US Senate votes 87 to 4 to promote advanced nuclear power and cut through NRC red tape
66 replies, posted
[QUOTE=OvB;49659484]I really like nuclear power though I'm aware of it's possible hazards. I really wish hard environmentalists would stop trying to shut it down and embrace it. My Ideal future is nuclear fission/fusion doing the bulk of the work with solar filling in the gaps/doing the work off the grid in remote areas.[/QUOTE]
This is really how it should be. Nuclear being the baseline power and renewables filling in the gaps. You can equalize the load with batteries or pumped storage if you don't want to use batteries and don't mind the efficiency loss. I wish the UK would do this as well.
I wonder how many still actually think that nuclear plants go up in a mushroom cloud if they fail
I've always found it interesting that politicians most in favor of drastic regulation to enforce a green energy sector are also the most against nuclear energy. Take Bernie Sanders. He specifically goes out of his way to make sure you know that he opposed absolutely any nuclear.
It really makes me doubt the seriousness of their concern. Nuclear is the only viable alternative at the moment.
[QUOTE=sgman91;49659730]I've always found it interesting that politicians most in favor of drastic regulation to enforce a green energy sector are also the most against nuclear energy. Take Bernie Sanders. He specifically goes out of his way to make sure you know that he opposed absolutely any nuclear.
It really makes me doubt the seriousness of their concern. Nuclear is the only viable alternative at the moment.[/QUOTE]
I can only hope that Bernie's opposition to nuclear energy is based on outdated information and that he ends up changing his mind.
As someone with family working on the U.S.' ONLY nuclear fuel re-processing project currently underway (the MOX project in South Carolina), I'm extremely pleased by this! Hopefully we'll see a resurgence of nuclear power plants and nuclear technology development.
I will mention that one thing that the federal government could do to improve perceptions of nuclear energy is to improve education regarding how we (as a country and species) generate electrical power.
I remember hearing how a school I used to attend as a little kid dis-approved a science textbook contender that mentioned nuclear as an "alternative/clean" fuel source, simply since it was "controversial". Between rectifying situations like that and providing proper education regarding the effects of nuclear materials on the environment and trying to educate future generations to NOT see nuclear power as some mysterious, non-understandable, "scary" technology, there's much to do to get the average citizen to start backing nuclear.
[QUOTE=Silence I Kill You;49657802]Oil lobbyists isn't what's keeping nuclear down, it's price. Nuclear cannot compete with the price of natural gas. The little jump we had hit in oil prices over the last 10 years however, showed that nuclear was viable and needs to be implemented to stabilize energy costs the next time crude and natural gas prices go up.[/QUOTE]
Its also an extremely large investment to build a reactor and companies weren't willing to stake their financial well being on it, though I heard the Obama administration put some laws in to cover the cost if it fails? In any case it seems to be a common misconception that nuclear power never caught on because of safety reasons when its usually monetary ones.
get rid of the salt treaty so we can throw the nuclear waste shit into space
then there will be no excuses as to why a nuke plant cant be built
[QUOTE=Wii60;49659855]get rid of the salt treaty so we can throw the nuclear waste shit into space
then there will be no excuses as to why a nuke plant cant be built[/QUOTE]
Except the expense of doing this and the potential disaster of a rocket being destroyed in the launch process.
Then scattering fissile waste into the stratosphere where it can be carried across the world c:
[QUOTE=Wii60;49659855]get rid of the salt treaty so we can throw the nuclear waste shit into space
then there will be no excuses as to why a nuke plant cant be built[/QUOTE]
Could get messy if there's a RUD. Although rumour is that SpaceX wants to send a fission reactor to Mars when they get a colony going.
I would imagine any plan to launch nuclear waste into space would include safety measures like encasing the waste in some sort of container that would prevent or atleast mitigate the chance of fallout following a disaster. Aren't the chances for that kinda low anyway?
