Comments (31)

@BOB.
you know nothing about nuclear plants and nuclear reactors.

@reza
you know nothing about a wars because of uranium.

@Dimitry

French nuclear technology has many weak points. to shut down whole elecricy production because they found another problem with a reactor is suicide.

@Michael Mariotte

i agree with you. aside that buclear technolgy is good only for producers who dont pay for recycle of nuclear garbage.

@Eric Petersen

Just in case; german price of gaz was rising around 30%-50% last year. nuclear plaint in Germany are not a solution because a price of recycling will be around a 5 euros per KWh when you count all tax money wich will be wasted on recycling and security of nuclear areas.

@Shank
you must be some russian underage idiot.
You know nothing what you are talking about. You should meet some people who are living in uranium mine areas.

@George
seriously dude. Do you realy know what a sh_hit you just wrote here?

@obrien :
yepp.. local french people told that they send their children to grandparents elsewhere as home and that their tourism is dead for next 5 years. aside that it was reported that locals got radiation in that 1 week like in a 2 years before.

@William McDonald
---Hydrogen is our best shot at a clean mobile fuel source during the next 50 years--which is the window that climate scientists give us to make massive changes or face dire consequences---
Nope. not only. air cars. electric cars. alternate fuel.

@Eric Petersen:
--What happened at Chernobyl cannot happen here - period--

Sweden: reactor was shut down near melting point.
Germany reactor was shut down because of fire and security problems. France large areas are contaminated by radiactive water. Germany: big problems with recycling factory. and and and.. China, India, African and South American countries. why at the fu_ck do i waste my time to talk with you?

@As I mention elsewhere, however, the nuclear waste issue would practically disappear if an IFR type reactor and fuel cycle system were in general use.

whahahahahaha...gosh..

Thanks for the positive outlook, Mr. McDonald. As I mention elsewhere, however, the nuclear waste issue would practically disappear if an IFR type reactor and fuel cycle system were in general use. You'd have an energy supply that could produce a major portion of our energy for a few thousand years using today's waste for fuel while leaving waste that was dangerous for a couple of hundred years. Just about the exact opposite of the current nuclear energy situation.

Thanks for the mention, Erik. Your mention of BN-600's uptime reminded me that the test vehicle for the IFR, EBR-II, had an uptime approaching the best commercial reactors despite being a test reactor that had to be shut down at intervals to remove and insert test items. In its 30-year operating history it proved to be extraordinarily reliable and trouble-free. It would still be running today if it had not been sacrificed to political correctness.

I worked at Argonne-West during the IFR period, so I am pretty familiar with it. I am encouraged by the increasing amount of material on it to be found on the web these days. For a while there, it was down to about one site.

Also, thanks for your info on the RBMK fiasco. Not very many people know the difference. Also, not many people know that the two most severe reactor safety tests on the IFR prototype were performed one week before the Chernobyl "accident". Those IFR tests involved shutting off the main cooling system and the emergency shutdown systems while running the reactor at full power. It behaved as dictated by the well-known basic physics of the situation, shutting off the reaction with no moving parts, so to speak. They did two such tests in two days, no damage, no worries.

Another overlooked aspect of nuclear power is that it is the only technology on the horizon that allows for large-scale production of hydrogen. Hydrogen is our best shot at a clean mobile fuel source during the next 50 years--which is the window that climate scientists give us to make massive changes or face dire consequences. Hybrid tech can buy us a little time over the next decade or two while we move to a next-gen nuclear energy infrastructure which produces large amounts of hydrogen as a nearly direct byproduct of energy generation (main ingredients are electricity and very hot water).

Any large scale infrastructure construction has its cost in lives and other areas. Hard working American citizens lost their lives constructing the Brooklyn Bridge, Hoover Dam, and Apollo rockets. I can guarantee you that every one of those individuals would rather the project go forward than stop it because of the risk to their lives. Citizens of rural Nevada or wherever else we decide to put the long-term waste storage site should adopt an attitude that is similarly self-sacrificing attitude. I would welcome the storage facility in my backyard.

