Thread: Nuclear!

I support the use of nuclear power fully, and think we could take a page from the methods the French are using (e.g. recycling fuel through the reactors, etc until by the time it is waste, it is MUCH safer than the one-time-use method which causes so much concern)
With less demand for fuel, I feel prices would go down, also, as well as the need for international squabbling over it. At the moment, if Russia or OPEC shut off the fuel, people would freeze in their homes during the winter, all sorts of bad things could happen; if electricity was being produced primarily by nuclear power nationwide/worldwide, this would be less of an issue, and, hopefully, once one nation is not able to hold this vital resource against another (much like the sugarcane or spice trade of years past) there will cease to be fighting over it.
I'm rambling, I guess I could have simply said
"I agree".



John P.

Originally Posted by Bruno

Nuclear isn't just one thing, where you can turn fuel processes into weapons processes by flipping a switch.

Originally Posted by Bruno

Fuel breeder reactors are different from weapons material breeders.

Nuclear fuel is the best option that we have right now. Wind, solar, wave, ... energy is something we should investigate. And if solar ever becomes efficient enough, it will be great. But until that time, nuclear is better than anything we have.

Coal plants emit more nuclear waste than nuclear reactors, but noone seems to mind because it doesn't have 'nuclear' in its name.

And with reprocessing of nuclear fuel, combined with modern reactor design, there is only ver little actual waste. But it won't matter because the greenpeace zealots fight against anything that uses nuclear fuel, regardless of facts. It's no different from any other fundamentalist mindset, except they don't blow up stuff.

Except that the nuclear waste lasts for thousands of years and can not be transported safely.

yeah for the lasts thousands of years, but I won't buy can't be transported safely without more details.

Just think, given a chance, we could all be driving vehicles without burning petroleum or what used to be our food(biofuels).

Originally Posted by DSailing

Except that the nuclear waste lasts for thousands of years and can not be transported safely.

I read that with the latest designs (using breeder reactors for fuel mix) there are only 2 kinds of waste: with a very long half life (10s of 1000s yrs) and very short half life (20 years).

In the case of the long life: what people fail to understand is that if the half life is extremely long, it is also very low radioactive so while it is chemically toxic, the radioactivity is not that dangerous and it can be contained and reprocessed.

In case of the short half life, it is very radioactive, but it decays so fast that it has gone all but inert after 100 years. So this is controlable as well.

Now, the halflife of carbon 14 is 5730 years. And as I indicated previously, this gets actively dumped in the atmosphere by the coal plants, and into our food and air. Add on top of that the heavy metals that get expelled with it, and you have to admit that while nuclear has the potential for pollution, coal power actively pollutes right now, 100 times worse than nuclear.
Yet noone seems to mind, and people still consider nuclear to be the worst choice, despite the fact that it is safest and less polluting.

Just wondering what the risk of a Chernobyl style 'accident' is with the latest reactors ?

More than 0% is unacceptable to me.

Originally Posted by onimaru55

Just wondering what the risk of a Chernobyl style 'accident' is with the latest reactors ?

More than 0% is unacceptable to me.

If the correct procedures are in place, it will be 0 for all intents and purposes.
A theoretical 0 is not possible, and it shouldn't be a reason not to choose nuclear.

The risk of US nuclear weapons falling in wrong hands is not 0. they plain lost half a dozen already.
The risk of a civilian aircraft crashing is not 0 either, yet still people fly.
The risk of bioweapons escaping from weapons labs is not 0 either. Yet those labs still exist.

Where you like to admit it or not, risk cannot be expunged from your life.
The only way to prevent people from dying in traffic would be to set the max speed to 0 mph.
Yet we cannot do that, so while any death is one too much, we have to accept that it can and will happen with the current speed limits.

So if proper procedures with fail safe and triple redundancy are in place, chernobyl won't happen again.
In fact, chernobyl wouldn't have happened at all with that reactor design, if people would have followed procedures instead of doing their ****ing best to blow up that reactor.
The reactor was safe enough. The people weren't. Same as the people handling nuclear weapons and bio weapons. Yet we trust them all the same.

1. haven't had coffee yet, sorry if this isn't coherent
2. right now the US can't fully benefit from nuclear technology that WE invented because of the idiotic Carter-era ban on breeder reactors. this needs to be fixed
3. about 10% of the inherent risk of an "incident" is in the physical design of the reactor vessel + control rod system, and the other 90% is in the people that run it. people are ALWAYS the weakest link in any security system, ask Kevin Mitnik. proper protocols are vital for safety. it's like the four rules of safe gunhandling... if you follow all four, accidents can't happen, it's only when you start relying on one or two to keep you safe instead of four overlapping that you have problems.
4. about 40% of the French grid is filled by nuke plants (and breeder reactors fuel them)... if those guys can get it right, it stands to reason that most other people should as well.

Originally Posted by Bruno

The risk of US nuclear weapons falling in wrong hands is not 0. they plain lost half a dozen already.
The risk of a civilian aircraft crashing is not 0 either, yet still people fly.
The risk of bioweapons escaping from weapons labs is not 0 either. Yet those labs still exist.

I hope he doesn't enjoy hot dogs... the choking risk on those isn't 0 either.

But in all seriousness nuclear is one of the cleanest scalable forms of energy we have to date. This whole mess is a case of what I call "not in my backyard". We all want the benefits of things like close airports, mass transit, cheap energy but don't want the airport, the train tracks, or cooling ponds in our backyards.
Nuclear: Small footprint for large output and economically viable
Wind: Large footprint for large output and not economically viable yet.
Photovoltaic: Large footprint for large output and not economically viable yet.
Hydroelectric and wave generators: Getting there slowly.

Frankly a coal burning power plant creates more waste than a nuclear power plant ever would.

Originally Posted by jockeys

2. right now the US can't fully benefit from nuclear technology that WE invented because of the idiotic Carter-era ban on breeder reactors. this needs to be fixed

4. about 40% of the French grid is filled by nuke plants (and breeder reactors fuel them)...

I've done a couple of projects in a plant where the fuel was made.
Basically, French and most european reactors run a mix of reprocessed nuclear fuel, plutonium and uranium.
The really cool part is that most spent fuel can be reprocessed into new fuel, adding only a little plutonium and uranium each time.
This is both really efficient and results in little real waste.

The french run almost 50% of their grid on nuclear. Sadly, in Belgium the greenpeace idiots won their battle and Belgium has stopped buildnig new ones. of course, the greens were not able to come up with an alternativee, but why let reality spoil a daydream.

Anyway, Carter put a ban on breeders to appease the anti-nuke lobby, regardless of the fact that not all breeder types can be used to produce weapons grade plutonium.