[QUOTE=Wii60;49659855]get rid of the salt treaty so we can throw the nuclear waste shit into space
then there will be no excuses as to why a nuke plant cant be built[/QUOTE]
According to [url=https://whatisnuclear.com/articles/waste.html[/url]this[/url] there were 47,023.40 metric tonnes of high-level waste in the USA in 2002. The SLS can conservatively carry 290,000 pounds to LEO. Not taking into account payload volume, the SLS would be able to just barely put 131.5 tons of waste into LEO.
It would take 358 launches of the SLS to blast all the waste we have right now into space. At a conservative cost of $500 million per launch, it would cost $179 billion dollars to do it. If they managed to up the production of the SLS to two launches a year,[B] it would still take 179 years[/B] to put what we have now into space. At this pace it would not be enough to even launch the annual amount of generated waste into space. You would still have a stockpile.
So no.
[QUOTE=OvB;49660249]According to [url=https://whatisnuclear.com/articles/waste.html[/url]this[/url] there were 47,023.40 metric tonnes of high-level waste in the USA in 2002. The SLS can conservatively carry 290,000 pounds to LEO. Not taking into account payload volume, the SLS would be able to just barely put 131.5 tons of waste into LEO.
It would take 358 launches of the SLS to blast all the waste we have right now into space. At a conservative cost of $500 million per launch, it would cost $179 billion dollars to do it. If they managed to up the production of the SLS to two launches a year,[B] it would still take 179 years[/B] to put what we have now into space. At this pace it would not be enough to even launch the annual amount of generated waste into space. You would still have a stockpile.
So no.[/QUOTE]
well wouldnt the ton of private space corps opening up eventually have the ability to help with the load and costs?
besides that, that makes sense.
SpaceX could probably help with their BFR but you'd probably just cut the time in half. Still a monumental undertaking. Then you would also have to consider private contracts to do it, on top of the $179 billion the government would be spending for the SLS.
[QUOTE=Wii60;49659855]get rid of the salt treaty so we can throw the nuclear waste shit into space
then there will be no excuses as to why a nuke plant cant be built[/QUOTE]
Then aliens will have a good reason to invade. Just launch the shit into the sun and be done with it, the sun is just one big continuous nuclear bomb anyways
[QUOTE=Wii60;49659855]get rid of the salt treaty so we can throw the nuclear waste shit into space
then there will be no excuses as to why a nuke plant cant be built[/QUOTE]
Thing is, many modern (GEN 4 and next-gen) reactor designs can use what we consider "waste" as fuel, and for a very long time with high levels of efficiency.
Just as well, France and several other first-world countries that generate electricity via nuclear recycle their fuel waste into more fuel (it's not perfect, but it works well enough). However, in the U.S., there's been some pussyfooting around under nonproliferation ideals about reprocessing.
That's why the project my relative works on, the MOX (mixed oxide fuel fabrication facility) project, is hopefully going to do well under this law if it passes both houses of Congress: it's the testbed for such a facility even existing in the United States.*
*(Although MOX is primarily for reprocessing military weapons-grade material into reactor fuel, it uses a similar process to what the French use in their recycling facilities.)
Also, I really don't think any developed country's going to be pleased with the idea of the U.S. allowing launches of fissile material [I]en masse[/I] into low earth orbit.
[QUOTE=Wii60;49659855]get rid of the salt treaty so we can throw the nuclear waste shit into space
then there will be no excuses as to why a nuke plant cant be built[/QUOTE]
SALT has nothing to do with nuclear waste and there is no treaty prohibiting the dumping of aaste in space.
[editline]3rd February 2016[/editline]
[QUOTE=Milkdairy;49659266]For the record, can you list these misconceptions?[/QUOTE]
I'll write a list when I can find a computer. It's been a while since I watched the video.
[QUOTE=Wii60;49659855]get rid of the salt treaty so we can throw the nuclear waste shit into space
then there will be no excuses as to why a nuke plant cant be built[/QUOTE]
That's dangerous and wasteful. Reprocessing the waste and using breeder reactors can recycle 99% of the waste and reduce the time it's radioactive from 300,000 years to 300.
