void coefficients, something the latest CANDU design addresses). From vague memory, assume no more than 90% yearly uptime.

ADDED: And you get an upvote if for no other reason than that you're doing the math. I wish a lot more people would do that.

90% is a best of fleet number. But for economic analysis you should really assume a lower number, unless you can guarantee that you are the cheapest producer at all times. As demand during the day can be near double of that in an area during the night, once your type of plant is over 50% of local supply your capacity factor is not a limit but demand side is.

4.5 billion capex is a really good number for nuclear in a competent regulatory environment. Still its double the estimated project cost when started.

Funnily enough nuclear and renewables really compete hard because of this. Extra power production is nearly nothing for both compared to opex and capex, so if you can produce you shall until returns hit 0. Both love energy storage for that reason. Nuclear is more dependable i.e. less peakers on because of supply issues. But capex for wind and solar are trending too be lower, as is time to market. Leading to less risks, which affects project planning a lot.

CSPs with inbuilt storage tend to go to lower generator capacity factors so that they can take a share of the peak shaving market, due to their relative good dispatch ability (send power to the market when wanted, instead of when you can).

Wind and solar projects tend to be online and producing quickly in time measured from first concrete poured to power send to market, certainly relative to nuclear in practice. Projects also tend to be smaller scale and in independent phases. Nuclear is added a GW at a time to the market, solar and wind in smaller 50-100mw projects. i.e. wind&solar are project wise much more agile.

4.5 billion capex is a really good number for nuclear in a competent regulatory environment.

Is France one, and does anyone know what their's is?

Flamanville, at 10.5 billion euro for 1.6 GW is not nearly as good as watts bar 2. This has had serious delays due to quality issues detected by its regulator. As had the finish and Chinese units build to the same design.

Sure these are supposed by GenIII, but are currently not competitive in any way with other power sources in economic terms. 10.5 billion buys you about the same in offshore wind e.g. 3 london array installations ( 2 billion per 600 MW * 50% capacity, compared to 10.5 billion per 1600mw * 90% capacity) = 10/(1.6*.9). Big difference is london arrays take 1 year to build instead of 10 for nuclear. That alone gives a mayor difference in real project costs.

There's not much surprise if the first version of a new design runs over budget; I'm interested in the costs of routine, serial production once those unknowns have been worked through. What about the 59 reactors already in operation, including Flamanville 1 and 2?

That is really hard to determine, mostly because project costs are part of the greater EdF numbers and not broken down in details for those years. So someone with better French and access should be able to answer you there. This is true not just for nuclear but all power generation before the late 90's in europe. i.e. same difficulty to getting numbers in the UK and Germany. Once these national power companies went to the stock exchanges they started to report in more detail how much projects cost. Anyway there are also number of existing reactors that are no longer running even if in the same generation as some other ones.

The, unfortunate, reality is nuclear reactors are not build in serial production. Therefore learning costs do not decrease as much as you might expect. Main reasons are distance between sites, meaning many construction workers do not work on all sites. You see at most 10 units for one design. Time between forgings for mayor means parts are not made in large series so relatively little is learned. All 4 EPR sites seem to have suffered from the same issues with concrete pouring so even there learning might not have happened.

Economically nuclear is in a real bind: for regulatory reasons you want big plants (1gw+), but for economic reasons you want many small ones (about 100mw). The current 1.6GW units are in many ways to big and smaller reactors would be much better project/knowledge wise. Yet the regulatory overhead for each new unit means that the firms went towards designing larger units.

Bechtel marine nuclear powerplants could actually be produced in series as they are small enough to be build off site and could be made economically viable. Yet I don't expect that Bechtel ever will.

But lest assume Arreva learns how to build EPRs for 5 billion and in 5 years. Which gives you

EPR done right 5 billion / (1.6 GW * .7 historic capacity factor) = 4.4 to 5 billion / (1.6 GW * .9 best capacity factor) = 3.2 London array 2 billion / (.63 GW * .50 historic capacity factor) = 6/2

Even in this very optimistic scenario, offshore wind is between 100% and 60% more expensive on construction costs. Offshore wind however, still has lower opex and a much better learning curve. i.e. if ordering a london array today costs will be less than 2 billion. (big difference in reporting is that wind projects include interconnect costs which current nuclear projects do not due to sitting next to existing plants).

