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The advantage of a graphite moderated reactor begins and ends with that it can use natural uranium with a U-235 content of 0.7%. A boiling water reactor, which uses purified water as the moderator, requires a higher concentration of u-235: 3%. This means extensive plants must be constructed to enrich the uranium to run in a BWR or other water moderated reactor. The Canadians got around this by using heavy water - deuterium - as the moderator, which can use natural uranium as well, without the hazards intrinsic in a graphite moderated design.

I don't think anyone is currently proposing a 100% nuclear powered electric infrastructure. Nor is anyone proposing a 100% breeder reactor nuclear infrastructure. A mix of power sources - which would include fossil as well as renewable, is most likely. Here in the US there's great potential for solar power - we're already making large amount in some of our desert areas using thermo electric maans - the sun's energy is concentrated and used to heat water which in turn drives steam turbines. More of this is on its way. Then there's wind power, of which the US is the world leader at present. Photovoltaic is a great option of individual businesses and residences, but the cost of the silicon panels is still too high. One advantage of solar is that its energy production peaks at about the same time demand peaks - during the hottest parts of the day in climates where AC is needed.
 
Yay! Someone sees the light of day!

When 95% of all France's power comes from nuclear without mishap its time to get off the anti-nuclear bandwagon.
There are designs that are very safe.

Keep us posted, we need electricity!
To think we can just keep growing in usage and try to grow a crop to fill the shortfall is crazy.
Do you really want to end up with the same people who control the oil markets today to then control food markets tomorrow??
 
Light Water Reactors

Light Water Reactors, as well as Breeder reactors, are both run at close to 100% power capacity due to efficiency. That is why nuclear power plants are used primarily for base load power generation.

A controlled ramp up is only required from a unit that has been placed in cold shut down mode (usually done for refueling every six months to a year.)

When online, a modern nuclear reactor responds to power transients (peak load/off-peak load variations) nearly instantly without operator intervention. Its response rate to transients exceeds that of conventional fossil fuel systems.

Rapid response rate to load changes is one of the reasons (as well as the need for only infrequent refueling) make them such as ideal propulsion device for submaries.

It is because of efficiency, as opposed to ability, that reactors are kept near full power to provide baseload power generation needs.Auxilliary power stations (which may be oil, gas or coal) are often used, by local power utilities, to meet customer load variations. However, they are not necessary.

A nuclear plant can act very well as a stand alone power source...but efficiency is increased if it can stay near a full power state.

Because of this, nuclear power stations can team up very well with none conventional power sources such as solar, hydrothermal and wind, as well as conventional fossil sources,
to be used for load leveling generation.

There is no technological reason the U.S. couldn't go 100% nuclear, but in reality we will always have a blend.

In areas of the country where the climatic conditions allow, we will hopefully continue to see growth of auxilliary stations using wind, solar and in some areas of the country, even geothermal sources.

Right now, about a fifth of all of our power in the U.S. is generated through nuclear energy. However, if you look at all carbon free, and particulant free, generation in the U.S., nuclear is producing slightly less than 75% of it.

If we can continue to work on increasing the efficiency and practicality of alternative energy sources, and use them to augment baseload nuclear power generation, we can at least make a dent in the approach of a truly "green" environment by eliminating smog, particulants, greenhouse gases and acid rain.
 
One question I can't help but ask, Professor Woods, is why does your university have a nuclear engineering program when there are only 2 nuclear plants in Ohio and 85% of Ohio's electricity comes from coal? That's almost as bad as West Virginia with 100%. Pennsylvania has 9 nuclear plants for about 1/3 of our power, I think we may have the highest wattage of all the states and Governor Rendell approved an Areva reactor in central PA. Pittsburgh, with Westinghouse, had the first nuclear power plant in the nation. So why aren't you at, say, Pitt or Penn State? It seems that Ohio likes their coal.
 
I think

we should be thankful to have such a competence in the area in Ohio. A state with a solid academic and cultural tradition.

I do have a question. Perhaps it's because I'm too D-U-M, dumb to get it, but what end would be served by putting all our eggs in one basket? Isn't that what got us into trouble with fossil fuel?

