Nuclear power a good idea?
 

With all talk of energy, nobody ever mentions nuclear power.

So tell me in this poll,

is Nuclear power (i.e., reactors) built on American soil a good idea, or a bad idea?

Of course it is. Don't be silly.

Any more silly questions? Until the libs let us drill for more black gold in Alaska, nuke is the only option unless you like $8 a gallon gas.

YES It is a good idea!

YES it produces nuclear wastes that are basically un-dealable with. At the same time, It occurs to me that if Florida was an electrical-only state....it would make a HUGE dent in our carbon signature!

Problem: 99% of us are NOT ready to covert to the new Hydrogen life style, to include cars on the road. Me and my parter? We live 1500 feet from a Publix grocery store, and we/'ve been living on the high hog anyway since I have a 6.2 kilowatt generator. We had a 30 amp plug installed so that I can power the house in an emergency.

This might be a factor in Florida in the next few years. They've done little maintenance on the lines,and the grid is only getting larger....

N!

I have serious reservations about it. Short-to-intermediate term, it would help. Longer term, I'm not so sure. I have recurring nightmares about the health, safety and welfare of the populace at large being placed not in the responsible hands of builders and designers and scientists and engineers, but in those of bean counters down the road. I can easily envision a scenario down the line 50 or 60 years from commissioning where a bean counter makes a decision to forego an inspection or not replace a 49-cent o-ring or fire a few maintenance guys and in so doing kills half a million people. Inadvertent or not, the people would be just as dead.

That said, I think nuclear power should be on the table, but I don't have any easy suggestions or answers about how to ensure it is done safely - for the longer term future.

I also think that the people who think it's a "silver bullet" are completely delusional. A huge percentage of our nation's energy demand is from transporation-related expenditures, which are overwhelmingly petroleum-based. Unless you're going to invent the 1950s "atomic car", you won't make much of a dent in transportation-related energy demand or reduce dependence on (mostly foreign) oil for it. Hydrogen is a potential long-term solution, particularly powered by nuclear energy. Same with GOOD mass-transit, trains, etc. like they have in Europe and Japan - these can be powered by electricity rather than oil. But such things are a long way off - this will NOT be a band-aid and for the foreseeable future, we need to all get used to the idea of $5 or $10 gasoline, with no alternatives for personal transportation.

Just another shining example of how the ROW is DECADES ahead of us in our hubris.

Short answer, yes we should have nuclear power on the table and focus on methods for long-term safety as a #1 priority. And it won't fix much short-term. Those expecting immediate results will be sorely disappointed.

Waste storage is a political issue, not a technical one. You want to reduce your carbon footprint, there is your answer. look at Japan, it has no oil, gas or coal reserves. We get our oil from others cause we already used up the easy to get stuff here.

With breeder reactors, there is enough nuclear fuel to last until the sun burns out in several billion years.

Very true! and you reduce your waste by about 100 fold.

Facts about nuclear waste disposal, from russp.org:


August 2002 -- The American public has been led to believe that nuclear power is extremely dangerous and that nuclear waste disposal is an unsolved problem. Those beliefs are based on preposterous distortions perpetrated by irrational environmentalists and an irresponsible mass media. In reality, a reactor meltdown would have to occur every two weeks to make nuclear power as deadly as the routine emissions from coal-fired power, from which we get about half of our electric power in the United States. (Note: some newer nuclear power plant designs cannot possibly meltdown.) And if the United States went completely nuclear for all its electric power for 10,000 years, the amount of land needed for waste disposal would be about what is needed for the coal ash that is currently generated every two weeks.

Anti-nuclear activists like to scare us with horror stories about the "thousands of tons of nuclear waste" that have been produced since nuclear power began some four decades ago. That sounds like a lot -- until you put it into perspective, which anti-nuclear activists and the mass media never do. Consider that one pound of plutonium can produce as much energy as the Yankee Stadium full of coal. And coal-fired power generates something like 100 million tons of waste annually in the United States, or about three tons of ash per second. Every few hours, more coal ash is generated than high-level nuclear waste has been generated in four decades!

Oh, but nuclear waste is far more dangerous than coal waste, isn't it? Actually, it isn't. For a given amount of energy produced, coal ash is actually more radioactive than nuclear waste. How can that be? Simple. The quantity of coal ash is literally millions of times greater than the corresponding quantity of nuclear waste, so even though the radioactive intensity of the coal ash is much less, the overall amount of radiation and radioactive matter is greater.