Wind farms, also have positive decommissioning costs (those steel towers have real economic value at end of life).

Both types of projects have issues with nimbys.

According to http://www.platts.com/latest-news/electric-power/washington/... , 90% seems to be an average number, not a best of fleet number.

That is only in the last decade, and for the US. Other countries and decades have differing numbers. Still it only holds when Nuclear is a less than 50% of production. France tends to have around 77%.

Why would the percentage of production being nuclear have any effect on nuclear capacity factor?

If you produce it but no one buys it what was the point? In fact in reality if you do that you wil pay a lot to the grid maintainer for this.

Capacity factor is % utility of your max generating power output.% utility is lower if you can't produce or no one is willing to buy so you don't produce max.

If you produce min deman load with nuclear at 90% capacity. The it's all good.Once you are above that demand slack means production capacity is wastes. Currently nuclear is the last to stop producing as it's variable costs are so low. If nuclear is a larger part of your grid it will tend to have a capacity factor that is equal to the average demand.

Ah good point. That's why I think solar + nuclear is a good idea, the nuclear plants running all the time and solar adding more during the day. It won't perfectly match demand, but it'd still be better than either tech on its own.

Compared to hitting the jackpot on a SV Unicorn, it sucks. But in the grander scheme of things, it's not bad.

You have to remember that it's a very long-term investment -- considering that well run nuclear reactors have expected life spans of 50+ years, and the price of carbon-free electricity probably isn't going to go down anytime soon, it's starting to look pretty good. After the capex is paid off, you have a 250mm/year cash cow.

It's not carbon free.

You are correct. It is not carbon free. Nuclear power plants make about 90 - 140 g CO2 per kWh electricity.

Uranium extraction, waste management, construction, and decommissioning being the biggest offenders in the whole process.

90-140g/kWh sounds like a lot when 'carbon free' is also being bandied about. Nei states c02 emissions are 4-50g for the entire lifecycle,including construction mining fuel and decommssioning. Only hydro electric is lower.

http://www.nei.org/Issues-Policy/Protecting-the-Environment/...

That link says 2 to 59 grams too. Apparently the range is very high depending on how the extraction works, and all sorts of factors. Cement and steel for example have very different behaviours for emitting co2. Maybe the steel was melted by wind farm electricity for example.

But anyway, even at the high end of the estimates, that is still way lower than coal.

Neither are solar or wind farms, if you count everything that went into their construction. None of the three technologies have enough CO2 emissions to worry about, though.

you're missing the biggest cost of all. how do you price the cost of the waste fuel?

Grossly overstated. E.g. leave it alone for 600 years and it's no worse than the ore from which it was mined (which, I grant you, you don't want to be rolling around in). Or feed it to breeder reactors, all that's used up is the U-235, there's still plenty of tasty U-238 that you can do all sorts of stuff with, and they also help address the nasty actinides etc.

Don't confuse the bat-shit crazy regulatory regime for this in the US with anything rational or useful. We're wealthy enough for now to indulge in it, we'll see when things get tighter.

I recall going round a nuclear power plant once and they had a display showing that fresh coffee beans were radioactive enough to be considered nuclear waste had they been produced by the plant (whilst obviously not being considered materially at risk outside).

It's stuck with me (though I merely presume it to be true).

This has been formalized with the banana equivalent dose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose

Potassium-40 is pretty fierce stuff, enough to, in this context, get people to be call for the outlawing more than two people sleeping together. If, you know, they really cared about the level of one kind of safety they insist on, as opposed to shutting down US nuclear activities for their various reasons, and used ludicrous methods like the linear no-threshold model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model which due to common sense and radiation hormesishttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis we can even say is unscientific.

So do the math. How much does it cost in today's dollars to guard it for 600 yeaes?

I think it's an even worse investment than that.

I don't believe them that the cost of decommissioning is built in. Especially since the financiers who pay during construction aim to sell their equity. Also in the UK, recently had to pay 4 billion worth of tax payer funds to decommission. That puts the whole thing at a loss.