Holy Jony: You say "only one - Chernobyl." What happened at Chernobyl cannot happen here - period. Sovient RMBK reactors had positive void coefficients of reactivity, all LWR reactors have negative void coefficients. Any nuclear engineer knew RMBKs inherently dangerous, described by one as "a perfect storm of bad engineering." This design was banned in the US in 1950. The Soviets took bomb factories designed to product weapons-grade plutonium and used them to produce civilian power, the cheap and nasty way of doing things in the Workers' Paradise. What actually triggered the disaster was (almost) beyond belief: Two dudes from an electrical supply company who knew nothing about RMBKs came to the plant, told the operators to power it way down to test the electrical output from a coast down of the turbo generators, and turn off the emergency core cooling system. The guys running the plant said this was a really bad idea, but they were over ruled; the whole series of events was like putting a gun to your head, pulling the trigger, and, gee, let's see what happens.

Bob Mosby's comments on integral fast reactors are right on. Russia's BN-600 fast neutron reactor has been operating since 1981 and has the best up-time record for all reactors in the Russian nuclear fleet.

One thing so far left out of the political discussion of nuclear power was India's 1974 detonation of a nuclear weapon that became a hot topic in the Carter-Ford presidential run off - the use of a civilian reactor to make bomb-grade plutonium, the start of the proliferation freak out. The Indians used the Canadian-designed CANDU reactor that, like the RMBK design, can manufacture weapons grade PU. The US kindly supplied India with the deuterium to fuel the reactor - and the PUREX technology to do the PU separation. (Oops.) This Indian example was blown up in the media as (somehow) proving that US (or other country's) reactor fuel could be stolen-diverted to make bombs. This is impossible as explained in my earlier post, so I will not repeat. Never the less, the Indian incident had policy repercussions in the US that lasted for decades - and listening to some current comments out of Congress still seems to be with us.

A final note on costs: If one wants to build a new nuclear plant in the US the filing fee at the NRC is $250,000, and the expected review period for a construction and operating license is about 42 months, during which time you will be billed $258 per bureacratic hour. According to one industry participant, the NRC review will cost between $60-$120 million just to get the initial paperwork done. Albeit I don't have the facts, it seems fair to assume that the French (who standardized on one Westinghouse design) had and have a more cost and time efficient set up.

There is a technology out there called the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR), developed at Argonne National Laboratory from about 1984 to 1994, which used real hardware to show that there is a reactor type with enhanced reactor safety, proliferation resistance, fuel-use efficiency (by a factor of nearly 100 over existing light-water reactors), and other benefits. General Electric designed a commercialized version of the concept called the ALMR. The Integral in Integral Fast Reactor refers to the fact that it would incorporate a fuel-recycling facility at the reactor site. Almost all of the highly radioactive fuel would stay in the reactor at all times, with a few percent of the core being put through the recycling facility at a time to remove fission products. The actinides which are the longest-lived parts of today's nuclear waste are re-used as fuel. The only waste output from the reactor plant consists of fission products, whose longest-lived components have half-lives of around 30 years. The waste mix as a whole becomes less radioactive than uranium ore in 200 to 300 years, which might just be less time than it will take to decide what to do with today's spent fuel. And of course, an IFR type plant could use that waste for fuel, and also all that depleted uranium we have stockpiled and currently use for nothing except armor-piercing ammunition. Google "Integral Fast Reactor" and "ALMR" if you'd like to know more.

The Clinton administration cancelled the last couple of years of the program because "Nobody is clamoring for nuclear power". In 1994 we were subject to a recurring fantasy that natural gas was our energy savior, and continuing the IFR program seemed like a waste of time.

won't it be wonderful when the earth warms enough for us to grow sugar cane in iowa, and we fight wars over uranium rather than oil.

