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airdvr

Should Nuclear be a part of the clean energy strategy?

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1 hour ago, billvon said:

 

nuclear waste can be safely stored indefinitely.  

Hi Bill,

IMO that is a very general statement that says very little.

At Hanford ( almost in my backyard ) they buried the waste for 'indefinite storage.'  Then the caskets leaked.  They were quite close to the Columbia River.  Had that waste seeped into the Columbia the results would have been devastating.

IMO any discussion of 'safe storage' must have specifics so that the specifics can be understood & discussed.

Jerry Baumchen

PS)  And let us not forget all of the increase in cancer downwind from Hanford that was denied by the gov't. consistently until they could no longer refute the facts.

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4 hours ago, billvon said:

 In reality, we will keep generating nuclear waste, since there are a bunch of nuclear power plants operating in the US.

Well, that's a given. But they all have a limited lifespan. Extensions will not be given forever. And there are few signs that more are going to be built. It's hard to imagine that the needed fiscal and physical discipline required to maintain spent fuel is going to be available in the long term when all these plants become liabilities instead of assets.

4 hours ago, billvon said:

It definitely has downsides.  Just far fewer than other forms of power.

Fewer, I could agree on. But that is not the same as lesser. Freedom from CO2 emissions and other more poisonous products of combustion are the only advantages it has. The twin disadvantages of sky high costs, plus the unknown long term costs of waste storage look to be enough to basically shut down expansion of this industry. There is a reason no one is investing in new nuclear plants. I don't see it changing. There are better, cheaper and safer ways of generating electricity. Solar, wind, and possibly tidal combined with new storage capacity will slowly fill the gap while we continue our burning natural gas reserves and pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere is what is going to happen. It may not be the wisest thing, but it is the cheapest and most practical.

 

China has announced big plans to move into nuclear. But reality is even catching with their centrally planned economy. They are falling more and more behind their schedule since they looked at the costs and dangers and have swallowed hard and suspended new starts for the last 2 or 3 years. India is still pressing on, but is far behind projections and has poured a lot of money into it with limited capacity to show for it. Europe is a mixed bag of policies, but a third of existing plants are ready to shut down and there are serious concerns that the operators do not have the funds to care for many of the shuttered plants. France and Finland are constructing newer generation plants, but they are seriously over budget and hardly a shining beacon to attract more investment.

 

And as far as reprocessing and or recycling the fuel goes, that is just a punt down the road. It merely trades some of the immediate problems for a slightly different set of problems on a slightly different time scale.

 

In short, nuclear is not going away anytime soon. But the renaissance of design cost and safety  talked about by the industry appears to be in two words, utter bullshit.

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4 hours ago, JerryBaumchen said:

At Hanford ( almost in my backyard ) they buried the waste for 'indefinite storage.'  Then the caskets leaked.  They were quite close to the Columbia River.  Had that waste seeped into the Columbia the results would have been devastating.

IMO any discussion of 'safe storage' must have specifics so that the specifics can be understood & discussed.

Jerry Baumchen

PS)  And let us not forget all of the increase in cancer downwind from Hanford that was denied by the gov't. consistently until they could no longer refute the facts.

A few things there.

1) Hanford is primarily storage for nuclear weapons byproducts, not spent nuclear waste from commercial reactors.  They are very different materials and different considerations apply.

2) Most of the problems at Hanford has not come from storage of spent reactor fuel.  They come from the careless storage of moderately contaminated stuff in tunnels and storage buildings never intended for long term storage.

3) The problems will remain because no one wants to move any of that to a better storage site, one not on a river.

 

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On 4/13/2019 at 3:27 PM, billvon said:

I don't think it will take a lot of money, just some foresight.

Look at the Oklo reactors.  16 reactors ran for centuries, and then the waste products were safely stored on site for 2 billion years.  And that took no money at all.  With careful selection of a similar site, we could reproduce that result.

I don't think they are quite grasping the tongue in cheek here. 

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On 4/13/2019 at 3:27 PM, billvon said:

I don't think it will take a lot of money, just some foresight.

Look at the Oklo reactors.  16 reactors ran for centuries, and then the waste products were safely stored on site for 2 billion years.  And that took no money at all.  With careful selection of a similar site, we could reproduce that result.

I don't think they are quite grasping the tongue in cheek here. 

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I am not a fan of Uranium or Plutonium fueled reactors because of the potential risks are high. I have looked a little into Thorium and I think it may be the better option.  Nuclear power is our future what other option are there that will meet the demand of the hungry growing population. 

     

 

 

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1 minute ago, lug said:

I am not a fan of Uranium or Plutonium fueled reactors because of the potential risks are high. I have looked a little into Thorium and I think it may be the better option.    

 

 

Thorium is a great option.  They solve the fuel supply problem, but you still have nuclear waste to deal with.  Further, almost all thorium reactors are molten salt reactors, which present their own problems.  (Liquid nuclear fuel has some pretty self-evident problems from a safety perspective.)  They may be a good solution in 10-20 years once all the kinks have been worked out.

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Bernie Sanders Denies Closure Of Vermont Nuclear Plant Increased Emissions -- The Data Says Otherwise

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/04/16/bernie-sanders-denies-closure-of-vermont-nuclear-plant-increased-emissions-the-data-says-otherwise/#2d9d65c843d9

Vermont shows that renewables cannot make up for the loss of nuclear. The only wind farm, Deerfield, to be built in Vermont over the last decade took eight years to be completed due to litigation related to the siting of the farm in black bear habitat.

It would take 59 wind farms the size of Deerfield to replace the annual quantity of electricity from Vermont Yankee, which was one of the smallest nuclear plants in the U.S. when it was closed.

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(edited)
16 hours ago, airdvr said:

Bernie Sanders Denies Closure Of Vermont Nuclear Plant Increased Emissions -- The Data Says Otherwise

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/04/16/bernie-sanders-denies-closure-of-vermont-nuclear-plant-increased-emissions-the-data-says-otherwise/#2d9d65c843d9

Vermont shows that renewables cannot make up for the loss of nuclear. The only wind farm, Deerfield, to be built in Vermont over the last decade took eight years to be completed due to litigation related to the siting of the farm in black bear habitat.

It would take 59 wind farms the size of Deerfield to replace the annual quantity of electricity from Vermont Yankee, which was one of the smallest nuclear plants in the U.S. when it was closed.

First, there's no requirement for Vermont to get its electrical power from sources inside the state as its borders are imaginary lines, not giant walls of porcelain. 

Next, sorry to say but your source (A pro-nuke energy lobbyist) is including transportation, cooking and heating to account for the increase in emissions, not electrical power.  Also Sanders said "I don't believe that's accurate" so, not exactly damning.  I used to live near the reactor, fished downstream of it and ate at a restaurant right next to it.  It's a derelict plant and was the last of its type in operation.  The state has strung it along because it provided such a large percentage of power but it needed to get shut down as components were literally crumbling.

As for wind in VT the state is very protective of the mountain top but it would only take increasing from the current wind power (119 MW now, 193 MW including what's under construction) a factor of 5 to handle what the plant (620 MW) did.  I know the "55 times the size of the Deerfield plant" sounds dramatic but that's not the case.  Besides, Deerfield is a 30 MW facility so that would only be times 20.

And again, to reiterate the first point, there's no requirement for Vermont to get its electrical power from sources inside the state (or even use 100% wind) as it's borders are imaginary lines, not giant walls of porcelain. 

 

Edited by DJL

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