Also, wind, solar and other renewable are able to be produced with a much smaller capital cost, and are only getting cheaper. Many of the tech issues are being fixed. For example, critical steam is now possible with CSP and mass production is making the systems cheaper.

The production risks for nuclear are really high, because of the high capital costs. As demonstrated by this project stalling for over a decade.

Also, uranium costs are not fixed. Over the last 18 years have changed a number of times. The price difference has been 3x (not even adjusting for inflation).

Finally, many nuclear power plants have been closed down early to fix up (14% have been closed for more than a year). Including of course Fukushima, but also other ones around the world and in the USA. There was a report of 14 plants in the USA which will likely close early. That is around 14% of plants (so far) closing earlier than planned. (There are 99 plants in the USA).

If there is a problem because the high capital costs, it seems many of the plants get closed. 100 orders for plants in the USA were cancelled, bankrupting companies.

Also, wind, solar and other renewable are able to be produced with a much smaller capital cost, and are only getting cheaper.

Are you including the energy storage systems they require to provide either baseline or peaking power? Outside of perhaps some very special locations (i.e. cover deserts with solar cells if you can get that past the BANANAs, and that still doesn't cover nighttime to, e.g., recharge electric cars) they don't, you know, actually produce the two types of electrical production the system actually needs....

You can build small renewable systems with all sorts of different capital costs, and all sorts of power generation abilities. Price ranges from $100 to $9billion. Nuclear projects do not happen for less than $Xbillions (and about half bankrupt before completion).

Got data? Seems that most of the renewable energy is being used ok. Smarter energy management, and using salt/aluminium/steel aluminium molten lakes allows for storage/adjustment. In many places aluminium factories use up a LOT of power. They can be used as batteries of sorts. CSP solar can hold power for over 8 hours. Wind farms over provision to allow for baseload generation. Then there is storing energy in car batteries. Biomass solutions offer different power generation abilities too. All this is being done today, and systems are continually being enhanced.

The point I was making though, is that you can have power generation (including batteries) at a much smaller cost for it to be useful. For example, even installing solar on a factory roof and installing batteries can be done for way under $100,000.

Working nuclear plants have to close 38 days every 17 months for refuelling and maintenance. How good are they at generating baseload then?

They aren't good at generating baseload during refuelling, obviously. Most plants have more than one reactor. Refuelling usually occurs during the spring or fall, when demand is lower, and only in one reactor unit at a time. It's not exactly a feature, but it also isn't much of a bug.

http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2013.08.27/supplyreq...

http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=12711

> I don't believe them that the cost of decommissioning is built in. Especially since the financiers who pay during construction aim to sell their equity. Also in the UK, recently had to pay 4 billion worth of tax payer funds to decommission. That puts the whole thing at a loss.

Only if you're counting the decommissioning costs for nuclear but not for anything else. By the time a mine is exhausted it's generally a Superfund site, whether they're mining coal or neodymium. And what do you do with fifty million decommissioned solar panels?

> Also, uranium costs are not fixed.

The amount uranium price fluctuations contribute to operating costs is negligible.

Yes, PV solar is not so good with waste either. Yes, the costs of removing broken solar panels should go into the costs for a project too. But that has nothing to do with judging weather Nuclear plants are a terrible investment.

Last I read none of the closed plants in the USA had been completely decommissioned. Which is why I think the estimates for decommissioning are wrong. But perhaps there are cheaper ways to do it in the future... I don't know.

Yes, fuel cost isn't that much... apparently 0.52 ¢/kWh. But that could still impact the bottom line if costs were 3x as much. But with 70 years of uranium left, I'm not sure prices will stay at similar prices over the life time of a new reactor.

Last I read none of the closed plants in the USA had been completely decommissioned.

Much, if not a lot of this has to do with the simple fact that after you mothball the plany, it's easiest and cheapest to wait a while for various radioactive isotopes to decay to less hazardous stuff. As long as you mothball it properly, and maintain that, there's no hurry.

If the money is set aside ahead of time and invested well then sure. If your dependent on the company that operated the plant to still be around then there just going to keep putting it off until the company fails. At which point the taxpayer is stuck with the costs.

