The Aging of Our Nuclear Power Plants Is Not So Graceful 436
Lasrick writes "This is a very thoughtful article on nuclear power plant aging: how operators use early retirement of plants to extract concessions from rate-payers and a discussion on how California's 'forward-looking planning process' has probably mitigated disruption from the closing of San Onofre."
NIMBY (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:NIMBY (Score:5, Informative)
The failure to build new reactors is primarily driven by economics. Nuclear reactors require huge capital investment and take a long time to build. They also take a long time to turn on and off, so make an inflexible source of supply that integrates poorly with more variable sources, such as wind and solar. Natural gas, on the other hand, has a comparatively much lower capital investment and time to build for the same generation capacity. The low price of natural gas also makes it extremely competitive with other power sources. Natural gas turbines can also come to full power from a dead stop in 20 minutes and partial power sooner than that, allowing it it integrate gracefully in a world with variable power demand and supply.
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Here in the UK we enjoy almost uninterrupted mains power. No brownouts (a brownout perhaps every eight months which is usually due to maintenance, extreme weather or emergency works), no requirement for external generators nor for a UPS for your desktop PC.
I understand that the power supply in the US is patchy at best, with frequent brownouts. I think you guys really do need a stable source of power. Nuclear is a good way to supply this. Focusing on renewables won't begin to replace this, nor will it give a
Re:NIMBY (Score:5, Interesting)
Here in the UK we enjoy almost uninterrupted mains power. No brownouts (a brownout perhaps every eight months which is usually due to maintenance, extreme weather or emergency works), no requirement for external generators nor for a UPS for your desktop PC.
I understand that the power supply in the US is patchy at best, with frequent brownouts. I think you guys really do need a stable source of power. Nuclear is a good way to supply this. Focusing on renewables won't begin to replace this, nor will it give an easily modulatable power supply that reacts to user demand. Sure they take a long time to build, and there's legislation preventing waste processing being done that would wring out more power from the same uranium. So you end up with large waste disposal sites where you wastefully allow spent rods to decay needlessly. That's assuming you still are building old-style reactors. Newer ones have much less waste, more power and frankly are less dangerous.
Gas Power? Coal Power? Great, Cheap to build but pollute like crazy. Not to mention coal burners actually more radioactive than nuclear power. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste [scientificamerican.com]
Solution lots of smallish pebble-bed nuclear reactors to do the heavy lifting, augmented with solar, with the odd gas & coal power stations taking up the slack.
I like a lot of what you say, but your "patchy at best" lead in isn't very convincing. An average American home that hasn't just been through a hurricane, tornado, or earthquake might see 5 minutes without power per year and no brownouts in the occupants' lifetimes. Yes, these things happen, but they're isolated and rare. The brownouts in California about a decade ago, which were the only widespread American brownouts in recent history, were caused by Enron manipulating power markets, not a lack of real power.
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I like a lot of what you say, but your "patchy at best" lead in isn't very convincing. An average American home that hasn't just been through a hurricane, tornado, or earthquake
So everyone not on the East Coast, Midwest or West Coast?
>quote> might see 5 minutes without power per year and no brownouts in the occupants' lifetimes.
5 minutes per year is high when it's spread out over dailly 1-2 second outages. Which is what I started experiencing when moving to the US 14 years ago, and have experienced since, living in three different towns and five different homes. Compared to Europe, the stability of hte electric grid here sucks. I never needed a UPS before, but here I can
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I can't imagine where you could live and see only five minutes without power per year. I've never seen that level of reliability anywhere I've lived:
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Where I live [Manitoba, Canada] and have lived most of my life since 1975, I could count on one hand the number of times I've seen the power go out longer than an hour. Outages lasting longer than a minute [from lightning strikes to transmission equipment, for instance] are few and far between [2-3x per year]. Outages lasting a few seconds occur now and
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The US power supply is quite stable. I've never experienced a brownout
It depends on how you define brownout. If you include short outages of a second or less, the US system has them aplenty. Lights flicker so often that people born and raised here don't even recognize it. It's considered normal.
My UPSes log an average of 3-4 of them per day, and did so before too, when I lived in a different town.
Then let's not say anything about the unwillingness of the power companies to bury the wires or bring multiphase to the homes. First a 3 day outage and then a 9 day outage in two
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That's true, but that has basically nothing to do with generation. That's a matter of the cables in some areas being shit, above-round stuff that goes through poorly trimmed trees which, unsurprisingly, fall in the next major storm.
The solution to that is better maintenance of the grid, not anything to do with power plants.
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That's true, but that has basically nothing to do with generation. That's a matter of the cables in some areas being shit, above-round stuff that goes through poorly trimmed trees which, unsurprisingly, fall in the next major storm.
The solution to that is better maintenance of the grid, not anything to do with power plants.
Yes, it's a grid problem - also a faulty design in that a single downed wire can cause an outage, unlike in (I would guess) most of the industrialized world.
All the transient failures, though, I'm not so sure about. I notice them pretty much wherever I go in USA. So it could be a grid design problem, but it could also be related to frequent switching over from one provider to another due to capacity problems. I am not sure what causes it, but it's certainly common here in the US.
Re:NIMBY (Score:5, Insightful)
With all due respect, you appear to fail to understand the distinction between base load plants and topping plants.
Base load plants supply the huge amount of power that MUST BE THERE 24x7. Topping plants supply the variable amount that is or is not needed depending on seasons, weather, uncharacteristic heat waves, sudden cold snaps, Pink Floyd concert light shows...
MOST of the power demand is base load demand. Heating and cooling don't stop. Water pumping doesn't stop. Hospitals run 24x7. Ditto traffic lights.
