Nuclear Power - your thoughts? (survey)

You damn people would squabble about the direction the sun comes up.

I was an instructor for several years at the S1W plant at the Naval Reactors Facility at National Reactor Testing Station in Idaho (it's now called Idaho National Laboratory). I can speak with a "sense of authority".

What Caliente says is 100% correct.

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8518670.stm

It's happened, Obama has pledged at least $8 billion in federal loans to build 2 new reactors. The ball is moving.

 

...

 

Despite the fact there is no real solution to the radioactive waste problem. Wisdom or expediency?

 

Nuclear waste is only a problem because people make it a problem.

What about Yucca mountain? It'd be fine and dandy if it'd get people to stop complaining. Yucca Mountain is basically god damn stupid though in the end.

Being used in a nuclear power plant reduces the energy in fuel 1-10% the other 90-99% is thrown away, why? Because the breeder reactors needed to get the other 90 something percent out take the fuel through a cycle that gets it vaguely close to weapons grade. Because of this the United States and the Soviets promised not to do it.
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And it's stupid as hell. Beyond that the whole idea of yucca is stupid, dealing with nuclear waste is simple. Find a place with a certain radioactivity level, take all your waste and grind it up, mix the radioactive waste with inert stone until it's the same radioactivity level as your target environment then dump it on a playground or something. But people are scared of atoms and hate the idea there is a natural radiation level. The level that we hold radioactivity to is absurd.

A hilarious fact: If someone had some brazil nuts in a nuclear power plant they technically should be buried in the ground for 500,000 years before being deemed safe. Brazil nuts exceed the definition of low level waste on radioactivity. As does the capital building in Washington.

Obviously uranium is heavy, so it'd have to be made into something solid such as stone or glass to make sure the waste didn't sift itself out again, but it's still entirely pragmatic.

Also yes, we can just dump it into the ocean. This method you're looking for involves vitrification of the waste followed by sealing it in stainless steel drums and dropping them in oceanic subduction trenches.

The waste becomes completely irrecoverable and there is no way waste treated in such a way can ever harm anyone or anything anywhere ever, period, full stop, etc.

The problem with this method is the anti-nuclear crowd will summarize it by saying "They're dumping waste in teh ocean", which is true on the most technical grounds but is mostly a lie by omission.

A very silly example:
America creates 2,200 tons of radioactive waste annually.

America mines 6¼ million tons of coal annually.

That means, if we decided we wanted to get rid of the waste the dumbest way possible we could mix it with the coal. That would leave us with nuclear waste 1/2840th as radioactive as the original waste. .03% as radioactive. And thats a silly impractical example, imagine if all we had to mine was 'random old rocks" and not 'coal".


Also, let's compare electricity:

Wind: Clean power, but low output and only really viable in certain high wind areas.

Solar: Clean power, fine for supplementing an existing power supply, but doesn't really output enough by itself to practically power more than a couple buildings, or supply a low energy demand. Anything large scale makes it very expensive.

Coal: Dirty power, tons of pollutants and toxins. Finite resource. Ironically releases the most radiation into the atmosphere. It is cheap and a good source of power however.

Oil: Pretty much the same as coal except we're burning a resource that we are also dependent on for our cars. Doesn't seem too smart to me.

Natural gas: Much cleaner than coal and oil. Medium power output, but it's still a nonrenewable resource.

Waste incineration plants: Generates power, and helps the landfill issues, but a very dirty source in itself, though still cleaner then coal.

Hydroelectric: Clean high output power. People still complain about this because it destroys ecosystems. Every once in a while I'll see a bumper sticker that says "Free the Colorado" Hydroelectric power and Lake Powell are awesome you stupid hippies.

Geothermal: Awesome, clean power. Prohibitively high initial cost, after that though it's relatively easy to maintain.


The best quote:

(And no one bring up Chernobyl, both the reactor design in that system, the "safety" systems in place in physical construction, the lack of following mechanical safety systems by the engineers running the test, and extreme chain reaction that followed makes it literally impossible, for this to happen here, or even anywhere else that didn't use the Chernobyl design. Chernobyl even on the drawing board would've been illegal in near any other country.)