Non-commercial plants have been fully decommissioned, I don't know about commercial ones. (The NASA Plum Brook research reactor is completely gone now).

Seems like I remember the "peak uranium" studies suffered from the same faults as "peak oil". That there is estimated to be quite a bit of easily recoverable uranium left undiscovered. And a near infinite amount recoverable from seawater.

> Yes, fuel cost isn't that much... apparently 0.52 ¢/kWh

That's more than 95% processing, not raw material cost.

> But with 70 years of uranium left, I'm not sure prices will stay at similar prices over the life time of a new reactor.

That's not true at all. The total accessible uranium resources are near inexhaustible. The 70 years you hear bandied about is proven reserves/consumption, which is completely braindead, because proven reserves do not mean what you think they mean.

If the market price of uranium rose by two orders of magnitude, it still wouldn't materially impact the economics of nuclear fuel plants, and it would make thousands of years worth of uranium reserves economically extractable.

Last I read none of the closed plants in the USA had been completely decommissioned.

The Trojan Nuclear Power Plant[1] in Oregon comes "close" to being decommissioned. E.g. the reactor vessel itself was barged up the Columbia River and dumped into a big pit in the ground.

Of course, the spent nuclear fuel remains on site. But that's a political issue, not a technical one.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Nuclear_Power_Plant

Decommissioning costs are generally around a few hundred million $ - not more than 10% of the capital costs generally [1]. And there are very strict regulations around it - many firms are required to have a trust or other type of fund built up during operation of the facility in advance of final shutdown and decommissioning. And as others have stated, uranium price is very small part of total nuclear energy cost.

[1] http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/de...

The German utilities just had to set aside around 35 billion dollars to decommission just about 10 nuclear power plants: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-16/why-german...

With that in mind I honestly don't believe the "few hundred million $".

I wonder where all the money will go? See my previous comment about a decommissioned plant, elsewhere in this topic. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10457453

The reactor vessel is long gone. What remains on site is spent fuel, but there's nowhere to move that to. Cost was perhaps $0.23 billion but that's an approximate figure. Still, nowhere near the $3.5 billion per plant that German utilities have set aside.

Don't forget though that these plants are designed for a 50 year operating life, with some talk that they might be extended upwards to as much as 100 years, and with operating costs that are pretty low. Maintenance isn't that bad, fuel is hardly even a rounding error; waste disposal is the only significant cost long term.

Definitely a long term investment, which is why only large utilities are really interested in them. I think the direction for power generation in the US is solar/wind/hydro, but supported by nuclear in areas where solar and wind are much less attractive (like the Southeast). That's discounting the possibility of clean fusion energy (or other novel tech), which is likely inevitable but still a long way off.

I've worked analysis related to extending reactor lifetimes. With correct maintenance, 100 years is going to be easy. Most of the analysis to getting them to 80 years required almost no changes.

The article refers to 1180 MW of _power_. MW is joules/s and the unit of power is the watt (j/s). Your math talks about MegaWatt-Hours.

These are often confused in articles, do you happen to know if that was the case in this article? Did they mean 1180 MWH or 1180 MW as stated? Otherwise your yearly production calculation is very off. 1180 MW (j/s) would produce 10^7 MHW per hour.

It's megawatt hour.

The last line of the article surprises me:

However, we're hoping that by the time Gen IV reactors are ready for construction (sometime in the 2030s), fusion power will have completely taken over electric power generation.

Based on the current trends, it seems like renewable energy will be set to take over energy production before fusion power.

I doubt renewables can compete with a fusion reactor for high load power uses. So, I can see fusion being used in part with water desalination plants or anything to do with heavy industry.

> I doubt renewables can compete with a fusion reactor for high load power uses. So

Right now, the can compete favorably with fusion for most uses, what with fusion not actually being even remotely viable. GP seems to be offering the opinion that they will improve to compete more favorably with the best (even before considering environmental concerns) large-scale generation methods before fusion is viable, which may be overly pessimistic in terms of fusion progress, but then again, given how consistently fusion has failed predictions of imminent viability, isn't at all implausible.

Actually there are potentially some large breakthroughs in fusion power depending on how the new Wendelstein 7-X does when it is turned on later this year. Stellarators are pretty cool and if they prove viable could lead to a big shift in the field away from tokamaks which have stalled in efficacy improvements.