For topping plants, there are lots of choices, natural gas being a popular one. For base load plants, there are at the moment exactly three viable choices: hydroelectric, coal, and nuclear (to be precise, negative void coefficient pressurized water reactors). We are maxed out on hydroelectric power: every dammable river in the country has already been dammed. Coal is about the dirtiest power generation technology known to man, as well as one of the most dangerous (Google "black lung disease" someday). That leaves nuclear as Hobson's Choice, if you actually care about environmental and safety issues. (Hint: Of the three, only one emits significant quantities of carbon dioxide.) (For that matter, if coal plants were held to the radiation release limits applied to nuclear plants, it would be impossible to light up a coal plant, because of the radioisotopes in the coal (carbon-14 being the big one) that go straight up the smokestack and into the atmosphere.)
*ANY* base load plant costs a lot of money and takes a long time to build, because, by their very nature, they are BIG.
Finally, observe that wind and solar are utterly unsuitable for base load, because the wind doesn't always blow, and the sun effectively "goes out" for several hours every day.
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the sun effectively "goes out" for several hours every day.
Well, there are solutions to this. One is to store that power for nighttime consumption, perhaps as potential energy, by adding water to a reservoir, or thermally, by heating something up a lot. Of course, I'd like to see more of a push for space based solar power, which only has to deal with the sun setting twice a year, at the local middle of the night, on the equinoxes. It would take significant investment to set up mining and manufacturing operations in space, but it would be worth it in the end. (And t
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every dammable river
Ok ok, relax man. No need to start swearing.
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There's no carbon-14 in coal.
What are you, one of those evolutionists or something? Two C14 half lives (11400 years) is longer than the age of the Earth, and that coal has fossil plants in it which means it was created after the third day of Creation. Did Jesus die for nothing?
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Let me see if I understand this.
You're saying that, as we shift from reliable power sources (coal, nuclear) to unreliable ones (wind, solar), we should shift that unreliability penalty to the end user, who just has to live with the fact that his power is unreliable?
Where I come from, the system designer's first job is to ensure reliability: when the user throws that switch, the machine is supposed to work. Every time.
Seriously: In the name of energy efficiency, would you consider incorporating a random "W
Re:NIMBY (Score:5, Informative)
Nuclear reactors require huge capital investment and take a long time to build.
It's true that the capital costs of nuclear power are high, but in all fairness a substantial part of those costs and the time required to build are caused by anti-nuclear pressure groups and other NIMBYs who drag the process out for decades in courts and through environmental review boards as a delaying tactic to discourage development by artificially running up the cost. Meanwhile the world continues to burn ever more and dirtier fossil fuels to make up for lost nuclear generation capacity in national electric grids.
They also take a long time to turn on and off, so make an inflexible source of supply that integrates poorly with more variable sources
Which is why you don't turn them off and why the electric grid should never be entirely nuclear. Nuclear is for the portion of the demand that needs constant and consistent base load supply. Because the national energy grids never have zero energy demand at any time of day there will always be demand for some amount of base load power and nuclear fits that profile perfectly. The variable power sources, like wind and solar, can contribute as they're able with the remainder of variable demand being handled by natural gas turbines that can be turned on when necessary to fill in supply gaps and shutdown quickly and easily when not needed.
Natural gas, on the other hand, has a comparatively much lower capital investment and time to build for the same generation capacity.
Natural gas is also a valuable transportation, heating and cooking fuel. It's not just power plants that demand natural gas, so it would be unwise in the long run to replace base load nuclear with natural gas. We have many centuries of proven nuclear fuel, but natural gas supplies have waxed and waned over the years along with demand, depletion and development of new supplies. The lifespan of a power plant is measured in decades but nobody can tell you what the price will be for natural gas decades in the future.
The low price of natural gas also makes it extremely competitive with other power sources.
For now, but much of the newly drilled glut of natural gas comes from horizontally drilled and fracked wells in tight shale formations where the long term depletion rates are still poorly understood. We might have centuries of gas left in these formations or they might be depleted in a matter of decades; nobody's sure yet because we don't have enough data on depletion rates and demand is also uncertain. For example, increased use of natural gas in commercial transportation may eventually put upward pressure on natural gas prices as an alternative to diesel in those applications.
Natural gas turbines can also come to full power from a dead stop in 20 minutes and partial power sooner than that, allowing it it integrate gracefully in a world with variable power demand and supply.
Which is why there will always be a role for natural gas in electricity generation. My point was that we shouldn't lean too heavily on any one technology, but rather seek to optimize the grid by tapping into the different strengths of different generation technologies. We need nuclear, solar, wind, natural gas and even niche sources, like geothermal or tidal, where available. The best solution utilizes a mix of all of these technologies, but as long as there are ignorant, biased and uneducated people we will continue to "debate" whether eliminating one or more of these technologies from the mix is a "good idea", as in the case of the "no nukes" crowd.
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"It's true that the capital costs of nuclear power are high, but in all fairness a substantial part of those costs and the time required to build are caused by anti-nuclear pressure groups and other NIMBYs who drag the process out for decades in courts and through environmental review boards as a delaying tactic to discourage development by artificially running up the cost."
Citation needed.
For instance, please explain how the failure of WPPSS in the late 70's and early 80's was the result of this versus eco
Re:NIMBY (Score:5, Insightful)
Citation needed.
Oh please, really? Do you honestly believe that environmentalists don't deliberately delay power plant construction (especially nuclear) in the United States? Give me a break. Also, I said that it was a substantial cost, not the only cost. The problem is legal and economic, so it cannot be solved by a new reactor design because it wouldn't matter what design was proposed to the environmentalists, they'd still be against it. The legal problems require political not technical solutions and the economic problems are largely caused by the legal and political problems. Dragging out engineering projects, in the courts and through political maneuvering, is expensive and that's were the delays deal economic damage. The environmentalists wouldn't use those tactics if they weren't effective.
please explain how the failure of WPPSS in the late 70's and early 80's was the result of this versus economic, technical, and competency factors.
Are you going to tell me that there wasn't a single lawsuit filed or political agitation conducted by environmental groups opposed to a new reactor? I don't believe that the problem is entirely caused by technology or lack of engineering competency.