Nuclear power needs to be part of the mix because it does not add carbon dioxide during the process of generating electricity. Other problems like waste storage represent a lack of political willpower, not any technical issues. Solar, wind, biomass and renewables can supplemtn existing power and eventually do quite a bit. Solar in particular is promising, because there is always a certain amount of sunlight even on cloudy days whereas there are some days of just no wind at all. This society is very conservative and will only absorb a certain amount of change at a time. If you tell people that not only do they have to give up their big cars, but also give up living in detached suburban homes, they will rebel. Using nuclear will allow society to gradually change without making drastic alterations to suburbia, which is where most Americans now live. That may change over the next 50 years, but it will be a gradual change.

Bob wrote
O'Brien, Local, distributed and renewable is just the pipe-dream of the '00's. Give me one example where it works, and tell me how it would work for over 6 billion people.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Not a pipe dream bob. Scientific American had an article back in January explain the feasibility of just solar. Fact is that there is quite a bit of solar, wind, wave, tide, biomass, energy out there and we just need to tap into a miniscule percentage of it. Ironically, you mentioned 6 billion people geographically dispersed but mostly in temperate to tropical regions near the coastline. Well the sun shines and blows on these people better than oil or uranium is distributed to them.
There is much skewed misinformation out there about solar farms the size of kansas etc. The electric economy, LED lighting, EVs, etc. is 300% more efficient so the combination of better designed homes with rooftop solar tiles, backyard wind generators, garage charging stations for EVs, future battery and super ultracap technology tied into the free grid as well as massive thermo solar plants, wind farms, wave and tide farms will adapt nicely to existing and improved infrastructure and building design.
Change is slow because all this requires massive engineering, standards, building code updates, and laws to decentralize energy production but we do it if we choose and then we can export it ($$$) to the rest of the world.
The only people who don't want to see what we can do are those who stand to lose or are terminally backwards looking.

==Most experts expect the price to settle around $60-70 a barrel when speculation is taken out and a true picture of supply and demand is established.==

Actually, it is just ONE, pretty discredited "expert" who said that. It was said during Congressional testimony and endlessly repeated by every talking head everywhere.

If oil went down to $60 today, there would be a huge run on the stuff, kapish?

Since there is no elasticiy in the supply, the extra demand would quickly drive the price right back up.

The numbers I have seen is speculation is maybe $10-20 of the price per barrel.

As someone who works in the US industry, I suspect the French use of standardized designs and government control does make their regulatory process a lot more streamlined - which translates into money savings. (But I've never looked at it closely.)

One commenter above tied nuclear power to oil. Nuclear is used to generate electricity. Practically no oil is used to generate electricity in the US. The only real intersection of the two in the US at this time is home heating via oil or electric (or gas).

One important point you don't hear much about is the "elasticity of demand for oil". Very small changes in supply and demand drive large changes in the price. If we add supply, or even just start projects to add supply or reduce demand, you will see sharp drops in the price of crude. Most experts expect the price to settle around $60-70 a barrel when speculation is taken out and a true picture of supply and demand is established.

O'Brien, Local, distributed and renewable is just the pipe-dream of the '00's. Give me one example where it works, and tell me how it would work for over 6 billion people.

Edward Kee, Excellent content, yes, it is not a big deal to do this.

Shank and Eric, Correct, good points all.

Joe, Nuclear plant life-cycle's are basically endless. Why can't you keep it running essentially forever? What wears out? Nothing. Anyway, it must not be a big deal since the US Navy has been dealing with replacement of nuclear subs and ships for decades.

Joe and Hardy, I live outside of Indianapolis, feel free to build it in my area and hook me up for some cheap, emission-free electricity.

Hardy, I'd say moving to cheap oil was a smart and small price to pay to eliminate the Soviet Union without resorting to harsher means. I'm sure the 30-50 million souls purged from Lenin to Gorbachev would agree. I'm sure that Obama would agree.

How many nuclear hotspots does the world want?

Using thermonuclear reaction with its attendant un-disposable waste to essentially heat giant steam kettles is little over kill, don’t you think?

Enough of this 1950s fantasy, the solution to future energy needs to be local, distributed, and renewable.

