New Nuclear Power Plant

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bwoods

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A couple of years ago we had a very interesting thread going in reference to Nuclear Energy.

Some very good news.

Here in Ohio, plans are being laid for a new nuclear power plant in Piketon. It's not a done deal but it looks promising. The Governor and reps from Duke energy were surveying the site yesterday.

Hopefully the contract will go to GE. Their Advanced Boiling Water Reactor Design is a vast improvement over the older (yet viable) Mark series of BWR in efficiency and reduction of complexity in design.

Will keep all of you informed on new developments.

Barry

Department of Electrical Engineering
Wright State Univ., Dayton.
 
I don't. The safety record is actually excellent. Any failures have been very publicized and were (Chernobyl excepted) far less hazardous than anyone thinks.

If everyone expects to be driving electric cars, there is going to have to be an order of magnitude increase in electrical production. Nothing could hope to provide that safer and with less pollution than nuclear. I would like to see this Ohio project become an example for its expansion.
 
First I've heard of this!

Barry--

Do you know who is going to be licensed for it? DP&L, First Energy (Ohio Edison,) or someone else?

I'm not a proponent or opponent of nuclear electricity.
I'd rather see solar, or wind, or biomass...

Lawrence/Maytagbear
 
Well its 100 degree's here, and if nuclear power is what it takes to keep the A/C blowing icey cold, then so be it. We have tree hugged our heavy industry and mfg. base totally out of business. To me it's just goofey to argue the case for any type of power production.
 
All these plants do is boil water. The main problem has been finding somewhere to dispose of the spent fuel rods, reactor coolant etc, which is radioactive for many (sometimes thousands of) years.

In the 1950's and 60's nuclear plants served primarily as plutonium factories for the U.S. military, even though they were "sold" to the American people and Congress as power plants. This deception caused a huge community of rabid anti-nuclear activists, who managed to scare people though books, films and news stories. The world owes France a huge debt of gratitude, for doing what needed to be done anyway, in spite of all the protests. They now get over 80% of their power from nuclear plants.

I'd also prefer seeing solar and wind rather than nuclear fission plants, but anything that distances us from fossil fuels is good IMO. The nuclear waste problem pales in comparison to the damage being caused by fossil fuels.
 
Actually,

There is no basis for pretending that the nuclear industry has been anything but careless with our health and safety in the past.
I am not opposed to nuclear energy in principle, there are, however, to major considerations.

1) Sellafield? Three Mile Island? Chernobyl?
All this "rah-rah", we can trust the industry mentality scares me. Perhaps because I understand the difference between stochastic and deterministic statistical analysis? Know what half-life means?

2) Even if we exploit every available fissionable material, it won't be nearly enough. At best, this can only be a stop-gay solution.

The French industry is regulated in a manner which would have any American Republican screaming "Socialist"!
 
Great Idea . . .

We really need to jump-start the nuclear industry in this nation asap. What must be remembered about nuclear power is that it isn't a permanent solution to our need for power, but it is the one of the few realistic interim solutions to the problems presented by peak oil. I'm not a "doomer" on peak oil, but it's real and we've so far simply assumed that there will always be enough imported oil and gas to satisfy our needs, or that we can replace it with Alaskan oil and gas. The latter is not going to happen, as even if the environmental issues were to go away there isn't enough recoverable oil there to replace all that we import. Remember too that Russia is likely to be one of major providers of natural gas and oil in the future. They've already threated to cut off many European countries from their gas supplies, and have basically reneged on deals with foreign energy companies like BP to develop their northern oil and gas fields. I don't blame them for getting full value from their own assets, but after decades of being beholden to Middle Eastern countries do we really want to perpetuate the problems by having to buy necessary oil and gas from Russia as well?

Green power in the form of wind and solar energy is great and must eventually replace nuclear and fossil fuel power, but there are many environmental issues there too. Right now more than a few environmentalists are clamoring to prevent large solar installations in the desert, and people near Cape Cod in Massachussets (including the Kennedys) have banded together to kill a wave-action power plant there. All this will eventually be worked out, but it'll take some time and anyway lots of technical deveopment is needed on wind and solar to increase efficiency before they start to supply large parts of our energy needs.

This leaves us with two reliable, proven sources of non-imported energy in the immediate future: nuclear and coal. We have lots of coal, and the coal industry would just love to sell us all on "clean coal", but their track record of environmental desctruction is way worse that that of the nuclear industry outside of the former Soviet Union. Plus, any way you cut it, coal has high CO2 emissions which are a big problem for us both politically and environmentally.
 
Lawrence,

Duke energy will be the primary operator. However, there will be other partner members in an energy alliance which will sell power to the grid.