Imagine we go 100% nuclear and it turns out there is a flaw in, oh, I don't know - the stainless steel we buy from China, no longer possessing the means to produce such large quantities ourselves. Or, it turns out that the programming was done (to increase profit) by a small firm in the Pacific Northwest, run by a Ms. Bates...and every first Thursday of the month this highly-regarded gravity dump, um, dumps cause the controlling system went off-line to reboot and someone forgot to ...

Well, ok, but still - I do think I understand that nuclear power plants are designed to be run at a certain degreee of efficiency and thus are good for the base-line needs. The French (who have lots of atomic plants) and the Austrians (who have lots of mountains and water) have a very good deal going - at night the Austrians use "atomic" electricity to pump water back up behind the hydroelectric dams and during the day, when demand exceeds the baseline in France (the Austrians only need electricity for, well, never mind) they let the water fall back down and the resulting "wet" electricity takes up the short-term surges which would otherwise have required several times more reactors to meet.

Makes sense and works.

But - and yes, I just started a sentence with a conjunction - but the French and the Germans and the UK have seriously well trained personnel and even if the officials and politicians are corrupt, they are also willing to be corrupt and pay attention to safety. I just don't see American politicians having the competence or will to enforce the degree of oversight which the industry requires to run safely.

Again: The US has no means to have un-safe drugs pulled off the market. There is no means to force a company to withdraw tainted food from the market. Any attempts at oversight are always shouted down as "Socialist". We can clean up a Pruho bay or two, sort of and Mother Nature will take care of the rest within a few decades or so. Radioactive contamination is, in human terms, forever. Let's address the safety concerns first, then I'll be happy to talk about the rest.
 
I believe it's relative: it's already been established that fossil fuels are destroying our ecosystem. We used to be able to afford becoming paranoid over "what-if" lists, but not any more.

Again, IMO we owe France a large debt of gratitude for showing the world how to proceed with nuclear power.
 
nuclear engineering

Good to hear from you, NeptuneBob. I always think of you when something about Westinghouse comes up. Are you still living in "Westinghouse-land" (PA)?

Wright State, unfortunately does not offer pure Nuclear Engineering. My Department offers Electrical Engineering and Engineering Physics as degrees for entry in nuclear power generation and distribution.

Pumped storage makes a really nice supplement to nuclear (or any power generation system) to store energy during off-peak times. We have a pumped storage unit in Cincinnati.

The basic premise is you use excess electricity made at night, when demand is low. (People are in bed and most industry have ramped down.) to pump water up a hill to a storage reservoir.

In the morning, when people get up, ( turn on the lights, kick on the air conditioner (or heat in the winter), start to cook breakfast and most industry throttles up to full power) you drain the water back down and use it turn turbines to create extra power to meet the immediate peak demand

However, it require some very specific terrain requirements. One needs to build the equivalent of a man-made lake at sufficient elevation above the power plant to provide enough force to efficiently turn the turbines when a peak demand arises.

Not too many generation stations own the land or have the appropriate topography necessary. When they do, it works well and makes a perfect mate for a nuclear power unit for load leveling generation.

GE is making a good product even better with the ESBWR, Gabriel. None constructed yet, but from what I hear, some utilities have ordered Early Site Permits for ESBWR construction.
 
Of course,

Where gravity is stubbornly refusing to cooperate (there might not be much grade to many areas in the US, there is a lot of land and work is still distance/time (at least it is where I live, I understand the Republicans moved to have π set equal to 3.0 in some state legislatures not all that long ago).

But I have always been a strong proponent of using nuclear energy for the things which really require big whomping quantities of the stuff, constantly.

How about water desalination projects that are run during the off-peak times? The areas which need such water (not quite potable, but close enough for agriculture) also happen to be the areas which eat the most electricity during the day - California, for instance. Or use it to produce hydrogen for those "clean cars" which are always right around the corner but never quite show up.

My hopes for a battery with sufficient storage density to replace hydrogen based fuels in the near future is virtually null. But who cares, if you're already processing water anyway and you've got 0² as a waste product...

Or, how about pumping some of the excess water from the mid-west (speaking of natural laws, there's an example of two: Water always finds it's own way, and, water always wins in the end) to the arrid West and Texas? Goodness, one could even be extravagent and turn the Rio Grande back into more grande and less rivulet.