Here is an article about it: http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2015/10/feature-bizarre-r...

And here is a great video showing the design in amazing detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyqt6u5_sHA

I think in the next ten years we'll know for sure what the exact cost will be to make an economically viable fusion reactor. Until then, I think it's anyone's guess what that will be.

What trends do you base this on? What renewable energy source is on course to take over a majority of energy production? As far as I know nuclear energy (fusion and fission) are the only contenders to replace fossil energy at the moment and in any foreseeable future.

"[During failure,] only a small amount of water transfer (about ten garden hoses worth) is necessary [...] to keep the reactor stable."

How much is "ten garden hoses worth"? Are we talking running ten garden hoses at full capacity for a few seconds? A couple hours? I very much dislike comparisons like these in reporting, especially when discussing safety.

They didn't say how long the hose is. Maybe it's a mile? To the moon and back?

I've never seen a garden hose a mile long. Typically they are shorter than 25m.

I would think the author means flow rate, not static volume. That would be a hopelessly unintuitive, and as you demonstrate, incomplete analogy if it were meant to represent the static volume needed.

Water transfer seems like it calls for a measurement of flowrate. So the real question is: how fast is the water flowing through a pipe of that diameter?

Doesn't that depend on pressure as well?

Yes. As a first approximation we can use Bernoulli equation, which states that 0.5V^2+gz+p/rho [1] remains constant through a streamline. If we assume incompressible flow, no friction, perfect discharge, no altitude change etc., and that speed in the pressurized reservoir is null, we can obtain that p_reservoir = 0.5 V^2+p_ambient and thus V = sqrt(2(p_reservoir - p_ambient)) if I'm not mistaken.

---

[1] Where V=velocity, g=gravity accel., z=height, p = pressure, rho=density

I think it's meant as a rate measurement, not volume. They want readers to visualize spraying the reactor with 10 garden hoses as the rate of cooling needed in an emergency.

I wonder how this new plant will affect the power costs to consumers and especially wholesale power costs.

The Chattanooga area just turned up their municipal fiber network to 10 Gbps and a lot of tech companies are moving there. With inexpensive power and good connectivity, it might be a prime location for data centers.

So, where do Small Module Reactors (SMR) fit onto the authors timeline of reactor development? Do SMRs show any promise, or are they just an iteration of the same ideas, but at a smaller scale.

design from the 60s, built in the 70s and ceased production in the 90s

put into operation in late 2010s

what could possibly go wrong

Given how much experience we have with this class of reactors, and the inherent safety of PWRs (e.g. TMI, vs. BWRs like a Fukushima), and that the organization running it has long, continuous experience in running these, not much, I'd expect. They only unique danger comes from it being mothballed for so long, and the possibility that resulted in undetected degradation (anything more that corrosion?).

Agreed.

If PBR is to be taken as the flagship of reactor safety (physics prevents a problem from ever occurring), the safety features in Gen II PWR come pretty damn close. You'd need a long cascade of extremely unlikely events in order for it to dangerously fail, for example, the reactor vessel being bent so that the rods are unable to be affected by gravity. Having first breached the concrete and steel whatever caused the catastrophe would also need to bend uranium.

Indeed. TMI was pretty close to a worst case disaster for a PWR with a partial, uncontrolled meltdown, with a lot of corium ending up on the bottom of the vessel where it did exactly what was planned, sat there not particularly bothering anyone except the company which would have really rather continued generating power from the reactor.

I'd have to double check, but as I recall if you were standing outside the containment vessel, you'd have received the dosage you'd get from sleeping with two other people (potassium-40) ... which we should clearly outlaw right now due to that grave danger (along with living in the Mile High city of Denver, commercial jetliner travel, and eating bananas).

> a lot of corium ending up on the bottom of the vessel where it did exactly what was planned

Yes, that's what happened, but I wouldn't say it was planned. Popular wisdom at the time was that the corium should have melted the whole way through the containment vessel. It was only afterwards that they discovered that the water and corium itself helped keep the steel containment vessel cool enough to prevent melting (albeit just barely).[1]

Yes, almost no radiation was released. But we got very lucky. It was close to melting through the containment vessel. "By some estimates, the core was 30 minutes away from melting through the eight-inch-thick steel reactor vessel when cooling water was finally restored."[2]

1. http://articles.latimes.com/1994-01-30/news/mn-17003_1_nucle...