How many nuclear hotspots does the world want?

Using thermonuclear reaction with its attendant un-disposable waste to essentially heat a steam kettle is little over kill don’t you think?

Enough of this 1950s fantasy, the solution to future energy needs to be local, distributed, and renewable.

The French approach involved an approach to fleet construction in the 1970s and 1980s that resulted in lower construction costs, standardized designs, and identical operating plants.

The US approach in the 1970s and 1980s did not use the French nuclear fleet approach.

However, the current wave of new nuclear plants (driven by a mix of markets and governments) has incorporated the standard design nuclear fleet approach on a global scale.

The same designs are being built (or will be built) in China, Europe, the US, and elsewhere in the world (aside from differences arising from 50 Hz and 60 Hz electricity grids)

The real market issue now is whether there will be 2 global standard designs or 6, and which designs and vendors will dominate the nuclear supply business.

The French approach involved an approach to fleet construction in the 1970s and 1980s that resulted in lower construction costs, standardized designs, and identical operating plants.

The US approach in the 1970s and 1980s did not use the French nuclear fleet approach.

However, the current wave of new nuclear plants (driven by a mix of markets and governments) has incorporated the standard design nuclear fleet approach on a global scale.

The same designs are being built (or will be built) in China, Europe, the US, and elsewhere in the world (aside from differences arising from 50 Hz and 60 Hz electricity grids)

The real market issue now is whether there will be 2 global standard designs or 6, and which designs and vendors will dominate the nuclear supply business.

Bad timing for your little PR article .. news just in

Nuclear leak runs into French rivers
08/07/2008 - 19:25:06

Liquid containing traces of uranium leaked at a nuclear site in southern France today with some of the solution running into two rivers, the country’s nuclear safety agency said.

Authorities banned the consumption of well water in three nearby towns and the watering of crops from the two rivers.

Swimming, water sports and fishing were also banned by authorities.

A spokeswoman for the nuclear safety agency, Evangelia Petit, said about 30,000 litres (7,925 gallons) of solution containing uranium leaked at a factory at the Tricastin nuclear site. It is about 25 miles from the historic city of Avignon.

The factory handles materials and liquids contaminated by uranium, the fuel for nuclear power plants.

It's important to understand that in discussions of energy policy, nuclear power has almost nothing to do with oil prices. In the U.S. and most of the rest of the world, nukes displace coal, not oil.
That's not a judgment on the value of nuclear plants, but just a caution that oil and nukes aren't very closely related.
The only way that nukes can have anything to do with oil prices -- and resulting gasoline prices -- is if the world makes a major conversion of automobile engine technology to electricity. That hasn't happened, and isn't likely to happen, given the cost of electric cars and the limitations of battery technologies.
So discussions of the value of nuclear power are worthwhile, but let's not confuse nukes and oil.

I had an opportunity to holiday in France for three months in 2007-2008 and saw several nuclear power plants as well as numerous very large windmill as I drove through the countryside. Very enjoyable and peaceful holiday.

Shank posts:
".... yes, if there is a catastrophic failure at a nuclear plant, there is a possibility of a release of toxic or radioactive material."

My observation, if there were a catastrophic failure of a French nuclear power plant the impact on the country which is slightly smaller then Texas with three times the population would indeed be catastrophic to France's economy as well as the economies of Western Europe.

I'm an American who has lived in France for 20 years. France has proven nuclear works and indeed they've made much money exporting their excess electricity to other countries.

The world really has no better choice to solve the energy crunch short or long-term. Coal? Solar power? Starving the world with ethanol? All we have to do is solve the tricky problem of nuclear waste. The French engineers are working on it. The Americans, who live on newspaper horoscope stupidities and political (green and Big Oil) flatulence, are buried in the 70's.

This is the perfect place to ask: what happened to American ingenuity and problem-solving? Take our political leadership for Reagan to Bush and you have your answer. Problems solve themselves when government gets out of the way. Eating that is worse than eating nuclear waste in today's world!