But nobody worries much about the radioactivity of coal ash because the chemicals in it are far more dangerous. They include several thousand tons per year of mercury and other heavy metals, along with huge amounts of lead, arsenic, and asbestos, for example. Yet even the huge quantities of chemical waste in coal ash are of little concern compared to the gaseous emissions from burning coal, which kill an estimated 10,000 to 50,000 Americans every year, depending on which study you believe. As a point of reference, even the lower estimate approaches the rate at which Americans died in the Viet Nam war, and the higher estimate greatly exceeds it, yet the media rarely report on those deaths.

So let's get this straight. For a given amount of energy produced, coal waste has more radioactive matter than nuclear waste, yet the radioactivity of coal waste is nowhere near as dangerous as the solid chemical waste, which in turn is nowhere near as dangerous as the gaseous emissions. Are you starting to get the picture yet?

But even those staggering figures fail to capture the major environmental advantages of nuclear power over coal-fired power. Why? Because the solid and gaseous emissions from coal burning are generated in such a huge quantity that they cannot possibly be contained. They can only be spewed into the atmosphere and dumped into shallow landfills. There is no conceivable way to isolate waste that is generated at the rate of three tons per second. Nuclear waste, on the other hand, is so miniscule in comparison that it can be almost completely isolated from the environment at a very modest cost. And even though that cost has been greatly inflated by the anti-nuclear hysteria, it is still very managable.

If all the high-level nuclear waste that has ever been generated were simply dumped into the middle of the ocean, it would be many thousands of times less harmful than the coal waste generated over the same period. But the nuclear waste is so miniscule in quantity that it can be isolated almost completely from the environment. In fact, that is exactly what is being done all over the world. Basic technology exists to convert nuclear waste into a solid, water-impermeable glass form, encase it into stainless-steel-lined concrete containers, and put it thousands of feet underground where water hasn't flowed for hundreds of thousands of years. And nuclear power produces no gaseous emissions, of course.

Yet, amazingly, a large percentage of the American public has been hoodwinked into believing that nuclear waste disposal is an "unsolved" problem. In order to perpetuate the absurd mythology of nuclear waste, anti-nuclear extremists have concocted the absurd idea of a "nuclear priesthood" to warn people of the dangers of buried nuclear waste thousands of years in the future. Never mind that coal waste contains more overall radioactivity and is not contained at all. The idea of a "nuclear priesthood" is based on another absurd anti-nuclear distortion: the idea that nuclear waste is "dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years."

Oh yes, nuclear waste would indeed be "dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years" if we were stupid enough to leave it lying around untreated, but did someone forget to mention that coal ash is dangerous forever? That's right: solid chemical waste never decays. It will be as dangerous in ten million years as it was the day it was generated. And there is so much of it that we have no choice but to leave it lying around untreated. So do we need a "coal-ash priesthood"? Only if we've lost our sanity and common sense. Note, incidentally, that uranium comes from the ground in the first place, where it is neither encased in stainless-steel-lined concrete containers nor isolated from groundwater.

The whole notion that nuclear waste is "dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years" is fundamentally misleading. Nuclear waste contains a combination of many radioactive materials with a wide range of halflives, ranging from a fraction of a second to millions of years. The short-lived materials radiate very intensely but for a short period of time (they are safely dissipated at the power plant long before they are ever put into long-term storage). The long-lived materials such as uranium and plutonium, on the other hand, radiate for a very long time but at an extremely low level -- so low that their danger is essentially chemical. The materials with intermediate halflives on the order of a few decades are the most problematic, but even they are easily managable.

Coal-fired power is many thousands of times more dangerous and harmful to the environment than nuclear power. Does that mean coal-fired power should be stopped? Absolutely not. Even coal-fired power is far better than no power at all. Without economical electric power, we will rapidly degenerate into a third-world nation, and average lifespans will drop precipitously. Even though emissions from coal-fired power costs many lives, the net effect of coal-fired power is to extend average lifespans. The point is not that coal-fired power is bad, but rather that nuclear power is thousands of times cleaner and safer. And the fact that so many so-called "environmentalists" vociferously oppose nuclear power -- even while they agitate for draconian measures to stop "global warming" -- should tell you something about them: they are either ignorant or they have ulterior ideological motives -- or both

Send the waste to WI. What further damage could it possibly do?

Kickn the guy when he can't respond....LOL

Great way to use up all the excess weapons grade plutonium (in storage) left over from reducing cold war nuclear arsenals.