2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/tmi/...

Yes, that's what happened, but I wouldn't say it was planned. Popular wisdom at the time was that the corium should have melted the whole way through the containment vessel.

The "popular wisdom" is utter propaganda bullshit; have you ever wondered why the popular at the time and mentioned in [1] "China Syndrome" is for some inexplicable reason is not longer bandied about? The design of the reactor vessel allowed for this and withstood the stress without the bigger concrete containment vessel even coming into play. Note even in [1]:

Besides the insulating property of the fuel and the strength of the steel vessel, previous studies had shown the concrete bases on which U.S. reactors are built also would hold up against melting fuel, Beckjord said.

That you are confounding the reactor and containment vessels in your posting suggests to me how effective that propaganda has been.

I don't have anything new to say about TMI/PBR/PBM, etc., however this sentence stands out:

"You'd need a long cascade of extremely unlikely events in order for it to dangerously fail"

Have we learned nothing at all ? Even when given extremely relevant and instructive examples within the last 10 years ?

From Fukushima to Lehman Brothers, we continue to be shown that these unlikely events are highly correlated - even if they are extremely unlikely individually.

The Tsunami comes with the Earthquake

> Fukushima

With Fukushima they knew what the problems were and chose to make an half-assed attempt at safety - for example: the 2008 Tsunami study was ignored. I guess what could be surmised is that nuclear power is only completely safe in the absence of human nature. Which makes you correct in a round-about way.

However, it is unsafe in comparison to what? Nine times out of ten not being able to breath anywhere on the planet, forever, seems like the more dangerous prospect; versus making a specific piece of land uninhabitable for a few thousand years. Nuclear waste is far easier to see, which makes us more aware of it and hence our monkey brains believe it is more dangerous ("smoke just dissolves into the air!").

I can't think of any power solution that doesn't have severe drawbacks; however, nuclear is at the very least not the top contender in that list.

> However, it is unsafe in comparison to what? Nine times out of ten not being able to breath anywhere on the planet, forever, seems like the more dangerous prospect;

The arsenic and other emissions from a coal plant are roughly measurable to a nuclear MELTDOWN every 10 years.

... and because of the current anti-nuclear sentiment, when South Africa faced a power crisis they decided to build the biggest coal power plant in the southern hemisphere[1]. I honestly can in no small way whatsoever see that as a win for the environment.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medupi_Power_Station

Thanks for that factoid.

Don't put your emergency equipment in the basement when you're building in a flood zone.

I don't think Fukushima really needed, or experienced, a long cascade of extremely unlikely events. It was just badly designed, then experienced a not-particularly-unlikely event.

There must be more to the story:

"And when the newer generation’s passive advanced safety features are taken into consideration, the AP1000 reactors should be about 100 times as safe as existing plants."

Right, but this is not one of those. It is a case of using existing infrastructure because it was already 80% built.

If you look at the environmental cost of coal and oil for electricity the impact seems to be more. Here is a list of Environmentalist for Nuclear Power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pro-nuclear_environmen...

From what I have read into this and taking the data into an untrained eye seems to make sense to use modern nuclear. http://ieer.org/resource/factsheets/types-of-nuclear-reactor...

The biggest problem with nuclear power generation is external to the technology, it depends on the legal and regulatory regime, and how good a safety culture the country can develop for it.

On the latter factor, Japan has amply demonstrated over 3+ decades they have absolutely no business doing anything in this area (a judgement I reached long before Fukushima). To compare to a vaguely comparable culture, the PRC seems to be doing well, but wonder if that's due to a much greater lack of transparency.

While I haven't looked at it closely, France sure seems to be doing well (76% of their electricity production, at good points and with lots of exports), but the usual political suspects propose to fix that. Canada as well??