Barry
 
Jeff,

That's a valid question.
Thinking.
Still thinking.
Expanding search to include conditional trust parameters.
Thinking.
Thinking hard
.........
No records found.

Expanding search criteria to include non-human species.
Thinking
Bingo:
Dogs
Cats
E.O.F.

Jeff, I grew up in the 1960's, was in my teens for Watergate,saw ronnie rayguns and mad maggie intentionally let gays die of aids, have worked with Ethiopian refuges, saw the German government outright lie about the radiation levels after Chernobyl...and we just had eight years of shrub. Economy shattered, two wars, thousands tortured...untold tens of thousands of brave young Americans wounded and abandoned...

Trust?

Not much, no.
 
Yes, some of us do know the difference between stochastic and deterministic statistical analysis too, and can even do time series analysis with our eyes closed, however, your sample is somewhat flawed! You're talking about obsolete designs built in a whole different era. Chernobyl (a 1 GW RMBK design, which was known to be flawed from the design point to begin with) is so out of the league of modern reactors from a design and operations perspective, that there is not even a valid comparison. Unlike Chernobyl, modern reactors do not allow anyone to shut down their safety systems, as Chernobyl did, which is what caused the explosion in the first place as poorly trained operators tried to bring the reactor offline. Same with Three Mile Island, though newer, still obsolete. Not to mention the fact that reactor operations are governed today in a completely different manner than 30 - 40 years ago. But this, like anything else, is subject to human error, since humans build and run the systems. That's just a fact of life that isn't going to change, just like the politics involved in this or any other industry.

The French have enjoyed a stellar safety record, their politics aside....it works. Their worst nuclear "accident"? Three people walked into a nuclear particle accelerator in 1992 without wearing protective clothing, and were contaminated. I guess you really can't fix stupid??

Florida Power and Progress Energy are currently starting production of two plants here in Florida. It's about damned time. Hopefully we'll see more along the way.

Delaying the construction of power plants only serves to have the running life of existing units lengthened. Yeah, a nuclear reactor can run for 30 or 40 years without much trouble, if the vessel walls hold up as they were engineered. But I would rather see the timely replacement of such units then asking the existing equipment to do a job it really wasn't intended to do. There are reactors running today that should have retired, just based on their age, simply because they do not have replacement capacity for these units. Yeah, engineers can certify their suitability for operation, but why take that chance?

Spent fuel rods are stored onsite in pools, in a vault, and a working reactor needs a fuel change every 6 - 9 months or so, depending on its output and capacity. This does not make for lots and lots of waste such as people may think, though yes, there is spent nuclear waste. I was in the energy industry for 10 years here in the U.S., and I'll still take nuclear as a safe, clean, renewable fuel source over any other source of energy out there, all "analyses" aside. Ever see the crap that comes from coal combustion? Or from "cleaning" coal to make it suitable for combustion? It ain't pretty!!
 
Given

That food safety in the US was reduced to a level of oversight we haven't seen since Sinclair Lewis and drug safety is now entirely at the discretion of the manufacturers, I don't think my concerns are entirely without basis.

We have a nearly unblemished military safety record for working with fission. The commercial record - from an era when oversight was far stronger - is poor. Awful compared to the military.
As I have said whenever we have these discussions - I am not opposed in principle. I just have absolutely no reason to trust industry here and, given their record, it's no good arguing the technology is far better today. It's not the technology which worries me. It's the complete lack of competent oversight and the eagerness to set profit ahead of safety.
Or has anyone forgotten that our power grid infrastructure is still largely older than I am? And these are the people who are so responsible we should trust them?

And yes, Andrew, the industry does rely on the stupidity and ignorance and greed of politicians. Many folks here are far brighter than I am. But you aren't making the decisions. The folks who are really don't understand what they are dealing with.
 
reinforced concrete is not everlasting ...

after 20/30 years concrete is less alkaline, so steel starts rusting/breaking. This happens to bridges/highways and to nuclear plants too.

Not a case that some french power stations have daily "small events" : these plants are somewhat 20/30 years old.
Just google and read about it

Our power stations are switched off since the no-nuke referendum in 1987. But they still exist and are getting older and older ......

What about dismantling costs ? They make nuke power anything but cheap.

Anyway the mother of every question is what Keven wrote :

"It's not the technology which worries me. It's the complete lack of competent oversight and the eagerness to set profit ahead of safety"

Sadly this happens everywhere in the world.
We've just "checked" this problem in occasion of the last earthquake
 
That's the way it has always been Keven....just look at any Public Utility Commission...and I have testified in front of many, many of them!!! The difference is today, though, that the technology has obviated the need for much of the human intervention and oversight, though not every single aspect, than that which was required "back then". If not for that fact, I would not be much of a supporter myself. But I do understand the technology, and it's implications for safety. It will never be perfect, for sure.....as long as man is involved.
 