Absolutely yes! I'll even take one of those micro-reactors for my house. :)

Best.

Kurt

The major shortcoming of nuclear power is the human element. Human errors in plant/component design, manufacture, operation, maintenance, waste disposal, or security are what limit nuclear power's acceptence. I would not hesitate to accept nuclear power in my area, if the probability of human error was sufficiently low.

I live 40 miles from a nuclear power plant.

I wish there were more of them around.

Maybe three eyes is a good thing.

Even better depth-perception...

+1 on breeders. Surely we can find the political will to get this done? Let's form an alliance with the Greenies by phasing out coal-fired plants in favor of nuclear based on clean power and saving the polar bears.

Same here, one of the largest in the country. Does not bother us at all.

Amazing that the greenies fight against new coal plants, but protest any nuclear plants. I suppose they don't have electricity at home?

The stigma attached to nuclear power is for the same reasons we don't have many diesels in the USA: the general populus consists of stupid sheep, who are too lazy to educate themselves on the facts related to the issues. Objections to nuclear power are a result of fear-mongering, and not related in any way to facts. In it's modern form nuclear power does not harm the environment, is very safe, and highly efficient. In my opinion, all of our highly polluting coal plants should be replaced with nuclear power, supplemented by solar, wind, and hydrodynamic power where feasible. It's sustainable, and will reduce dependence on foreign oil for those who use heating oil in their homes.

Blame Hanoi Jane. She made that movie, China Syndrome, at exactly the right time. I don't believe technology can solve everything, human behavior for example, but I do think that technologically we can make the level of risk from nuclear power acceptably low. What's acceptable? In our risk-averse society, that's the real question, isn't it?

Blame an actress for her role in a movie? Why not blame the screenwriter, or the grip, or the electrician, or the catering service hired for that movie? I'm sure you can formulate an argument on this topic, but the one you tossed out here ain't it.

Three Mile Island and (especially) Chernobyl are the examples. When you have dollar signs and people involved, the protential for problems increase. If they are well reined in, it can be a viable source of much needed energy for our nation.

Highly efficient and cost effective, you do need to be careful with it. With our appetite for oil we don't have a lot of options. Solar, hydro, wind are under utilized as well. I have no fear of nuke plants. It's clean power.

Sorry, was it humor that was supposed to be in green or sarcasm, I forget.

Ha!


:D

A couple other things that need to be thrown out while we are on the subject:
I've worked in 2 nuke plants and this is what i've personally seen: the simplist task that should take a half hour to complete can take 3 weeks, because of the incredible amount of oversight, procedures, inspection, redundancy, and total and complete dedication to take human error out of the realm of possibility.

Here's an example:
In a normal plant if a welder needs to weld a pipe, he gets a drawing, some welding rod from the warehouse, a work permit, and starts welding.
In the nuke plant, the welder got a job to do so he took a weld procedure test that he has taken a thousand times. He was given a pre-determined amount of welding rod that has detailed records of the alloys including a stagering amount of reports on the testing of the alloys in the rods, and certifications of where those alloys were mined, processed, refined, blended, etc. Up to 80 signatures per welding rod.
The rods each have a serial number stamped onto them for tracking and each rod is tracked cradle to grave.
The number of rods issued to the welder and the serial numbers are recorded, so that when he is done he has to return every single unused rod and every single used stub must be returned to quality control (whis watched by another quality inspector). If the werlder fails to return all the stubs or returns a stub with the wrong serial number, or brings back too many unused rods, all heck breaks loose and he's probably looking for a new job or worse.
The weld itself can take 20 times longer than normal because each and every pass is completely inspected visually as well as x-rayed. He has at least two guys watching him weld to make sure he's donig it right. The running joke is that nuke plants emmit more radiation from x-raying welds than they do from the unranium.

I have been patted down by armed security guards 20 times a day while working on one of the giant turbines to make sure there is absolutely no chance of FOD. The first day the guy duct taped my wrist watch to my wrist to make sure it didn't fall off while i was working on the open turbine in the resicted area. the next day I left the watch in my truck.
Working in containment is even more strict. They provide clothes to wear and you are escorted AT ALL TIMES by an armed guard. If he can't see you even for a split second then you are in violation and subject to investigation and disciplinary action.
Hard hats are tied to your belt loop, safety glasses are tied to your hard hat, every single tool is tied to your wrist and tracked and if you take it in, you take it out. If not you are sitting in a room with 4 NRC guys with no sense of humor.
nothing happens without training on a procedure and a test to make sure you understand it.
Because of all the redundancy and multiple layers of checks and balances it would be very difficult or impossible to circumvent the process and cur corners. Even with that increduble amount of inefficiency, they are still more cost effective than fossil fuel plants.