To Eric,
Your post reinforces my belief the USA needs a non-political long term energy plan.
As a resident of New Mexico I'd like to see WIPP relocated to Orange County CA or San Diego CA where "Republicans who so fervently demand "A Nuke in Every Backyard"" live or any other hot bed of conservative blovaters.

Anyone who is an advocate of nuclear energy evidently has never worked in that industry. It died in this country for economic reasons as much as political ones. It is ironic that it is the very same Republicans who so fervently demand "A Nuke in Every Backyard" as the magic bullet solution to our energy woes, when it was their mortal god Ronald Reagan who orchestrated with the Saudis the fall in oil prices that financially crippled the Soviet Union. With cheap oil abundant there was no incentive for utilities to continue pumping money into nuclear black holes. Hence the industry's collapse, which only just now is being resuscitated because (drum roll, please) the price of oil has gone up again - and how! As for those who pooh pooh the waste storage issue as being inconsequential, uh, please, forward your address to Washington so your home can be registered as a dump site.

It's fascinating to me that people bring up the environmental and cost problems with nuclear power without considering the alternative. yes, if there is a catastrophic failure at a nuclear plant, there is a possibility of a release of toxic or radioactive material. Coal plants, even the so-called 'clean' ones, however, emit radioactivity and heavy metals into the air each and every day, 24/7. It has been proven that these emissions cause thousands upon thousands of illnesses and premature deaths every year, so the cost to the health system of dealing with the aftermath of coal plants has to be factored into their true cost, and that's not even getting into the cost of climate change. Call me crazy, but I'd rather have energy waste be small, concentrated and containable than have it constantly spewed into the air. Yes, we need to make wind and PV a larger part of our energy portfolio as well, but what we really need to do is get away from coal. Nuclear offers us a chance to do that today.

Michael: You say "private capital is going to renewable energy [as] that's where the profit is." Not - that's where the state subsidies are. Germany and Spain, the leaders in wind and PV, have been offering a feed-in tariff of about 45 cents per kWh, about 4x what we pay for electricity. These subsidies have proved so expensive for tax payers that both countries are now in the process of cutting them back at bit.

Denmark now has the highest wind power fraction of any country - and the highest electrical rates in Europe. Italy, a few decades ago, shut down their nuclear plants, and now buys power from France, power generated by nukes. Given the high level of electrified commuter and long-haul rail in France, nuclear accounts for about 35% of the contry's total energy use.

The 2 cent/kWh production tax credit in the US is absolutely critical to finance wind/PV. The PTC was initiated in 1992, but was not renewed three times (1999, 2001, and 2003 from memory) and in the year following wind/PV collapsed. The PTC will expire at the end of this year should Congress not renew it; if they don't, guarantee these industries will nose dive next year. As for other "alternatives" like ethanol, the level of federal subsidies (aka buying farm votes) has run into billions.

The US nuclear industry was privately financed. With coal and natural gas at current prices, nuclear delivers the cheapest (perhaps save for hydro) and most predictable power in the US. As far as the industry's inability to successfully address safety, security, and proliferation, how many folks have been injured/killed by civilian nuclear power, how many plants have been breached, and how much plutonium stolen from said plants? Zero, so the record is rather successful. No one has, or ever will, make a bomb from light water moderated reactors (100% of the US fleet), the bomb-grade PU-239 is far too contaminated by PU-240 to ever make it "useful" for this purpose.

Without going through all the math, the cost of new-build wind or nuclear is about the same on a deliverable kW basis. (PV a lot more expensive still, and watch out for wind/PV kW or MW announcements - they are nameplate numbers only, a lot higher than what's deliverable.) The capital cost difference is merely scale; one new wind turbine is relatively cheap, a new nuke not so, but when one adds up the cost of the turbines necessary to generate the power from one nuke the totals are pretty close. Yes, nuclear plants will have to be replaced after their 60 or possibly 80-year life; wind turbines are guesstimated to last about 25 years. Free lunch is not being served.