Then please explain how the new designs will escape this fate. After all, since there must be places which don't have this problem, these new designs must be operating successfully in large numbers. Where are these places?
Of course new designs cannot solve what amounts to a problem of politics. As for where nuclear power is widespread, how about France? I think that there are three basic reasons why France was able to build many reactors, using a modified US design (Westinghouse I think) no less, while things have been more problematic here in the US. First, France has almost no natural deposits of either coal, natural gas or petroleum and few rivers to be dammed so for the French it was pretty much nuclear or nothing. Second, the French have a much greater faith in their scientists and engineers than we do here in the United States. The French scientists and engineers in turn work hard to earn and sustain that trust by doing good work. I cannot recall there ever being a serious nuclear accident in France for example. Finally, it seems that the French legal system doesn't allow for NIMBYs to get in the way of projects that are deemed to be in the national interest whereas anyone with money for the filing fees can cause no end of legal trouble here in the United States.
In any case, it will still take decades for them to come on line in significant numbers at BEST (based on production estimates).
Wah, wah, wah it's too hard and it takes to long to get strated so why even try right? There's a productive attitude. You could use that argument against just about anything worth doing. Indeed, just imagine where we might be as a nation today if we allowed that objection to override all good sense. The difficulty of the task should inform our long term planning, but it shouldn't be taken as a reason to do nothing or not to get started. I could trot out that same argument for why we should do nothing about global warming, why bother to do anything now when the benefits won't be seen for decades, but I suspect that you wouldn't like the argument as much in that case.
Sure, it's not base load, but maybe we should be looking at a solution for that?
I don't claim to be omniscient, is there something else that we ought to be looking at? Something perhaps that all of the other scientists and engineers around the world have missed? I doubt it, but I'm willing to be surprised. Please tell us your brilliant plan for replacing all of the world's base load nuclear generation with fairy dust and unicorn farts (this ought to be good).
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It's true that the capital costs of nuclear power are high, but in all fairness a substantial part of those costs and the time required to build are caused by anti-nuclear pressure groups and other NIMBYs who drag the process out for decades in courts and through environmental review boards as a delaying tactic to discourage development by artificially running up the cost. Meanwhile the world continues to burn ever more and dirtier fossil fuels to make up for lost nuclear generation capacity in national electric grids.
I'm opposed to new nuclear power and also opposed to burning more fossil fuels. You probably think I'm some kind of eco-hippy who wants to return to an agrarian lifestyle, but actually I'm a software engeineer who likes his gadgets and wishes he could afford more air-con and an electric car.
The solution is twofold. First we need to reduce energy consumption. It's cheaper than building new capacity and pretty easy to do. The problem is that it requires some socialism - going into people's houses and upgradin
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A somewhat-common solution to the inflexible nature of nuclear power is to pair it with hydroelectric power in artificial lakes. During the night, or other low-demand periods, the excess electricity can be used to pump water upstream, filling the reservoir. When peak times hit, that water can be let back down to generate additional power.
This has certain additional advantages as well. Nuclear plants need cooling water, so building them next to a lake is already fairly common. And as yet another added bonus,
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So demand side methods turn us all into nice model citizens under threat of removal of service?
Wait, what you just described was turning everyone into model citizens by removing service! No threat needed.
Re:NIMBY (Score:4, Interesting)
And the best parts of smart meters! (Score:5, Interesting)
No, it's more like an auction where you can program your appliances to stop bidding on electricity when the price gets too high. Allowing the price to fluctuate in response to demand gives people a greater opportunity to economize than exists with flat rates. If the fall of communism is any indication, the "one price fits all" model just doesn't work very well in the real world.
And the best parts of smart meters!
First, the utility can program them for differential rates, so if you are being antisocial to the grid by installing solar at your house, they can pay you less for the electricity you are generating than they charge you for the electricity you are consuming, which is something that's not possible without a smart meter!
Second (and this is the great part!), they can charge you less for electricity when you aren't there during the day to use it, and more, when you are home at night, and have no choice but to use it, since even with huge storage capacity, there's no way you are going to be able to recharge your car while you are asleep after lighting up your house and appliances after getting home from work, because, hey! The sun isn't out at night!
Good thing it's illegal for them to force you to install a smart meter in most places in the bay area...
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Smart meters can be programmed so that when supply is reduced, it will turn off your water heater, or turn down the heat or A/C, or stop charging your electric car, or recommend that you dry your laundry on the line instead of using the dryer.
Because people will just love it when their smart meter turns down their AC during a scorcher or stops charging their electric car so they don't have enough juice to get to work the next day or nagging them about how they should be drying their clothes on a laundry line during working hours. The belief that this will actually work in the real world is utterly obtuse. Can you imagine the political fallout from ACs being turned down in the sunbelt by smart meters and seniors being found dead in their homes fr
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His / her inability to understand that the power grid in the US is a total mess (just...wow), and that there's no one with any reason (financially, politically, etc.) to get involved in upgrading it...because it's a huge job that will likely fail, and fail hard. The whole thing is, if rumors are to be believed, shoestring and bubblegum. If it ever goes down, totally, there is some cult-like belief they won't be able to get it started again. That doesn't inspire confidence.
We've spent a hideous amount of mon
Re:NIMBY (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, because the utilities haven't thought about *any* of these problems.
If they have they don't seem to care. Consider their initial rollout strategy here in California: move fast and install as many meters as possible before people realize what's going on or have a chance to respond. Naturally, this sort of rough shod approach led to considerable backlash in California where the people have fought numerous political battles with the public utilities over the years. So no, I don't think that they thought about any of those potential problems. I think that they saw an opportunity to cut their costs and increase profits and rushed to get as many smart meters installed as possible, with or without the knowledge of the property owners, before opt-out regulations could be passed by state and local governments.
How about a neighbourhood with AC 'rolling blackouts'?
We tried rolling blackouts here in California during the electricity crisis [wikipedia.org] brought on by ill considered deregulation of the power market. The people of California didn't much care for them, but hey the people in your state might love them, right?