That's great news!
I tought that the ABWR didn't make it past the projecting stages but it'll be great to se another design besides the EPR!
I hope we're going to get new plants as promised here too, electricity won't get cheaper for final consumers but at least we'll stop buying from France.
Anyway, was any kind of schedule published? What will the rating be, how many reactors? With cooling towers or stream/lake cooling?
I see nuclear as the best thing we can get in this era of fossil fuels (nuclear is fossil too!) as it's the most safe and less polluting real alternative to oil and gas. Think that all the waste done in a lifetime of a plant can be stored in less than the volume of the plant. With all the storage equipment, while a standard coal plant can emit some 2000 kg of ash per hour (most of it gets filtered) but that ash is more radioactive than the combined effluents from a nuclear plant! Even at a rate of 97% filtration a standard plant emits more radionuclides in the enviroment than a nuclear one.
 
Gabriele,

GE has four operational ABWR's now online in Japan. Three more are currently under construction.

Barry
 
Uranium reserves

Estimates vary, but one article states that the power in uranium reserves exceeds that available from all fossil fuels, including the theoretical output from undersea methane deposits.

Furthermore, at roughly twice the cost ($240/kg) of conventional mining, the Japanese have developed a uranium specific fiber mat which can extract fissionable uranium from sea water - a virtually limitless supply. It's also my understanding that the cost of the uranium is a fractional component of the overall cost of nuclear energy - the capital needed for building the reactor complex and for its eventual retirement and decommissioning being the primary costs.
 
Don't forget about the Westinghouse - you can be sure!

DJ, some utilities are planning to build the Westinghouse AP1000 nuclear plant - I know since what's left of Westinghouse (now part of Toshiba) is based in PGh. They just moved their headquarters north of Pittsburgh from the east because they need more engineers. I'm hoping my brother (electrical engineering) can get a job there, even though he may have to go to China.

Favorit, isn't the concrete in a nuclear plant 4 feet thick? It seems that should last a long time but highways not lasting long here, I wonder how long?
 
I don't think it's the concrete longevity that is the issue with nuclear power plants.

It's the effect of the radiation on the metals that are used in the core and the surrounding plumbing. I'm not technical on the details, but as I recall the radiation embrittles and weakens the metals to the point where they must be replaced or retired before a major leak occurs. At some point it becomes cheaper to retire the entire plant rather than try to replace the deteriorated components.

I also recall a major foul-up when the Diablo Canyon reactor was being built. It was publicized in the bay area... someone managed to build a lot of the plumbing in a mirror image of what it was supposed to be. It was hugely expensive to redo all that work. The alloys used are special and not inexpensive (think very pure stainless steel, etc...).
 
Concrete itself tends to get stronger for many years after it is initially poured. However, reinforced concrete derives much of its' strength from the steel rebar inside, and I think the radiation affects that as well as other metals used in the reactor.
 
I think the fact that the Japanese

have had to go to such lengths to scavenge fissionable materials makes the point - we don't have nearly enough to meet all our needs for any length of time. If some new discovery or technology changes that, great.
I am not, in principle, opposed to nuclear energy.

Am however, terrified by the way plants have been built up to now, and those are just the things we do find out about.

We are now in the midst of a big discussion (led, I might add by conservative capitalists) on limiting the size of banks and financial institutions because anything "too big too fail" is too dangerous.

I fail to see why the same mentality shouldn't apply to nuclear power plants: We can play the "well, that was old technology" game all we like, but as far as I know, the laws of physics still apply...and so far, the mathematics underlying statistical analysis have proved grimly reliable.

Let one of these things fail, and we are talking about hundreds of thousands of cases of juvenile leukemia (the co-relation is so high, not even the government pretends otherwise here in Western Europe regarding cases since Chernobyl), an increase in non-Hodgins which is textbook-curve in shape and millions of valuable farm land which will now lie fallow for centuries...

We don't even have oversight over cookie dough in the US in 2009 and we are expected to believe that the industry will police itself?

Puh-lease.
 
I am pro nuclear plants all the way.We have 8 reactors within a 100 miles of me..These new ones there making like the Westinghouse are true walk away reactors.They use Gravity and natural cirrculation to cool the core if there is a Scram or some other accident.We can never run out of Fuel for Nuclear plants because of breeder reactors which make more fuel than they use.The U.S. has had quite a few breeder's running in the past.Chernoybol would never have happened here.No Plant here would try to run the pumps on Turbine spin down and disabling all the saftey features of the plant during the test.The U.S. plants contaniment is something the USSR didnt use on there R.B.K. plants or any other types they had I don't think.We need these baseload plants they are so much cleaner than Fossil fuel.Wind power is great we now lead the world in it.We have just sold the first 6MW turbine and more to come but they can never be use for baseloading like Nuclear.
 
no

A breeder still requires fissionable material. We certainly are going the right direction with them, but again - the effort necessary to find or mine or filter or extract that material will ultimately limit them.