I find the potential of nuclear energy fascinating. I find the thought of getting down on our knees in front of the greedy-gut, corrupt, too-hell-with-safety power industry so they can let down their flys and piss all over us scary. And that is what too many people are advocating. If we are going to trick out with a dangerous partner, let's do it safely.

Again, these highly praised reactors in France are run in what the Americans otherwise always sneerlingly call "Marxist-Leninist-Socialist-Fascist"-highly-regulated quasi-government owned utilities and not by freemarket capitalists who neither know nor understand what ionizing radiation is.
 
~Again, IMO we owe France a large debt of gratitude for showing the world how to proceed with nuclear power.

My limited understanding is such. In France every nuclear reactor is exaclty the same. So an engneer who is familiar with this little valve way over and under here ..... would find the same valve doing the same thing anywhere in the country.

Now there is a low-tech solution to a low-tech problem; standardization. I'd say with nuclear power ANTYTHING THAT can be done to eliminate user error is a good thing!
 
> Again, these highly praised reactors in France are run in what the Americans otherwise always sneerlingly call "Marxist-Leninist-Socialist-Fascist"-highly-regulated quasi-government owned utilities and not by freemarket capitalists who neither know nor understand what ionizing radiation is. <

All but one of France's nuclear plants were built by Areva from *Westinghouse* original designs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France
 
No suprise, there

The French know what's good.
Jeff, I am not arguing against nuclear energy. I am arguing against our returning to the untenable situation of the first atomic era - it was a disaster waiting to happen. Which then did.

Right now, I see the same hurrah-mentality as we saw back then.

By all means, learn from the French. But not just the technology (which Intel also uses and popularized) but from the controlling organs.
 
Westinghouse Design

A wise choice on Areva's part, Jeff, to go with Westinghouse designed reactors. Westinghouse has a solid engineering design as evidenced by their high plant capacity factor operating history and are used around the globe.

Westinghouse utilizes the Pressured Water Reactor (PWR) and GE the BWR. Both have an outstanding track record. Both very viable designs, but from an engineering stand point I give a slight edge to the BWR systems as you reduce some of the complexity with the elimination of the secondary steam loop and associated hardware.

Barry
 
Don't mention Areva in our area!

This is Westinghouse territory! One of my neighbors works for Westinghouse and has been for the past 30 years and if I even say "Arevaderche" as a greeting I get a dirty look. Coincidentally, she looks like Anne Lavergeon, the woman who runs Areva.
 
I think the problem is not necessarily how safe anything is -- it's probably "Not In My Back Yard". No one wants utilities in their neighborhood, just ask around.

You should have seen the bitching, not only by the neighborhood properly, but everyone else that drives through around here when one has to expand and/or remodel or even do just simple maintenance on a water treatment plan, for example.

The Boston Area just recently went through a few years trying to get all the plans and permits to improve (or expand?, I forget) a water treatment plant in Cambridge (the one near the "Rotaries of Death", for y'all who know the area), and it was a year or two of actual construction in which the traffic around the area was just murder. Everyone was bitching about it... I don't even live nearby, and I was bitching too, so no, I'm not excluding myself here, I tell it like it is.

Sure, put a nuclear power plant in the middle of nowhere, maybe not enough people have enough power to stop it. Now try to transport radioactive materials to/from there and see millions of people complaining. I'm all for nuclear power, but I might join the ones complaining: I'd want to know about what kind of safety measures they'd put in place, how they'd avoid people trying to rob the materials passing through etc.

Also, you'll notice, other countries tend to have fewer, larger power plants away from cities and high-voltage towers bringing the power to where it's needed -- how often do you hear people here demonstrating against the installation of such towers through their neighborhoods? And who can blame them, I wouldn't want the eyesore, or the problems associated with them, including lowering property values. Heck, people in Martha's Vineyard are trying to stop the installation of wind power generation because they claim it will be noisy and an eyesore... noisier than the ocean? And really, when it's several miles off the coast like intended, how visible is this gonna be, a quarter inch on the horizon? Still, maybe I'd be on their side if I lived there, who knows?

It's all about how unobtrusive things can be. I've been to areas where cell phone coverage is near perfect (sometimes in 3rd world countries), and there are areas in USA where there's no coverage by one company or another, 'cuz no one wants a cell tower nearby and if a church or two refuses to let the antennas be hidden in the steeple, "no cell coverage for you!" is what you get. If you can hide a small power plant in an innocent looking building around here, you have power, otherwise, tough luck.