The US finished going bat-shit crazy on the subject under Carter (perhaps because he was on the cleanup crew of this first generation (1947) reactor after it suffered a meltdown: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NRX, and, yeah, it's another reactor with a positive void coefficient). You're not going to see economic nuclear power in the US for the foreseeable future unless you foresee a counter-revolution that removes power from the NIMBYs and BANANAs.

I'm not sure I'd recommend Japan give up nuclear. Their horrible track record just means that their nuclear plants are single order of magnitude safer than their coal plans, rather than the normal 2 or 3.

Coal is terrible, but it's not the only alternative. Nor is coal the cheapest alternative.

Oil is also up there in the low single digit deaths per gigawatt-year and oil and coal are what Japan replaced all their nuclear power generation with after Fukushima.

Your comment is a fantastic example of why laypeople are not equipped to properly evaluate the risk profile of nuclear power.

And what proportion of the critics are so equipped.

I'm glad we have solved the nuclear waste problem.

Yeah, well, when this guy retires https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Harry_R... we should see some progress there. And/or as the court case WRT to his stopping it proceeds, the utility companies are paying for it without getting any return and are more than a little fed up.

See elsewhere for my comments on why it's not hardly the problem it's made out to be.

Don't expect future Nevada senators to be any different than Harry Reid on the issue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...

> A two-thirds majority of Nevadans feel it is unfair for their state to have to store nuclear waste when there are no nuclear power plants in Nevada. Many Nevadans' opposition stemmed from the so-called "Screw Nevada Bill," the 1987 legislation halting study of Hanford and Texas as potential sites for the waste before conclusions could be made.

> The governor of Nevada had 90 days to object and did so. However, the United States Congress overrode the objection. If the governor's objection had stood the project would have been abandoned and a new site chosen.

I simply expect them to be less powerful.

They'll be pretty powerful. A single senator can secretly prevent a motion from reaching the floor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_hold

Heh, a hold on this subject won't be very secret. And cloture can zap it.

But that's a power of a very different nature than that of one of the two political party's most powerful members in the Senate.

It's a political problem, not science problem. We could have already completed the Yucca Mountain project, if not for the anti-science anti-nuclear fear mongers and NIMBYs.

You delusional people are fascinating. If anything you are anti-science, considering that it's bat shit insane to do something that has absolutely no chance of being sustainable and every chance in the world of being a disaster. What's so darn scientific about piling up nuclear waste with a half-life longer than humans have even been able to spell out names? This has nothing to do with NIMBY, but if you think it is, why not simply store it where you live.

That project is not complete at all and there are significant problems with it altogether, not even to mention that it's not a solution, it's a warehousing of a problem. It's as if you cut off your house from the sewage system and started stockpiling your waste in the garage. Sure, that would work, but for how long.

The "nuclear waste" problem is hardly a problem at all in comparison to most economically viable alternatives, namely coal. Coal produces more radiation than nuclear waste, not to mention many other toxins.

Cite: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-r...

There's plenty of other waste that's more dangerous and produced in far greater quantities that people mostly don't care about. Why all the attention on nuclear waste specifically?

Waste with a half-life of 500,000 years?

There's a lot of industrial waste out there where the half life is more like 10^32 years (if protons actually do decay).

Anything that has a half-life of 500,000 years isn't very radioactive at all. The half life is directly related to the amount of harmful stuff it puts out.

Most of our nuclear waste, and almost all the long-term waste, is unused fuel. Fast reactors and some molten salt reactors (eg. Transatomic) can use it as fuel, leaving a small amount of waste that goes back to the radioactivity of the original ore in 300 years.

So most of our waste only has to be contained until we get around to building advanced reactors. Russia already has a couple fast reactors in commercial operation, one since 1980.

But you are always left with a waste product that is simply not going to be anything but a health hazard. So you cut down the nuclear waste with a 500,000 half-life to only having a 250,000 year half life. Congratulations.

How about finding a solution before making more problems.

Eh no. It cuts the total volume of waste per gigawatt-hour by a factor of 100, and the half-life down to decades. That's why it only takes about three centuries before it's no more radioactive than the uranium ore that was there in the ground before we dug it up.

What's more, these reactors could eliminate the long-term waste we have already.

Exciting, but too little too late? As I understand it, there's a good chance we've already doomed ourselves to the necessity of using geoengineering to fix our climate.

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