[QUOTE=Milkdairy;49659266]For the record, can you list these misconceptions?[/QUOTE]
Firstly, nuclear power in the 60s wasn't expensive. It was only slightly more expensive than coal and you have to remember that back in the 60s coal-fired power stations had essentially no environmental regulations. Many utilities built nuclear power plants to hedge their cost across several different sources as uranium price volatility had less impact on electricity price than coal price volatility. The British Magnox reactor was about 50% more expensive than 50s coal fired power stations but the Magnox design was rather convoluted.
The claim that nuclear was at the time was more risky is also incorrect. Power utilities can be divided into two types: fully integrated utilities that operate their own mines for coal and non-integrated utilities that buy fuel. Integrated utilities generally had large reserves of coal and weren't at risk of price volatility so there was little incentive to build nuclear power plants while non-integrated built almost 150 reactors in about 20 years.
No nation has ever used civilian nuclear power reactors as a step towards nuclear weapons. Every nuclear power on the face of the planet either got nuclear weapons from dedicated plutonium production reactors (US, UK, USSR, possibly France and China), or in research reactors (India, Pakistan, North Korea). Some nations (UK, USSR and [I]maybe[/I] France) have used specially designed power reactors to supplement their weapon's material production.
Most reactors outside of the US broke ground in the 70s, while in the US the newly formed NRC effectively put a halt to new nuclear licences at this time with the last licences making it through the red tape in the late 80s. This probably should have been explained.
Overblows Three Mile island. TMI didn't kill anyone and all of the melted core was contained in the reactor vessel like it was designed to do. Fails to mention the RBMK reactor was the most stupidly designed reactor in history and lumps the design in with LWRs.
Implies reactors are just getting a new paint job.
[I]Moving onto the next video...[/I]
The non-reactor and reactor paths for nuclear weapons carry similar levels of risk though the risks are different. It also should be noted that power reactors are probably the worst way to go about it. If you wanted to go the reactor route you would follow the major nuclear powers and built a dead simply graphite moderated reactor fuelled with natural uranium. It's literally a block of graphite with holes drilled in it. The five nations that developed nuclear weapons after the NPT all used research reactors and we won't be seeing those vanish any time soon due to how critical they are in modern medicine. It's also not difficult to distinguish peaceful and non-peaceful nuclear programs. Nearly every nuclear weapon's program has been horribly transparent.
While the PUREX process is used to extract plutonium for weapon's use, the plutonium in reactor waste contains large amounts of Pu240 and a few percent Pu241. Both seriously complicate nuclear weapons production. It also should be noted the only PUREX plants in operation (with one exception for Japan) are in states that already possess nuclear weapons. The claim MOX fuel isn't used as a uranium replacement because the reactors "are the wrong type" is straight up incorrect, as is the claim it's just "lying around". Straight up deceptive lies.
Actually we have found a place to dump it, among other waste solutions such as burning it in breeder reactors. The waste problem simply does not exist from an engineering perspective. It's purely a political problem at this stage.
Of the disasters listed:
Chalk River - Happened in the 50s, zero casulties.
Sellafield - Military plutonium production reactors, 50s, not relevant to civilian nuclear.
Kyshtym - Military plutonium production reactor, 50s, Soviet incompetence, not relevant to civilian nuclear power. Far worse than Fukashima but apparently less worse than Fukushima according to the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale.
Lucens - Bad and overly complicated design, zero casualties.
Three Mile Island - Reactor did what it was designed to do, zero casulties.
Chernobyl - Most incompetently designed reactor in history operated in a criminally incompetent manner.
Fukushima - Nuclear regulator and plant operated incompetence and corruption, zero radiation casualties.
With Fukushima he claims it leads to large amounts of land being declared unfit for human use. In reality, Japanese nuclear regulator incompetence and political meddling lead to that. The Japanese government gave in to nuclear fearmongering which led to them lowering the radiation regulatory levels to a retardedly low level. The deaths are also not "highly disputed". The only people disputing them are Greenpeace and Helen Caldicott.
[I]And the next video...[/I]
They seem to be implying nuclear is bad, but coal is worse, so keep nuclear around until solar panel replace it.
Implying current nuclear is dangerous when it's not (except those RMBKs still running in Russia!).
While I'm a big support of Thorium the video implies the stuff is like magic; it's really not. Conventional nuclear waste when reprocessed is also only dangerous for a few hundred years.