Each house is told to turn off their AC for 15 minutes every 2 hours.
Oh, that's just perfect. The all powerful government, that reads your emails and listens to your phone calls, and in whose wisdom you trust completely asks you to turn of your AC for 15 minutes every 2 hours. So of course you will just do what they ask, I mean who could possibly have a problem with that, right? Please.
nobody actually cares since AC off for 15 minutes is barely noticable.
You've never lived in Arizona have you?
Lather, rinse, repeat for other appliances. Car? Home owner decides how much 'expensive' electricity VS cheap overnight electricy to use, say "charge to 50%, but contimue only if rates fall below X".
Or they could just continue driving their used fossil fuel burning car, you know the one that's fully depreciated and still runs great, and not worry about any of that.
This actually isn't rocket science, and your naysaying is part of the problem.
If you want people to change their ways then you'll have to figure out how to offer them something better than the stick. Asking people to make do with less "for the good of all" and then forcing them to obey with government mandates and decrees is not the way to achieve energy savings or social peace. In fact, it often has the opposite effect, particularly in red states, as people use more energy on purpose to spit in the eye of big government and meddling busybodies who propose such things. You might not like that, but that's reality.
Re:NIMBY (Score:4, Informative)
But when the AC comes back on, it has to work harder because now the room is warmer. Sure, you saved that 15 minutes of AC usage but instead of the AC cycling on and off every few minutes as it would normally do to maintain a room at a given temperature it will come on and stay on until it's made up the difference.
No energy has been saved in the long run, all thats happened is a tall thin peak of energy consumption has been flattened and made wider.
Smart meters help with peak power on a grid which can't handle the demand but don't save energy. It's a cheap way of dealing with a failure to invest in essential infrastructure.
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You're saying that demand for electricity in hot states is perfectly inelastic in the summer, but you'll never find an economist who agrees with you. People will let the house heat up a degree or two, or close off unnecessary rooms, or stay downstairs where it's cooler, or turn off the A/C and visit a friend or go to the mall or movie theater, etc. Trust me, allowing prices to rise and fall in response to supply and demand does a much better job of encouraging the kind of behavior by producers and consumers
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If it's hot outside, you won't be able to use your air conditioner because environmentalists have opposed every single method of electrical power generation. Eventually, we will be all shivering naked in caves because burning wood will violate the EPA's particulate emissions standards.
Chances are that readers here think that being naked in a cave with everyone including shivering Natalie Portman, Olivia Munn and Misti Dawn might not be all bad.
ICBW
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Do you know what a bond is?
Re:NIMBY (Score:5, Insightful)
1. The reason reactors are not being built has to do with the cost -- they're not cost-effective for utilities unless they get huge subsidies.
2. Where are you going to put the nuclear waste? No, seriously, stop joking around: where are you *really* going to put the waste? This has been well-studied, and there's no good answer.
3. Improving efficiency is faster and more-effective than increasing output in the near term. Sure, we do need increased capacity, but instead of burning money in the form of subsidies lavished on for-profit energy companies, let's commit real public expenditure on real efficiency initiatives.
Re:NIMBY (Score:4, Insightful)
1. The reason reactors are not being built has to do with the cost -- they're not cost-effective for utilities unless they get huge subsidies.
Like, say, burning coal and oil? Let's see what the price of those would be if you had to store the waste.
2. Where are you going to put the nuclear waste?
Burning coal produces a lot more of radioactive dust which is simply put into the air. Almost any solution for (relatively) easy to secure barrels is better to that. Oh, and besides radioactive stuff, you get carbon dioxide, sulphur oxides, nitrogen oxides and a laundry list of other pollutants.
So any comparison that is not biased towards combusting carbon-based deposits by many orders of magnitude shows that if we had any shred of rationality we should replace those with nuclear power. Geothermal is better where it's available, wind not really.
Re:NIMBY (Score:4, Informative)
Not to mention there's legislation that prevents spent rods being reprocessed. Leaving a lot of nasty radioactive waste about when it could be reprocessed into more fuel, and reused and further being a source for fast breeders.
Besides Pebble Bed reactors are the way to go.
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The issue is economical.
As far as burning light/heavy water reactor nuclear waste, the way to go is Sodium Cooled IFR reactors, that burn existing nuclear sludge, in the end producing waste that has less than 1% of the radioactiviy of the nuclear sludge that fed it, and can burn depleted uranium too, and thorium too.
Those reactors will be the solution to use the remainder of the nuclear waste, as we move to a nuclear free world in the near future. Those will be the last reactors to be shutdown eventually.
Re
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I invite you to observe that the quantity of nuclear waste per kilowatt-hour generated is very very small, compared to the quantity of carbon dioxide and other pollutants, including radioactives, emitted per kilowatt-hour by a coal-burning plant.
You COULD figure this out by noticing that a coal-fired plant takes many, many freight trains of coal per year to haul the fuel in, while a nuclear plant takes on semi-trailer I think every two years or so.
It is also worth noticing that the United States is the only
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2. There's several designs that either leave very little spent fuel or leave the fuel in contained chunks that are easily disposed of, additionally there's reactor designs that eat the spent fuel from other reactors and spit out less dangerous waste. The problem with waste is not a technical issue from what I've seen, it's a political
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Actually it's both technical and political.
For instance, the nuclear waste repository was sited in Nevada for political reasons. It was not a good site otherwise. The best sites were excluded early on for political reasons.
Second, we use the reactors we use because they work and we are familiar with them. At least most of the time. Yes, there are other designs that might work better. In theory. But based on how well the current ones "work", I doubt it.
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1. The reason reactors are not being built has to do with the cost -- they're not cost-effective for utilities unless they get huge subsidies.
Subsidies and long term planning for essential infrastructure is one of the few things that almost everyone agrees is firmly in the role of government. Why even subsidize it? Just build it and run it and screw corporate profit. Break even on the power generation and reap the benefits of increased industry.