As for nuke waste, Yucca is an obvious fiasco as it was chosen for political and not scientific reasons - the geology of the site was examined after it was chosen, not before. In contrast, the French are spending 20+ years looking for an appropriate site, and vitrifying their waste in the interim. Unnoticed, the military has buried over 6,000 shipments of transuranic waste at the WIPP site near Carlsbad, NM since 1999 - half a mile underground in a bedded salt formation that has not moved in a quarter-of-a-billion years. According to one highly-credible nuclear scientist, the world's commercial reactor waste could safely be buried at an expanded WIPP - not that the residents of NM might welcome the opportunity.

While the US sits around moaning and groaning about nuclear power, the Chinese (and others) are going full bore; China, on average, will build 4.25 new reactors a year through 2020. Next year, they will start building their first high temperature gas cooled reactor, and plan to finish it in two years. Capital cost about a quarter of current LWRs, about 50% more thermally efficient, half the waste (and more importantly, half the actinides), the plants could use thorium (3x as abundant as uranium), and the chance of a core meltdown = zero. These units could also produce hydrogen by thermal disassociation of water. As to be expected, Congress killed funding for HTGR research decades ago.

The lesson here:

Take the best practices from the French nuclear power system and apply them here. Nuclear energy is part of the mix and can be a substantial part.

I am not convinced that the public utilities do a very good job of innovation. And, their basic corporate structure is antiquated and stale. So, we cannot expect them to lead in any sense. The entity that has to supervise nuclear power plants is the central government, which in many instances is even worse than the public utilities.

Innovation and energy creativity is going to be driven from small companies and entrepreneurs. The trick is how to harness the creativity and apply it to existing structures. Perhaps it cannot be done here.

i say only one: Chyrnobil.

USA have forgot what was after it tested nuckes in Nevada. For the next years Middle USA is a heavy cancer and mutation zone. For french.. well.. French are momentaly nucklear fans. Bbut in a same time they are going to fusion energy and to work together with germans and other green energy loving countries. (that funny "air car" will be produced in France)

Aside that nuclear energy is a thing wich makes monopolies and heavy price pressure on ordinary customers. ecologic nucklear power? bwhahahahah! should i remember why whole world was forced to stop nuclear tests?

This underlines what Amory Lovins of Rocky Mountain Institute (www.rmi.org) has said repeatedly. Nuclear power only happens with significant state support. Private capital is going to renewable energy sources and energy efficiency--that's where the profit is, that's where the jobs are, that's where the future is.

The private markets have, for all practical purposes, rejected nuclear power.

And environmentalists have rejected nuclear power for its ongoing inability to successfully address safety, security, radioactive waste and nuclear proliferation problems, not to mention the environmental destruction caused by uranium mining. Given that the nuclear fuel chain is not, in fact, carbon-free--its emissions are clearly higher than renewables, there really isn't any point at all to using nuclear power.

The US government should stop wasting taxpayer money propping up this failed, obsolete technology.

"Energy Department officials acknowledge that even though President Bush fervently wanted to get a nuclear plant started before leaving office, it isn't likely to happen."

Bush's final gift to Energy Companies and another attempt to create some sort of legacy.

It's wonderful France is able to generate 78% of its electrical need from a non-air polluting source but what will be the cost when their nuclear plants need to be replaced?
Surely some of them must be reaching the end of their life cycle.
Mr Mufson does not mention the amount of subsidy EDF receives yearly or the rates users are charged for electricity as compared to the USA.
After WWII Europeans learned to conserve all of their energy sources because energy was rare and expensive.
As American's we need to do the same while finding alternate non-polluting sources of energy.
If the true cost of nuclear power was passed on to rate payers nuclear power plants would be non-starters.

Modern French nuclear infrastructure is all standardized, with identical or near-identical plant designs, in order to faciliate uniformity in manufacture, inspection, operation and safety.

Needless to say, we have chosen a "market" approach, where every plant is different, requirering unique approaches throughout its life cycle.

Should we learn from the French?