To quote someone in the Youtube comments:
[quote] Annatala Wolf 9 months ago (edited)
Two comments, because I love your videos. <3
Your point number 2 is using the wrong chemical symbol. It's a small thing, but it makes the presentation look ignorant of basic chemistry. "Co2" is diatomic cobalt, not carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is "CO2".
Now for the bigger criticism (I apologize in advance if this seems too harsh). I fear your bias is apparent in these videos, and it has negatively affected the quality I've come to expect from your work. I don't have a strong opinion in either direction on nuclear fuel usage, but neither side is well-explored in these two videos, and it looks like you've done zero research on the importance of nuclear as a fuel source in developed nations. In particular, this video is substantially lacking in hard fact. You speak in hand-wavy terms, making points anyone would imagine, and don't quote much statistical data. It looks under-researched. You also couch your arguments repeatedly in this video, but not in the other video. There are many "maybe" words, and many places where before you even begin to make a point, you try to undercut it first with a counterpoint. For example, in the beginning of your third point, you start by referring to nuclear power plants as a "dangerous problem", which completely contradicts your initial point that nuclear power is the least dangerous power source. There's a severe slant to what you're saying here, and it's really, really obvious if you have a scientific or literary background.
I don't disagree with you about the troubles of using nuclear as an energy source, but it's very obvious from both videos (this one in particular) that you stand in strong opposition to nuclear power. These two videos are probably the most unprofessional ones you've produced in an otherwise stellar lineup, even though they're still well-made from an artistic perspective and do provide some good information. I encourage you to do more research on both sides of this issue, because I agree it is an extremely important one. It is, unfortunately, very difficult to get an unbiased perspective on this topic due to the political weight and aggressive monetary interests it is usually saddled with (this tends to be true for most environmental issues). It would be nice to see a more balanced attempt.•[/quote]
[QUOTE=download;49662520]Fukushima - Nuclear regulator and plant operated incompetence and corruption, zero radiation casualties.[/QUOTE]
everyone also seems to forget that it went through one of the largest earthquakes in history and a tsunami, one right after the other.
[QUOTE=OvB;49660249]According to [url=https://whatisnuclear.com/articles/waste.html[/url]this[/url] there were 47,023.40 metric tonnes of high-level waste in the USA in 2002. The SLS can conservatively carry 290,000 pounds to LEO. Not taking into account payload volume, the SLS would be able to just barely put 131.5 tons of waste into LEO.
It would take 358 launches of the SLS to blast all the waste we have right now into space. At a conservative cost of $500 million per launch, it would cost $179 billion dollars to do it. If they managed to up the production of the SLS to two launches a year,[B] it would still take 179 years[/B] to put what we have now into space. At this pace it would not be enough to even launch the annual amount of generated waste into space. You would still have a stockpile.
So no.[/QUOTE]
[url]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_gun[/url]
Would be perfect for disposing of waste that can't be reprocessed.
[QUOTE=Ninja Gnome;49662722]everyone also seems to forget that it went through one of the largest earthquakes in history and a tsunami, one right after the other.[/QUOTE]
Ya but the biggest issue was they partially melted down the cores of 3 of the units and had hydrogen explosions in 4 of the units because the cooling systems had no redundancy
[QUOTE=OvB;49660249]According to [url=https://whatisnuclear.com/articles/waste.html[/url]this[/url] there were 47,023.40 metric tonnes of high-level waste in the USA in 2002. The SLS can conservatively carry 290,000 pounds to LEO. Not taking into account payload volume, the SLS would be able to just barely put 131.5 tons of waste into LEO.
It would take 358 launches of the SLS to blast all the waste we have right now into space. At a conservative cost of $500 million per launch, it would cost $179 billion dollars to do it. If they managed to up the production of the SLS to two launches a year,[B] it would still take 179 years[/B] to put what we have now into space. At this pace it would not be enough to even launch the annual amount of generated waste into space. You would still have a stockpile.
So no.[/QUOTE]
Also worth pointing out that if you put it into LEO it's orbit will decay right back into the atmosphere.