2. Where are you going to put the nuclear waste? No, seriously, stop joking around: where are you *really* going to put the waste? This has been well-studied, and there's no good answer.
There are many good answers, most of which were figured out before the first nuclear plant was ever built. The most popular seems to be sealed off at the bottom of extremely deep and stable mines. The catc
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The issue is that people assess risk differently. Some people look at the probability of a bad event multiplied by it's magnitude, others just look at the probability of a bad event, others just look at the magnitude. People may not do the math explicitly, but that's effectively what's going on in their head. Now how do you say which method is rational. I like probability of a bad event multiplied by it's magnitude. On the other hand, I will acknowledge the people who are concerned about the magnitude
Re:NIMBY (Score:4, Interesting)
a couple of decades? Let's see with San Onofre offline California residents are paying more in electrical rates now and the power is being generated by more mainline gas generation to make up the shortfall. This article indicates to that it may be difficult for California to meet it's CO2 goals because of the need to burn 360 million cubic feet of gas per day to make up for the loss of the reactors at San Onofre. [rawstory.com]
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It's going to be pretty ugly in a couple decades. It would be nice if people could be rational and let us build newer reactors.
Well it is happening, but the focus these days is on more plentiful smaller reactors.
Westinghouse is beginning fueling tests on the SMR Reactors [westinghousenuclear.com], which are small enough to be delivered on a couple flatbed trucks. They are engineered for 225 MWe . [nytimes.com]
The Babcock & Wilcox Company is designing their own model [generationmpower.com] as well as NuScale [nuscalepower.com]. Most of these are in the 180 MWe range.
It seems that they are well on track for being available in a couple of decades, maybe in as little as 5 years for the Westinghouse models.
Our
Re:NIMBY (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:NIMBY (Score:5, Interesting)
But when you try to tell someone that, all they can think of is Chernobyl and Fukushima. Both were outdated and should have been scrapped but due to irrational fear, were allowed to keep running past thier expiration date.
That's exactly what TFA is talking about: when calculating the gain-cost-ratio of any new technologies, you have to always calculate in a) the cost of getting the technology to mature and b) the cost of keeping the technology up-to-date and c) the cost of finally scrapping the technology. Yes, we have several technologies. No, those technologies are not mature (e.g. we have no clue how they will scale, how much fine tuning it will take until they are at their designed power output and for how long they will maintain this output). And we don't know which incidents will happen in the future that force us to retrofit the technologies, and more so, at which point in time it will be cheaper just to scrap the new technologies instead of continous retrofitting.
The experience with those mature technologies like the ones used in the U.S. (which didn't, with the exception of Three Mile Island, have had any large and costly failures) proves so far, that the time frame in which those technologies ran at least at 90% of their capacities were much shorter than expected, and 70% capacity would be a much more realistic assumption.
Re:NIMBY (Score:5, Interesting)
One of our customers is a power plant operator, and they showed us the problems they have. Because of many small powerplants in regions where in former times only were consumers of eletrical power, they now have a huge balance problem. In the region, which uses at maximum about 100 MWatts of power, there are power plant installations of 400 MW. If there is a larger failure somewhere outside this region, and those 400 MWatts kick in as replacement power, the grid, which is fine for normal operation, will be completely overloaded, if all 400 MWatts suddenly push energy into the grid.
Another problem is the direction of power distributions. With a big plant design, the grid is built in a way that power runs only in one direction: away from the power plant to the consumers. Thus all regulation mechanisms are adapted to only one direction. If you have several power plants which run at different times, and consumers of power which sometimes take power from one plant, sometimes from others, you need a grid that is able to handle bi-directional or multi-directional power distribution. Most grids are not adapted to such a scenario.
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These problems have already happened, they caused the Blackout of 1965 [wikipedia.org], and the Blackout of 2003 [wikipedia.org]. Essentially, whenever there is a significant mismatch between the load and the supply on the electrical grid, then a massive destabilization effect happens.
1. Excessive load will cause an excessive amount of reactive power to be drawn over certain power lines. Once this power mismatch becomes excessive, a protective device (somewhere) will trip. This safely will disconnect the power line, but will not disco
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Need is an interesting word. Our use and need for electric power as two quite different things. Even if we decide nobody should have to go without their favorite gadgets there is no reason to think that we would need to produce more power to meet demand. This is principally because newer devices are often better than old one. A 15 year old fridge is a monster and junking it for a shiny new one will save the owner money. Other new technologies such as more efficient lighting are saving huge amounts of power.
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The only problem is, that new fridge Isn't using less power then that 15 year old model as I well know. Had to replace my old fidge with a new unit and it actually uses a bit more energy then the old one did because it has less insulation. You want to cut the energy use of a fridge? Glue an extra 1 inch of rigid foam board to all sides. Sure it's only an increase of R2 but that makes one hell of a difference for most refridgerators. Alternative is to buy a SunCold unit that's designed with 3-5 inches of ins
Re:NIMBY (Score:5, Interesting)
And this makes me wonder why we still build refrigerators, and the place they sit in within homes, the way we do.
In some parts of the country, there are several months of the year when we try to remove heat from our homes. But the refrig goes to all the trouble (i.e., energy use) to "separate" heat from already air conditioned air. Then, what does it do with the heat? It dumps the "heat" back in to the conditioned air in the house to repeat the cycle!!! Stupid...
Why not put an exhaust vent (and maybe fan) to the exterior and an outside air intake, perhaps with remote actuated dampers, by the refrig in new homes (and kitchen remodels). Hook that to a new class of "integrated climate control" refrig that takes its condenser cooling input air from either the room or the outside source and exhausts it either to the room or outside -- all depending on input from the thermostat controlling that zone of the house. Obviously input/exhaust dampers would be closed except when the refrig was running (in case of failure, it would default to taking house air in and exhaust the hot air back into the house).
Seems more efficient - a bit of up front cost (and, unfortunately, a need for some simple standardization between architects, the HVAC industry, and appliance manufacturers) but over the years it seems like it would pay for itself in areas with much hot weather.
