Good riddance. The immorality of nuclear power is touted by an interesting array of US citizens. Everybody from far-left Environmentalists to far-right Evangelicals. All other factors aside (safety, expense, regulation, etc), it is flat-out immoral to leave the wastes to future generations. Future generations stand to gain nothing from thousands and thousands of tons of waste, but they have to maintain it for hundreds of thousands of years. Current containment is only rated for 200 years. http://www.npr.org/2017/08/06/54158...cas-nuclear-renaissance-failed-to-materialize Then there were setbacks. First came the global financial crisis, which flattened the demand for electricity. Then fracking flooded the market with cheap natural gas. Renewable energy — especially wind power — also got more competitive. According to Brown, "that meant if you went back to reappraise the nuclear investments, they probably would not have been approved, or might not have been approved." Both the Georgia and South Carolina nuclear projects racked up billions of dollars in cost overruns and delays. Then earlier this year, Westinghouse, which was building the reactors in both states, went bankrupt, blaming high construction costs for its problems.
The one thing I hate about nuclear power is that if you turn everything off it causes massive environmental damage. Like in Japan.
It doesn't help they keep building these things in tsunami/hurricane/earthquake zones like they're just waiting for a disaster. Something like 90% of the US reactors and a majority of the world's reactors are 'leaking' at previously unacceptible and 'dangerous' levels. But why fix it when you can just redefine 'dangerous' and keep increasing the acceptable dosage we get in our food, water and air? Nuclear power was great on paper when we thought we had responsible leadership safeguarding our health and environment. But clearly we don't. We have a bunch of psychopaths, and a bunch of reactors to maintain or they burn us all from the inside out. **** nuclear power. (I still support nuclear subs, aircraft carriers, etc, the strategic value outweighs the much smaller environmental impact, but industrial power plants need to be *responsibly* phased out).
BS those rectors failed due to relying on the sea walls to stay in place normal people would go okay what if the sea walls fails what is Plan B and Plan C as backups to be sure the reactors we depend on are safe in case of a tsunami of unusual height and force hitting the coast. They ignored having contingency options in place or to use better and newer nuclear power designs. It is still safe France has used it for decades and its a dependable source of power and if the sun isn't shining and wind isn't blowing it still works and we need backups for green power options.
The point I think you missed is that without maintenance they WILL meltdown catastrophically. Even a localized social collapse scenario is all it would take for one or several reactors to decimate large portions of the globe if ignored for a relatively short period of time.
That is why you maintain them and if you need to shut one down you do it properly, ever consider we could be researching ways to use it better and safer instead of vilifying it.
Safety is only one issue with nuclear power. My main contention is the storage of wastes, and the immorality of imposing that on future generations. Our descendents will have to maintain megatons of waste for hundreds of thousands of year. And yet, they get absolutely nothing for their effort. The current containment vessels are rated for 200 years.
Nuclear power does have some serious economic advantages in countries like Japan and Finland. And ironically nuclear power would make the most sense in Australia, a country that has completely disavowed nuclear energy. Australia is the world's leading exporter of uranium ore, and has vast stretches of uninhabited dry barren wasteland in its interior where it could safely operate a reactor. (Of course, all those vast stretches of desert also mean a lot of solar energy potential) The cost of importing fuel to run conventional power plants in Japan is very expensive, with its high population and developed standard of living that uses a lot of electricity. There's not a lot of space in Japan for wind turbine farms or solar arrays without ruining the scenery or cutting down forest. Of course, also ironic, Japan is probably to worst place to locate a nuclear power plant if anything went wrong, because of the high population density, proximity to the ocean, and the importance of the fishing industry to the country. So what Japan really needs is nuclear power plants that are super-safe and have no chance of anything going wrong. Then you have a country like Finland with high heating costs in the winter. Not really the best place for solar, especially at that time of year. What I'm saying is that it's possible different forms of energy production will make sense in different countries. Renewables might be more practical in some countries than others.