[QUOTE=darkrei9n;49662895]Also worth pointing out that if you put it into LEO it's orbit will decay right back into the atmosphere.[/QUOTE]
I'm not even sure why "launch it into space" is ever an argument, look how much shit is in orbit already, and then remember that nuclear materials are some of the heaviest elements on the periodic table, uranium is heavy and its about the worst thing you could launch as a payload
[QUOTE=Sableye;49662916]I'm not even sure why "launch it into space" is ever an argument, look how much shit is in orbit already, and then remember that nuclear materials are some of the heaviest elements on the periodic table, uranium is heavy and its about the worst thing you could launch as a payload[/QUOTE]
"The fission reaction in U-235 produces fission products such as Ba, Kr, Sr, Cs, I and Xe with atomic masses distributed around 95 and 135."
For reference fissible uranium has an atomic mass of 235, hence it's name.
Nuclear waste != nuclear fuel.
Granted, we shouldn't be strapping nuclear waste into rockets regardless. It's both a huge risk and a waste of resources.
I still don't understand why France is the only nation to burn the waste as more fuel. Just kind of makes sense to do so, doesn't it?
[QUOTE=soulharvester;49662958]
I still don't understand why France is the only nation to burn the waste as more fuel. Just kind of makes sense to do so, doesn't it?[/QUOTE]
France aren't the only ones. Quite a lot of nuclear power in Europe comes from MOX fuel. Same goes for Japan. The US is building a MOX plant at the moment but it's using nuclear weapons as feedstock, not spend fuel while preiosuly many US nuclear plants ran on Russian MOX.
Yeah, that kurzgesagt video was horrendously biased, not a fan of it and commented quite a bit on the video that it was dreadful.
I'm glad the US is going somewhere with nuclear, They just need more people to speak about it in public without fear mongering
[QUOTE=RIPBILLYMAYS;49657811]Just to keep the thread on topic, anyone can PM me with questions or concerns about nuclear power, I should be able to answer them.
The NRC as a whole is terribly underfunded, they're a group of about 3500 people with a 1 billion dollar budget in charge of both maintaining the safety of the ~100 nuclear plants across the country, and licensing new reactor designs. Not everyone at the NRC is a nuclear engineer either; there are also administrative positions, and the NRC must also oversee the power plant mechanics in addition to the core itself.
There's a huge education issue where the employees are trained to maintain the old Gen II reactor designs from 40+ years ago. Most of the "new" reactor designs are spinoffs of these Gen II designs, typically bigger in scale and with better safety features. They have to be this way because the cost of getting a completely new reactor design such as Thorium Fueled Reactors, LFTRs, or Travelling Wave Reactors is incredibly high, and these reactors use completely different physics one would only understand coming from graduate school. Even so, grad students and researchers typically don't want to work in policy, so the NRC has a tough time finding the right people who will work for government pay to help license new reactor designs.
This article helps industry lower R&D costs since they can rent out lab space, though there are still a few more bureaucratic obstacles in the way.[/QUOTE]
They absolutely need to develop Thorium reactors. By design, they should theoretically produce 1/4000 the amount of nuclear waste material compared to current designs, should be much safer in case of an accident (incapable of a meltdown) and can't be used to produce nuclear material for nukes.
[editline]3rd February 2016[/editline]
Not to mention Thorium is much more widely distributed in the Earth's crust than uranium.
[QUOTE=StrawberryClock;49663578][B]They absolutely need to develop Thorium reactors. By design, they should theoretically produce 1/4000 the amount of nuclear waste material compared to current designs[/B], should be much safer in case of an accident (incapable of a meltdown) and can't be used to produce nuclear material for nukes.
[editline]3rd February 2016[/editline]
Not to mention Thorium is much more widely distributed in the Earth's crust than uranium.[/QUOTE]
All breeder reactors are like that. It's not limited to the thorium cycle.
I know people are going to disagree heavily on some of this, but here I go anyway.
Nuclear power is like the airline industry. It's statistically "safer" than driving, but the tragedies that can occur are still present. No matter how hard you try, Pan Am flight 759 happened, so did 103, nothing will ever change those incidents; yet driving a car is more "dangerous", statistically.