Also, interesting fact, did you guys know natural nuclear reactors have happened:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor

 

nuke: better then oil and coal. worse then wind and solar. want spent fuel in your back yard? you can have it. indigenous cultures it's being dumped on don't. also the assessment given of solar is inaccurate/incomplete. so is that of wind for that matter. 1m^2 solar ~ 1 hp, even in LOW light. cost largely factor of limited production do to incentive inhibited demand and deliberate fog of misinformation. hydro would be heaven too, if it wasn't grand ego scaled flooding sacred and most beautiful and gratifying lowland sites. many small dams high in the hills once had generators. all could. too many dams have been build with no generating capacity at all. this need not be.

i would also mention every dollar spent on gas for cars is a vote for war for oil.

not entirely seperate issue as stored energy recharged from a clean grid, and or supplemental onboard solar could propel transportation as well.

the real objection to DISTRIBUTED wind/solar. because everyone feeding into the grid instead of only or primarily extracting out of it doesn't kiss the ass of vested interests able to exploit by centralizing generation.

most of the cost fog is created by considering ONLY centralized generation rather then distributed.

 

^
What????

 

WTB efficient fusion reactor and then we can end all this.

 

I once was very opposed to nuclear power, what with the half life of some of the waste products being 10,000 years or more.

Then I made friends with a guy who worked on nuclear power plants in the navy and now works at a nuclear power plant in the east.

And he explained a couple of things to me.
One, the half life of nuclear waste can be thought of like a fire. A hot fire is what will burn you but burns up very quickly, a "cold" fire will not burn you but burns up very slowly. Thus the Nuclear waste that is harmful has a short half life and the nuclear waste that has a very long half life is just not very harmful.

Second, Chernobyl is literally a case of it can't happen here. Chernobyl was a case of active safety measures, where something has to be done to prevent a melt down, those things were not done, so it melted down. All reactors in this country have passive safety measures so that they are set up so that a reactor will cool on its own if just left alone. Three mile island being a case in point, absolutely everything was done wrong and there was no meltdown, even the release of the gas was not mechanical failure of the system but human err.

One might look to the nuclear program in France. They get a big chunk of their power from nuclear and they don't look at nuclear waste as waste but have it in "storage" until they can learn how to convert it back into usable fuel.

But still after all that, nuclear power still makes me feel uncomfortable.

 

So there is no need to worry after 5,000 years?
Well good, now I feel better.

 

Ah this isn't how it works.

Nuclear waste really isn't that dangerous. Even transporting it doesn't need to be done like it is. The public feared nonsense that didn't exist, so the nuclear industry and government made transporting it seem like it needed to be done with the utmost precision to ease their fears............which just people panic more about it because of how they saw it being transported.

For one thing, instead of calling plutonium waste, we can do what France does and use it to further fuel, extract it from the spent uranium, and use it to power power stations. Just because it can be used in nuclear bombs doesn't mean it will turn a power plant into one. The good deal of the plutonium 239 is converted into 240 in the process which has a half life of only about 84 years.

For nuclear waste that does remain and need to be dealt with, vitrification. Seriously turn the shit into glass so it's in a stable solid form, seal it in steel drums that themselves can basically survive a nuclear explosion, and bury it underground, or dump it to 5 miles below the ocean. By the time passes that nature can actually break through those drums that won't be nuclear waste anymore. Or ion exchange, you can literally reduce the amount of radioactive material, said material becomes more radioactive but much more concentrated, mix it with cement or other things, or glassify it too, and do the same thing.

As it was said nuclear fuel decay, what is most radioactive burns out first. Granted not within 5 years, but we have more then enough technology to seal the crap in a place where it's radioactivity will be at a minimum by the time it ever sees the light of day again, and will most likely be that of alpha particles that can't even penetrate the skin.

Oddly enough, despite the fact right around the reactor itself from the fact it exploded and there was nuclear fuel and piece of graphite everywhere so there was more then enough beta radiation, literally to the point where that on the roof soldiers could only stay on it for about 40 seconds without getting a fatal dose.

But, the real problem with chernobyl, simple alpha radiation. Look at the pictures of the reactor, that plume of smoke coming up, that's the problem. The molten core burning everything releasing these particles into the air, they may not be able to even go through a piece of paper, but once you breathe them or ingest them, they become a much worse problem. And this fire took almost 2 weeks to put out.

But to further show Soviet incompetence, aside from everything wrong with the reactor design itself, notice how the destroyed reactor building at Chernobyl is..........well a building, a normal building. They didn't even build a damn containment building around the reactor.

And then Chernobyl continued operation as a working power station with it's other 2 reactors until 2001.

 

Well see there ya go, just had to wait thirty years and ignore everything that has been said and done in that time.Then post a reply in reference to another post and now I have been briefed by a 23 year old on "HIPFORUMS"as to the safety of nucear waste.Wheww,thank you.