It isn't like on the simpsons.

That's the kind of information that doesn't seem to be effectively impressed upon the general public. It would go a long way towards making people more confident about nuke plans being establihed in their locale.

Yep, my neighbor across the street is on the maintenance crew for the nuke plant. He does pipe welding, mostly.

Well, our Navy seems to run the Aircraft carriers fine on it.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1205347539.jpg

you can see the evil-doers a whole lot better

No no no! The third one is supposed to be in the middle of her back ...... for slow dancing.

My mother grew up about 35 miles from the Hanford Nuclear plant, close to Hermiston Oregon.

She was born in 1948. She died in 2001. 49 years old. Her mother, my Grandmother is fine at 78. Her grandmother, my great Grandmother died at 98 a few years ago.

She died of a bunch of issues. Diabetes. Fibromyalgyia. A bunch of other thing I can't even pronounce.

When she was 8, she talked about how a bright, neon yellow cloud came over the place she lived. How the Government men came and talked to everyone in the valley, how they told people it was a radiation leak. My grandmother confirmed the story. They lived on the banks of the Columbia river. At this time its estimated the plant was dumping ~50,000 curies into the river daily, and conducting tests on releasing iodine 131 into the air.

When she was 10 she had some issues with her thyroid, and eventually something on her neck started growing odd. She eventually had some kind of tumor there. It got at large as a softball. My Grandmother worked as a nurse, and convinced a Doctor to remove it. It took 8 operations to remove it. The final operation they though it might kill her. She made it. She had a very large scar in her neck from the operation.

Her younger sister, my Aunt died when she was 28 in a car crash. She also had some odd health issues. Her older sister was 8 years older, and has a bunch of heath problems. Mostly odd issues the Doctors have a hard time diagnosing.

I don't know if my mothers troubles were due to growing up that close to a poorly run prototype nuclear plant when she was young. I think chances are though at least some of it was.

I support nuclear power 100%. The price has been paid. It's time to exploit it for as much as we can.

When they were first playing around with nuclear power they had no clue how dangerous it was. Folks from the manhatten project were unknowingly exposed to near letahal doses.

The first working reactor/generator was known as experimental Breeder Reactor #1 (EBR1) near Arco, Idaho and came online on December 20, 1951.
It experienced a partial meltdown in 1955, irradiating the workers who had no idea how dangerous the stuff was that they were getting exposed to.

We've come along way since then.

You guys should be president. No, seriously. :)

I am amazed how overwhelmingly positive the PPOT thinks of Nuclear. I would have expected a more diverse cross-section of opinions.

Vewy intuhvestink.

Btw , does the 3 boobed girl have a sister?

I'm all for it. I see these guys almost everyday:

http://www.nucleartourist.org/images/Limrick1.gif

My Father is a nuke...ran the Savannah River Plant in South Carolina for years and then was the nuke waste czar in DC for many more. He worked the Yucca Mountain issue, glassification of nuke waste, safe transport, NEST Teams, the works.

He was even present at the only core meltdown of a reactor in the US, in Idaho Falls when a rod was exposed (think Simpsons) on a developmental reactor in what was thought to be a suicide.

He even taught at the Navy Nuke school on Idaho Falls.

It is safe, the waste issue is almost a no brainer and there is no comparison to the damage a coal-fired plant does to the environment, both in garnering the fuel and production of electricity.

If the greens in France can stand over 70% of their electricity to be produced nuke...:)

It is like the development program has been on hold since 1975. Like who is driving AMC Pacers anymore? Where is the technology today?

We get little real information. And with tax credits for 'green" industrial wind turbines and the coal lobby we may never know..

You want the truth...you can't handle the....:)

Really too many advances to chronicle in this post, both in the production and waste efforts. PM me and I'll endeavor to help.

Development in the US has been on hold ever since Three Mile. However, there has been plenty of development in the field elsewhere. It would take 10 years from filing before you'd have a reactor online someplace, so nucs won't take any load off in the near future. Then you have the crazies (eg/California - no surprise) where some politicians are suggesting that any companies dealing in nuclear power have to clean their sites (when they're done) so that the site has less than background radiation. Brilliant.

(Sibling spends 50% of working time testifying or gathering data in Sacramento, DC, other legislatures....)