(Sorry for my likely abuse of the word "heat" et al)
Re:NIMBY (Score:5, Informative)
And this makes me wonder why we still build refrigerators, and the place they sit in within homes, the way we do.
In some parts of the country, there are several months of the year when we try to remove heat from our homes. But the refrig goes to all the trouble (i.e., energy use) to "separate" heat from already air conditioned air. Then, what does it do with the heat? It dumps the "heat" back in to the conditioned air in the house to repeat the cycle!!! Stupid...
Why not put an exhaust vent (and maybe fan) to the exterior and an outside air intake, perhaps with remote actuated dampers, by the refrig in new homes (and kitchen remodels). Hook that to a new class of "integrated climate control" refrig that takes its condenser cooling input air from either the room or the outside source and exhausts it either to the room or outside -- all depending on input from the thermostat controlling that zone of the house. Obviously input/exhaust dampers would be closed except when the refrig was running (in case of failure, it would default to taking house air in and exhaust the hot air back into the house).
Seems more efficient - a bit of up front cost (and, unfortunately, a need for some simple standardization between architects, the HVAC industry, and appliance manufacturers) but over the years it seems like it would pay for itself in areas with much hot weather.
(Sorry for my likely abuse of the word "heat" et al)
Do you really want to install and maintain all of that duct work and automatic louvers for "several months of the year" when it would make a difference? Don't forget to take into account the energy use for the fan that you'll need to run to vent the heat outside, and to account for the fact that while you're saving a bit of energy by making your air conditioner work less hard, your refrigerator compressor will be doing more work when the evaporator coils are cooled by 95 degree outside air instead of 70 degree air conditioned air.
I'm not sure that the energy cost savings would be worth it - a modern energy efficient refrigerator uses around $60 of electricity/year (500KWh * 12 cents/KWh). Even if you saved 100% of that energy, it might take you around 10 years to recoup the cost of $500 worth of duct work, electronic louvers, vent fan, and associated control circuitry. If you run the air conditioning 4 months out of the year, then it's a 30 year payback time.
Re:NIMBY (Score:5, Insightful)
I have no idea where your 1.2 GW per person figure comes from
Turn in your nerd card. [youtube.com]
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GREAT SCOTT! (Score:4, Informative)
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The weird thing is that computer power consumption at the user level seems pretty steady. My office PC of 10 years ago used the same amount of power as my office PC today. Today's PC has the potential to do more but, aside from facebooking and streaming video, most office workers are doing the same things now as they were 10 years ago. Maybe even less local (work-related) processing if they're at one of those companies that Clouded. The cube farm computer should be down to around 5 watts by now but it's
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Yes, over the course of a full day, it averages out that a Raspberry Pi or TI Graphing calculator has enough power to do all the work an end user is doing. However, end users hate watching the hour-glass spin for several minutes while Excel crunches some data, or Word reindexes a document, or Windows applies some needed updates. As the BOFH has tried to explain to the management in his stories, 100% utilization is 100% utilization; when some financial trader for the company needs to dial into a company mode
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I have no idea where your 1.2 GW per person figure comes from, but for your family's safely I hope it is hyperbole, since it would take about 1,000,000 toaster overs to generate that kind of power, though far be it from me to judge how dark you like your toast.
My theory is that he keeps the butter in the freezer.
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power consumption
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=united+states+power+use+%2F+population+of+united+states [wolframalpha.com]
1.39 kilowatt hr / year per person in the USA
If everyone globally uses the same (similar) amount, which is reasonable, it will require about 5x more power that currently used globally. That assumes a lot of things, of course.
Projections are fun!
Note that's not 1.39 KW-Hr/Year, but is 1.39KW per person (or 1.39 KW-year per person per year), which is about 12,200 KW-Hr per person per year. This must include all sources of electrical energy usage in the USA (industrial, agricultural, etc) since my own annual residential use is closer to 1200KW-hr per person.
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There are many solutions that will be ready long before a nuke project started today.
Natural Gas Fuel Cell power plants are twice as efficient as thermal natural gas plants, so produce half the pollution for the same electricity and their exhaust makes it very easy to sequester just the CO2 (without the steam), since the reformer that produces the CO2 is a completely separate stage from the fuel cell that produces only water.
Since Fuel Cells are modular, those plants will produce over 99% of their capacity
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Natural Gas Fuel Cell power plants are twice as efficient as thermal natural gas plants
Maybe compared to inefficient natural gas plants, but Combined-cycle [wikipedia.org] plants have efficiencies over 50% (approaching 60%) so what you say is not possible in general.
I've got nothing against natural gas fuel cells, and would be interested in any links, but overstatements are always undesirable.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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You do realize that there are these things called roofs. They are everywhere. They are great places for solar installations.
I think Germany has also proved that you can generate a massive amount of energy from solar. Why waste the time with nuclear. If you want jobs, start with solar.
The real reason we are building NG and coal plants? They are much easier and cheaper to build than nuclear plants. They can be build smaller. They can be built quicker. People don't object if they have problems. These
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the 1.21 GW of power that each person will eventually need
That figure is very deceptive - it's the peak load required per time machine (not per capita). Not only does that 1.21GW peak need to be converted to the much small average load, but time machine pooling can substantially reduce per capita use (we should convert to 4+ seaters instead of 2 seat Deloreans).
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Maybe the answer is embedded in your question.
Maybe we should be asking why we're going to each need "1.21 GW" of power.
I'm pretty sure my family uses less power than it did a decade ago, and I know my lifestyle hasn't suffered.
Imagine that. I guess we need to bring back the "Cl
Re:NIMBY (Score:4, Informative)
What killed Chernobyl, Fukushima and Three Miles Island isn't that they were particularly unsafe.