Breeders are not pure mass converters, unless something radical has changed since I went to school. You get below thorium or so and you are not going to do much breeding. Now, get it down to the aluminum level or so and then we'll be talking.

Again, I'm not opposed to nuclear energy. Just, I don't care how safe the theoretical design, ultimately, what matters is the fact that the industry has an enormously, rottenly bad tendency to cut corners on safety and to lie throw their teeth about mistakes.
 
A conventional reactor uses only about 1% of the energy contained in the fissionable material (U238-U235). A breeder reactor produces 20% more fuel than it consumes, and uses about 75% of the energy in the fissionable material.

The main objection to breeder reactors is that they produce plutonium, which can be separated and used in nuclear weapons of the type that was used on Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945 (the Hiroshima weapon was a U-235 enriched weapon; such fuel is quite costly to produce through successive levels of enrichment). The plutonium bomb is a far more complex design than the uranium bomb and was the focus of much of the later work at the wartime Manhattan project, as it was envisioned (correctly) that not enough highly enriched uranium would ever be available to produce a stockpile of atomic weapons.

The other objection to breeder reactors is the high radiation encountered during the fuel reprocessing step, which increases the risk of environmental contamination as well as theft of plutonium.

Current estimates of economically recoverable fissionable uranium reserves range from 50 to 85 years at current rates of consumption. Exploitation of all uranium deposits regardless of cost could result in a higher energy yield than all fossil fuel reserves combined, including undersea fossil fuel methane deposits. However as noted at a higher cost nearly unlimited amounts of uranium can be recovered from seawater, and these reserves were not included in the previous comparison with fossil fuel reserves. The current estimated cost of recovering seawater reserves of uranium is about five times that of currently recovered conventionally mined uranium. It remains to be seen if that cost can be reduced, and if the cost of energy will continue to rise and make seawater extraction economically attractive.
 
Rich,

Thank you - I was trying very hard not to say "perpetuum mobile" and not succeeding very well in explaining.

Of course, one aspect of nuclear reactors which the "better living through atomic energy, (pronounce it 'nu-klea-ear')" lobby also conveniently forgets to mention is that nuclear reactors are not easy to ramp up to meet a sudden load increase. In fact, if you want to run these babies as breeders, then you are not going to be running them outside of a very very very very tightly defined range. Or did they go and re-write those pesky natural laws again while I was taking a nap?

But energy demand is not constant. The French (I admit, this was old technology, but hey - they were not thinking breeder and so had more not less flexibility) calculated way back in the dark ages that if all energy needs were to be met with nuclear reactors, it would require seven times the number if a mixture of nuclear and hydro-electric were used. Which is, in fact, exactly how the French manage the relatively high efficiency (that and the Italians and everybody else buying from them whilst pretending they don't use atomic energy, oh, no.

So we can forget about going 100% nuclear from the get go. Unless some brilliant person thinks of an energy storage system which is safe, easy to transport, has more or less unlimited shelf life, is idiot proof and, well, shucks, guess I'm talking about gasoline, again.

Silly me.
 
Chernobyl

Cehrnobyl was a graphite moderated reactor. (A "moderator" slows neutrons down to allow capture by and fissioning of U-235 nuclei).

The former Soviet Union built this plant based on designs stolen from the West during the 1940's, and so was somewhat outdated. It also did not have a containment surrounding it.

In the U.S., we use light water moderated reactors for power production. Graphite "pile" reactors are not utilized and are considered relics of the WWII research era.

It is difficult to compare a Chernoybl type reactor with a U.S. type reactor as they are of different design.

An analogy I often give to students is comparing a Volkswagen "bug" with a Boeing 747.

They both are transportation, they both use hydrocarbon fuel and they both get you from one place to another. But they are somewhat disimilar in nature. They acheive the same result (moving a body (bodies) from place to place and share the same name of "transportation". They operate differently and have different safety ramifications should failure occur.

A graphie pile and a light water reactor power plant, share the same name of "nuclear power" and they both share that electricity exits the plant. However, the means and failure ramifications are different.

That is why the U.S., and most other countries, do not use graphite piles as they are outdated (you might say they are "fossils" technologically) and difficult to control.

I would hazard a guess that most countries, if they did employ a grpahite pile, would care enough about human life to build a containment around it.
 

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