 

Do you even know how nuclear power works, do you understand the difference between the U-238 and U-235 isotopes of uranium, how plutonium forms, the difference between alpha, beta, and gamma radiation, why Chernobyl was as bad as it was, what nuclear waste comprises of, what the natural level of radiation is in the environment.

Did you know you can hold a damn ball of plutonium in your bare hands with no problem?

Do you know why water is used as a neutron regulator, or how neutrons even factor into the nuclear chain reaction?

Did you even read the post to show how nuclear waste can easily and safely be dealt with?

 

would you please list your credentials for me,or should I just read all of your crap because somehow you have decided your brilliant?
You have no idea who you are preaching too,get a life kid!
as I said in another post ,please stop trolling my replies.As I have no need for an instructor on this site, for instructors I attend colleges and study under P.H.D.s.When I resort too conforming to the ideals of a conservative troll ,uh I'll contact you,o.k.

 

lol you call me conservative.

What's your credentials, you haven't been able to reply against anything I've said. You want a source? Go look up the fission process that turns U-238 into Pu-239, and why U-235 is actually the main part of the nuclear fizzle since U-238 just absorbs neutrons like a sponge.

Don't insult my age, guess what, a lot of the scientists working on the Manhattan project who made the bomb and nuclear power possible were in their late 20's. I'm not a nuclear physics major, or a chemistry major, or a physics major, but everything I'm saying is pretty elementary physics.

Have you ever taken a physics class or a chemistry class at your college? Because generally past physics 101 you can understand how nuclear reactions work and realize they're not that scary.

This is my general response in threads about nuclear power since the professor does a pretty good job at explaining it in a way that doesn't require tons of back knowledge on the subject:
https://www.youtube.com/watch#v=5BHdsjo-NR4
There's your crash course in nuclear bombs, reactions and reactors for the night.

 

Again, what would be the problem using Pu-238 for example for nuclear power. You have something that lets off a lot of energy, gives off only alpha particles of radiation, and has a half life of about 85 years. I mean we use it in probes, we obviously have no qualms about putting it on a rocket. A very small amount can make a lot of power. We can literally have mini power stations all over the place.

 

Syd, sorry, I think you're very seriously wrong about nuclear waste. All of your ideas have been considered and rejected. And by the way, I have a physics degree from MIT.

 

Yes they've been rejected, but by the public. You know the subject, what is wrong with vitrification of the final products of nuclear fission that can't be used.

If you don't want to seal it in drums and dump it somewhere, turn it into cement, pulverize it, spread it over an area large enough where it's radiation is no more harmful then the natural radiation in the environment. Nuclear waste doesn't have to just be sitting in drums next to the reactors.

*edit*
Also, for the record, it's not so much that nuclear power is a good, idea, but the problem is we need new power plants, and we need them now, like seriously now, demand is growing and too many old plants need to be taken off line. In regards to the sources that can actually create large amounts of electricity easily, nuclear by far is the cleanest. The technology for renewables can't meet our demand, we can invest all the money we want in them but the point is we're not going to have a super effective and efficient tidal, wind, solar, ect type plant when we wake up tomorrow. Nuclear is a good stop gap until we can get to that point.

 

Or this plan, personally I still prefer vitrification, but this part in bold doesn't seem like a bad idea:

 

Syd, you make some good technical arguments that I don't have the time right now to try to refute, but I do know that you are taking an approach which ignores one of the most important aspects of the nuclear waste issue -- the human factor.

Who will manage nuclear waste? The U. S. Government. At a time when very few people trust the government (for good reason), you seem to be trusting the U. S. Government to do a nearly perfect job separating nuclear waste from the biosphere over a timeline of roughly 10,000 years. You seem willing to put the health of your descendants into the hands of people who have mostly sold out to the industry.

We thought Yucca Mountain was a perfect solution. The research at the time indicated that it could hold the waste for 10,000 years. Then further research indicated serious problems with geologic activity and possible groundwater problems, as I recall. The nuclear industry knew that if Yucca Mountain was abandoned, it would pretty much mean the end of the nuclear industry in this country. So, the truth was trashed. Lobbyists and campaign contributions worked their magic on Congressmen and Senators, who helped to cover up the problems and keep huge amounts of taxpayer money flowing to Yucca. This big lie and its attendant corruption kept going for years until Pres. Obama put a stop to it soon after coming to office.

This is the reality of the system that will attempt to protect us and countless generations. It scares me to think of the government being in charge of this.