When 2 drivers [sometimes just 1] make colossal errors in judgement, it usually conjures up the image of 2 or 4 dead people. When a massive error happens on an airliner, it conjures up the image of 200+. Neither views are wrong, they've both happened.
But when people say [QUOTE]"TEPCO was warned 3 years earlier that such a chain of events could happen and yet they failed to install any protective measures. In fact, reactors closer to the epicenter (owned by other companies, I might add) experienced insignificant to no damage. Oh, and by the way - no direct deaths."[/QUOTE] it rubs me the wrong way, its one thing to say 'something happened and further measures will be made in the future', but downplaying those past events in which those policy changes must avoid seems counter-intuitive and don't help confidence. If anything, hearing "TEPCO was warned 3 years earlier" makes the situation for me worse.
There are be cleanup operations, yes, but the efficiency has been put into question, and Japan recently admitted that[URL="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/nov/12/fukushima-daiichu-residents-radiation-japan-nuclear-power"] a lot of people[/URL] might not return home, and [QUOTE]"As of August, the number of people in Fukushima who died from illnesses connected to the evacuation stood at 1,539, just short of the 1,599 deaths in the prefecture caused by the 11 March tsunami"[/QUOTE] -The Guardian
I don't doubt the science behind nuclear power, I doubt the people. It's easy to say "the United States will not make the same mistakes", but actually making people believe that is a whole other. A nation that pumps [URL="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2015/11/02/how-the-pentagon-spent-43-million-on-a-single-gas-station/"]43 million dollars[/URL] into a single gas station inspires no confidence, either, no matter how unrelated they may seem.
Now, with all this, I hesitantly agree that Global Warming poses a much, much larger threat than nuclear meltdowns ever will, but I also think we should always try to find alternative and viable solutions that don't involve something nuclear.
[QUOTE=download;49663206]France aren't the only ones. Quite a lot of nuclear power in Europe comes from MOX fuel. Same goes for Japan. The US is building a MOX plant at the moment but it's using nuclear weapons as feedstock, not spend fuel while preiosuly many US nuclear plants ran on Russian MOX.[/QUOTE]
Like I've stated beforehand, I've got relatives working on the US MOX facility, and it's hopefully going to move forward despite the continued feet-dragging of the NRC and Congress (mainly the House, not the Senate). As of now, it's on track to be completed in time to operate into the 2030s- provided, of course, there's not even more delays due to funding shenanigans, regulatory issues, and/or litigation by paranoid anti-nuclear organizations. Matter of fact, one of my relatives who works there (primarily dealing with litigation and contracts) constantly talks about how anti-nuke groups keep trying to derail the project and bring suit to the DOE and NRC. It just goes to show that the US government values fear-mongering over sound science most of the time. That's why I sincerely hope MOX gets built on time, so my relatives don't get laid off if there's more setbacks from issues like those.
[editline]3rd February 2016[/editline]
[QUOTE=Incoming.;49664064]we should always try to find alternative and viable solutions that don't involve something nuclear.[/QUOTE]
Here's the thing though- you can't meet the power needs of a first-world country while cutting emissions WITHOUT nuclear fission power plants. There's not one alternative that's as cost-effective, efficient, provides as much power per unit of fuel compared to nuclear. Solar might be great for reducing a home or building's draw on the grid, but nuclear is [I]absolutely[/I] necessary if we want to start moving away from oil/coal/gas for generating power.
For example, here's a list of why other "alternative" power options won't supplant nuclear:
-Solar only works in the daytime, and provides less power efficiency and generation.
-Wind is limited to areas suitable for it, and is also not very cost-effective or good at generating large amounts of power.
-Geothermal is limited by location, and requires drilling that may cause issues in the ground much like fracking.
-Hydro is great, but is extremely limited in terms of location, and requires environmentally disruptive dams to be built and maintained.
-Biofuel isn't strictly oil, but still gives off emissions.
In the near future, if fusion pans out we may get a power source better than nuclear fission. For now though, it's the best darn option we've got for modernizing our power generation in the US.
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