Chernobyl blew up mainly due to a whole bunch of human errors while preparing the reactor for a safety test - preparations were supposed to start nearly a day ahead of time and the chief engineer decided to rush it after preparation got delayed by a government request to run the reactor a few hours longer to accommodate peak hours. In their rush to bring down reactor output to test level, they accidentally radon-poisoned the core, power wouldn't come back up so they started removing control rods beyond GE's safe minimum and then got caught with their pants down in their attempts to restart it when the radon poisoning cleared up and reactor output surged out of control. This highlighted many design issues that could have helped the staff figure out what was happening a little sooner but the fundamental failure was human errors.
Three Mile Island's core issue was a flawed control/indicator pair for a discharge valve where the indicator tracked the control switch's state rather than the valve's actual state which caused the reactor to bleed dry without staff knowing it was happening. This got further complicated by lack of first-degree measurement of water level in the reactor core. How such a fundamental and trivial design flaw ever made it in an actual reactor design is beyond me. Without this vital bit of information, plant engineers had no way to know exactly what was going wrong when nearly every alarm, many of which contradictory, started going off at once.
For Fukushima, the single dumbest mistake and the root cause of most complications there was putting backup generators in floodable areas, causing the loss of nearly all backup power within hours. There was nothing fundamentally wrong with the reactors themselves. Most nuclear plants house their backup generators in the turbine building precisely to shelter them from elements but Fukushima had theirs outdoors near sea-level. I'm still scratching my head about how the people who managed the site had the foresight to install wave-breakers off-shore but neglected to protect generators from potential flooding in some way.
Pebble and molten salt reactors still benefit from everything that was learned from past mistakes. If you had a pebble or MSR reactor with Chernobyl-era knowledge and experience, Chernobyl would likely still have happened: still stuck with a massive power surge once radon poisoning clears up. Same for TMI and Fukushima. Pebbles and molten salt may be more convenient and safer to handle and process but there is very little they can do to prevent operator, design and construction errors.
Following the procedures and operating manual would have saved Chernobyl by never allowing it to reach the highly volatile state it was forced into in the first place. A simple direct-observation water level gauge would have saved TMI by providing engineers the single most critical information they needed to know exactly what was happening. Putting generators indoors in a safe location would have saved Fukushima by keeping them safe from the salt-water ingestion that fouled them. Being "obsolete" played little to no part in any of those incidents; all the measures that would have prevented those incidents are very low-tech even for their original construction dates and could have been fixed at little to no cost if someone had simply thought of these being liabilities back then.
If you are going to defend nuclear as a safe energy source, I strongly suggest researching WHY those historic failures occurred before blindly tagging all "obsolete" reactors as intrinsically unsafe; otherwise you are simply contributing to the FUD about it. Old reactors are just about as safe as newer ones once retrofitted to address potential safety hazard as they are identified - and this applies to newer reactors regardless of type as well.
Newer reactors simply have the benefit of decades worth of safety enhancements being built-in from day-1.
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1. Xenon, not Radon poisoning. This has been known much much before Chernobyl. Since 1950s. That's why when you shut down, you have to wait for Xenon to disappear before you restart. A few days.
2. GE's safe limits? The reactor was RBMK
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK [wikipedia.org]
3. Design issue in RBMK causes water to be pulled into reactor when reactor is at 100% power. Water is a moderator. So when Xenon was burnt off, they tried to reduce power, but that resulted in more power because of water pipes getting pulled i
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Please point to the many breeder reactors that have been successfully operating (meeting the claims established for them) for decades.
If you have difficulty (and you will), that's why it's a hand wave.
Fission power is the past (Score:2)
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What's going on with space-based solar power?
Why? Earth-based solar power doesn't work?
Solar panels on the sun charge things more quickly.
This subject is shill ridden (Score:5, Interesting)
The last time I commented to a post on this subject I saw my karma go from excellent to good because of rabid pro nuke folks modding down anything that asked questions of real long term cost and un subsidized cost of nuclear power per G/Watt versus wind or solar actual costs.
It would be nice to have a real discussion about this with citations to factual numbers, but there seems to be a foaming at the mouth "nuclear power is the only answer" bunch here that wat to obfuscate real data.
Even asking questions about factual discussion of long term nuclear power ACTUAL cost will prolly cost me Karma.
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wat to obfuscate real data
How else would someone get big expensive nuculer reactors installed??
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/. karma > nuclear energy discussion
Re:This subject is shill ridden (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think they're shills. Fanboys, perhaps, but not shills. Honestly, the nuclear industry just doesn't seem big enough to warrant forum shills. Talking heads or TV experts, yeah, possible shills, but not Slashdotters. We're not that important.
I, for one, think nuclear is something we need to be using more, but I'm advocating a nuclear+hydro+geothermal+solar+wind+tidal as a replacement for coal+gas+oil, not as a pure nuclear solution (at least, until we get fusion working - if fusion delivers on its promises, I would have zero issue with a pure-fusion power grid). But if you want to advocate a pure-renewable system, I wouldn't downmod you (I've actually got mod points right now).
Just a suggestion, though? Saying "we need more studies" or "what's the *real* cost?" tends to come across more like FUD than actual debate, particularly when you're coming from a position that is just as questionable in those areas. Maybe they're thinking *you're* the shill?
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Isn't Karma a renewable resource?
Oh.. If you replace Nuclear power with (X) whatever X is that's quite a chunk of power to replace. In 2011, according to this [world-nuclear.org] Nuclear power in this country produced over 821 billion kWh of power. If you replace that with X, we need to know what that replacement cost should be, right?
How many wind Turbines that kill about 600,000 birds / year including Eagles/Hawks/Owls. [grist.org]
We're not building any more large Hydro projects, and we have drought in most of the country presumably
Re:This subject is shill ridden (Score:4, Informative)
nuclear wasn't being subsidized in the way most people think. They are subsidized loans
Which are subsidies, plain and simple. Interest on construction loans is a standard cost that has to be dealt with.
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The "subsidy" isn't paying the interest on the loan, it is guaranteeing the loan. It's a bit like your dad cosigning your first car, your dad isn't paying the loan, nor is he paying the interest.