My personal feeling is that nuclear reactors should only be built in remote dry desert areas far away from any bodies of water. But Japan may be an exception due to the country's unique circumstances. The situation Japan is faced with is a real conundrum.
molten salt thorium reactors are far safer than the ones we have now. The waste can be reused as fuel and the half life is far shorter. Anyone who thinks renewable energy is going to meet our energy needs is either lying or disingenuous.
Hardly safer. As a matter of fact, they are still cleaning up the Trial test from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the 1960s. From the source: http://web.ornl.gov/info/ridgelines/nov12/msre.htm The reactor facility, called “Ole Salty” by some, was converted to lab and office space as the reactor lay in stand-by status. Then, in March 1994, samples of the off-gases in the process lines unexpectedly revealed uranium hexafluoride (UF6) and fluorine, a highly reactive gas. Where surveyors expected to find part-per-million concentrations, they found concentrations of UF6 of up to 8 percent and fluorine of 50 percent. ... Engineers then had a more protracted challenge: How to remove both the UF6 that had collected in the piping and the very radioactive and chemically unstable uranium-233 that had collected in charcoal-bed filters for off-gases. Those filters were surrounded by a water-filled chamber, raising concern of a criticality accident that could have spread contamination for miles. ... “We discovered a highly hazardous situation in 1994,” Rushton says. “The uranium in the charcoal beds was in an unfavorable geometry that could have led to a chain reaction. If the system had burped, the contamination would have been dispersed over a wide area. “The more studies we did, the more they showed that it could happen. There was a significant potential for disaster.” ... MSRE’s other big challenge is removing the highly radioactive fuel salt. The technical alternatives have been extensively analyzed, including an evaluation by the National Academy of Sciences. Fred Peretz, Tom Kring and David Vandergriff lead a team that will melt the salt in the drain tanks, separate and remove the uranium and remove the residual salt. The uranium in the fuel salt is in the form of uranium-233, once a fuel material but now touted as a source of bismuth-213, an isotope useful in nuclear medicine. MSRE fuel—the overall inventory of uranium at MSRE is about 17 kilograms— stands a good chance of saving lives in the form of radioisotope treatments. ORNL stores almost half the world’s supply of U-233 and has some of the only hot-cell facilities suitable for processing the rare material for medical uses. Imagine the amount of money that is going into this cleanup, over that number of years. Going to raise taxes to pay for these new reactor, the waste disposal, and the waste management?
What about in social collapse scenarios? Who keeps the reactors going when no one is supplying, supporting, paying the workers? Everything else manmade in the world just stops working when humans leave it alone. Nuclear reactors meltdown and kill the planet when left alone. We've placed time bombs all over the globe. It's not a matter of 'improving' them. This problem is inherent in nuclear fission.
I guess I am lying when I state that there are countries almost there right now. https://www.cnbc.com/2016/10/07/the...ntries-leading-the-way-in-energy.html#slide=1
Still won't work, we've dammed up all the rivers we probably can, wind and sun are not available 24x7 and not a workable solution for many areas.
I wonder if the fracking industry and wind turbine manufacturers were grateful for the helpful words on their behalf? 'cynic'? Who, me? Whatever would give anyone that idea?
I'm in full support of the Wind Industry. I have a residential wind turbine and solar panels, which produce a surplus of electricity 12 months a year. My next car will probably be an electric car, to utilize some of that surplus. I'm also an electric engineer (BSEE with over 30 years experience). My idea of responsible electrical power generation is renewables with pumped water storage and hydroelectric power. Pumped water storage has an 85% efficiency. It's proven, and it's used all over the world. And the end result, is hydroelectric power, which is the most responsive electricity for varying loads on the planet. http://energystorage.org/energy-storage/technologies/pumped-hydroelectric-storage
It is already working regardless of your ignorance of it. Then there is this. https://phys.org/news/2016-09-wave-produced-electricity-online-hawaii.html Perfect free energy production if expanded.