It always cracks me up when I'm walking or driving through Cambridge and see signs proudly announcing that "Cambridge is a nuclear-free city" -- sure, honey, if you discount all the energy that is brought to your fair city through wires but generated in some nuclear power plant, then you're right... also, if you insist on forgetting that MIT *has* a nuclear reactor, and so does Harvard -- sure, research reactors, but hardly nuclear free.

And Panthera, I may be the last person defending the republicans, but setting the value of Pi to 3 is, as far as I've been told, not for science or anything else, but for one case: if you have a piece of property that is circular, for the purpose of calculating the property taxes, you can use 3 instead of Pi -- it's like a discount on your taxes, which is I think the reason they suggested this law, as opposed to they can't afford a $10 handheld calculator that would produce the proper value. But they may have duped me on this, maybe they can't remember the value of Pi and can't be arsed to get a calculator, who knows. ;-)
 
NIMBY

NIMBY - Not in MY Backyard has become the rallying cry to stop any and everything here in Munich. Windmills? May the gods forefend - a bloody pigeon might run into one.
Methadone treatment centers? No, three times no, after all, everybody knows that somebody trying to get well is a bad person.
Cell phone antennas - What!?! - we've all seen the youtube video where those kids popped corn with their cell-phones, no way!

And so on.

But everyone, of course, wants unlimited energy, the best medical care and communications...just, not at their personal cost or possible inconvenience.

We have to learn to work together when such big infrastructure projects are needed. Actually, given the pitiful state of the North American electric grid, any hope of nuclear energy saving us is a lost hope until that mess is resolved. Texas has noted, frequently and loudly (well, they are Texans) that they can't even move the energy their current wind farms are producing around because of the grid's limitations.

Earthling, I didn't know about that surveyor's trick, interesting. I like decimals, hated fractions (still do). But, no, actually, there really is a group of Republicans who actually have tried to change the observations we have gained through the natural sciences on many occasions. I was being a bit oblique there because I don't want to insult the folks from the State in which they made their first attempt. And these are the people who make the laws governing industry...which has clearly proved that, no, it is not capable of regulating itself.
 
Panthera -- sorry, I had no idea, the last time I've heard the" Pi is 3" thing was nearly 15 years ago just as I described, so I thought it was the same old thing. I stand corrected. Just when I thought we had reached rock bottom, they started digging now? Jeez. I hope we can improve from here on.
 
Oh, no,

The politician's motto (regardless of party) is: When in a hole, don't stop digging - we are making progress...and don't forget to post that little sign right over the hole: Your tax dollars at work.
 
Continued Developments

Our govenor in Ohio, Ted Strickland(D) let it be known that
Duke energy will be using Areva to build the new nuclear plant in Piketon, Ohio. It will be a version of a Pressured Water Reactor (PWR) that Areva call the EPR (European Pressurized Reactor).

Currently we have 104 operating nuclear power plants in the U.S., this will be the 105th.

Of our plants, 34 are currently BWR and Areva will give us the 71st PWR.

Barry
 
.....and more developments

Ohio Governor Strickland(D) is working with President Obama to secure some additional funding for a prototype, at the site of the new Piketon plant, center of nuclear electricity production and uranium enrichment.

(Up to 2001 there was a uranium enrichment plan run by USEC there)

Plans are for USEC to operate a new and more efficient advanced centrifuge separation plant in Piketon with Areva's new reactor.

Strickland and Obama are in agreement to call it "Clean Energy Park".
 
Not to change the subject, but the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory here in the Bay Area recently had a grand opening. I guess it's some sort of milestone - they've demonstrated the contained fusion concept can work, I guess, now they just need to demonstrate that it can produce electricity regularly and economically.

The size of the thing is enormous, I understand. Massive lasers all focused on one little tiny bead of hydrogen... trying to turn it into helium and releasing more energy than was input.

OK, yeah, I'm skeptical this approach will ever be practical or cost effective (the capital outlay is enormous) but it's the closest thing to "clean" fusion nuclear power so far. It's kind of interesting, that's for sure.
 

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