Really? (Score:3)
Quoth TFA:
It is unrealistic to assume that complex new technologies will have a significantly better experience.
I might be wrong, but I was of the understanding that the 1970's generation of nuclear reactors were mostly based on designs proven a decade or more earlier. Is the article suggesting that in fifty years there has been little progress in making them more economical to build and run? This seems hard to believe.
Nuclear power, for good or ill, strikes me as one of the few ways to lever ourselves out of the hole we dug mining fossil fuels. It boggles the mind that in Europe despite having the potential for clean, cheap and abundent energy in nuclear power we're still building fucking gas fired power stations.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
Is the article suggesting that in fifty years there has been little progress in making them more economical to build and run?
The biggest problem is that while specialized parts and materials may become more readily available which should translate into lower prices, regulations and safety requirements have become a whole lot tighter over time and costs associated with that have increased much faster.
You can compare this to the aviation industry where a bolt that would cost $0.10 at the local hardware store if you were allowed to get it from there ends up costing $20 because of certifications. It sounds completely nuts but that's how it is in fields obsessed with safety and regulations... if you watch Mayday (a show/documentary that recreates the story of real crashes and near-catastrophes), there are a few episodes where maintenance engineers ended up with hundreds of deaths or at the very least terrorized passengers on their conscience for things as simple as using the wrong - though seemingly identical - bolts.
They are NOT aging that well. (Score:3)
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Or you create a lot of mini-Hanfords. Yes, that's hyperbolic but I wish people wouldn't say that reprocessing or something similar is the answer. There's a reason we don't do it. One reason is the cost. But it also produces more waste. Hopefully not as radioactive, but there is more waste.
And those new reactor designs? Still unproven. Why will they work better that the current versions? Note, I'm not asking why they should, I'm asking why they will.
There's a reason that nuclear plants are being phas
How about some actual research? (Score:5, Interesting)
What I find utterly baffling is that research in this field appears to be dead in the USA, Europe and Japan. We seem to be content to watch China, India and a few others design and build the next generation of nuclear reactors. Then we will have the privilege of spending money to decommission our own hopelessly obsolete reactors. We will pay higher rates as the availability and diversity of power sources is reduced. We will endure unreliable swings and reduction of supply. We will pay for electricity generated by the new guys on the block. We will watch as yet more industry moves where there is cheap, reliable power.
When we've had enough of all that, we'll spend money to license their designs since we made a point of making "intellectual property" central to our international agreements. Those countries will be more than happy to throw our IP regime regime right back in our collective face.
The NIMBYs, the willfully ignorant, and a few well-meaning critics have "won" in the West, and so thoroughly that even building research reactors has become impossible. The above will be their "prize".
Re:How about some actual research? (Score:4, Insightful)
What I find utterly baffling is that research in this field appears to be dead in the USA, Europe and Japan.
Why would any company in their right mind research new reactor designs in countries where the government won't let them be built?
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Civilizations rise and fall. We will give things one one by one: auto industry,nuclear power, space, high energy physics, fastest computers, tall buildings, high speed rail, commercial aircraft. Each time we will tell ourselves that we could do these things, we just don't want to anymore.
Retirement isn't bad (Score:5, Insightful)
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leverage (Score:2)
"early retirement of plants to extract concessions" -- leverage and coercion right there.
thoughtful, eh? (Score:4, Insightful)
You know, it could be that the author is somewhat biased... The entire article is about problems with the design of large nuclear plants-- hard to repair and expensive to build, it says-- so the obvious conclusion would be to build smaller, more flexible designs, right? But just to guard against Wrong Think it closes with this note:
And:
I might point out that since in fact, the safety of the nuclear industry is exlemplary by any reasonable standard -- like deaths/kilowatt -- maybe one should also be skeptical about these accusations of broken promises?
not nuclear problems (Score:3)
These are not nuclear technology problems, they are toxic politics and even more toxic business practices.
The actual technical issue is failed replacement steam generators, in both cases due to management gambling on cheaping out and losing. Somehow though, it's 'impossible' to replace the defective steam generators even though they were already replaced once?!? I guess we';re getting stupid fast if we already forgot how.
Put the owners on the hook for it (rather than the ratepayers) and watch how fast they come up with a solution that gets the plants safely back online.
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I'm skeptical as well. From http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_Station&oldid=560938909#NRC_response [wikipedia.org]
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There is another important thing to consider which is demand. Often demand is thought of as inflexible and that we must simply supply what people choose to use.
There is huge potential for power savings in efficiency. Take cooling costs, for example. Air conditioning is a huge part of electric demand. This cost could be greatly reduced in a number of ways:
1) Appliance efficiency standards. A more efficient air conditioner doesn't cost the owner much more up front and saves a bundle in the long run.
2) Insulat
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Shut down all the nuclear and coal plants and subsidize solar and wind energy, and by the end of this century we will have more than met our energy needs.
So what powers your home when the wind stops and the sun goes down? What keeps the grid up without brown-outs destroying all your A/C->D/C power converts and the equipment they power (which is pretty much EVERYTHING from TV's and computers, to cell phones, refrigerators, and washing machines)? You need BASELINE power stations on the grid. There has yet to be a solar or wind BASELINE plant invented (there is a theoretical one for solar that requires launching panels into space outside of the earth's and m
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Isn't that how they did it in the Star Trek storyline?
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They also had dilithium reactors too.
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Your dislike of the options doesn't make them bad.
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'Sufficiently distributed' wind power can also eliminate all those pesky birds.
Better tell the Audubon Society, because they support wind power.
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Some of the old reactors are developing chinks due to the constant nips of the operating machinery. Sometime the equipment is hosed down so that they are soaking, with wet backs. Of course the owners don't want to put money into maintenance because most of them are quite greedy and niggardly.
I sit here, wearing my coon skin hat and drinking limey flavoured beverages as a froggie would go through water.
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Niggard : (noun) an excessively parsimonious, miserly, or stingy person. See here [reference.com]