Dirty bomb
Can Obama stop the nuclear bomb in the Senate stimulus plan? (Part 1) 53
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Posted 5:31 PM on 2 Feb 2009
by Joseph Romm -
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Joseph Romm is the editor of Climate Progress and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
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Joffan Posted 5:25 pm
02 Feb 2009
Loan guarantees are not loans. They do not not require taxpayer money. There is no pork barrel.
Nuclear plants cover their own liability. Price Anderson does not excuse them.
Plants take about five years to build, even under close regulatory scrutiny. And there will be a new US plant operating before 2015.
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For someone who acknowledges the serious and urgent nature of the climate crisis, Joe, you have to tie yourself in knots of self deception to oppose nuclear as you do (despite your occasional claims that you don't). We need to deploy carbon-free power of all sorts as fast as we can, and nuclear will have to form the backbone of the smart grid if we want to get away from the fossils.
You have the potential to make a huge difference by abandoning the lies that prop up the visceral antinuclear position and really acknowledging that nuclear power is a tool we need right now and for the next fifty or more years to keep our climate liveable.
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Karen Street Posted 11:21 pm
02 Feb 2009
Job creation? Before nuclear power plant construction begins, sometime this year or next for a new US gen iii+ plant, parts construction must begin. People are hired to make the parts.
I agree with Joffan on the knot tying. Joe, you don't explain why you go with a CPA's non-peer reviewed analysis of costs rather than International Energy Agency's and other similar quality groups. You use a Turkish example, when there was clearly only one bid because no one wants to work with Turkey's current proposals.
For years, nuclear power was more expensive than natural gas and coal. This changed by the late 90s, early this decade, as coal prices increased with increased respect for human and other life. As natural gas prices increased with increased demand. And as the very expensive safety retrofits required by Nuclear Regulatory Commission produced power plants that are almost always on, over 90% of the time, instead of having long down times for planned and unplanned maintenance. NRC required safety, and the nuclear industry found profit.
Add in the likelihood of a small GHG charge in the next decade, and nuclear power clearly became an attractive source of electricity. Wind still requires a 1.8 cent/kWh subsidy, solar is still way too expensive, and they have other problems, including the need for inefficient fossil fuel backup. Many utilities opted for nuclear power. It still remains necessary to see how well the nuclear, wind, and solar industries do--can they produce high quality products on time with a minimum of quality control glitches?
I read about the good chance that the US southwest (start from the northern border of Missouri-Kansas, and go west and south until you get the majority of land in Mexico), south Africa, the Mediterranean, etc will move into a dust bowl later this century. I read attacks on nuclear power as too expensive (if that is true, then utilities will build solar, etc, and your post is unnecessary). And I grieve.
Karen Street
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amazingdrx Posted 1:00 am
03 Feb 2009
They could be placed in existing containment structures to treat the onsite waste and generate power. Maybe nuclear power could stay around 20% of our present power use and even increase that percentage as conservation through efficiency and lifestyle changes start to take over.
Compare running 3 window air conditiones to running a ground source cooling circulation pump. They both cool the same sized building to a comfortable level (until the power grid melts down from the window air conditioner load), one takes 5 kw, the other takes 1/3 of a kw.
Admit the problematic legacey of the nuclear power industry and faulty government regulation and back R&D for a safe, affordable solution. Embrace the conversion and cleanup of existing nuclear facilities payed for by generating GHG-free kwhs to back up a renewable distributed smart grid.
No one will get rich doing this, profits will be limited because of the mess left behind. Expensive robotic equipment will have to be used to handle the waste and treat it. This will produce a lot of good (though potentially dangerous) jobs though. Oversight must be in place, we don't want the russian system of bribing workers to kill themselves with radiation as is the norm in chernobyl right now.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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GRLCowan Posted 3:03 am
03 Feb 2009
Billions for nuke plants means, within a very few years, billions in savings on natural gas. But some of the natgas billions would have gone to government. Historically, this has motivated it to red-tape nuclear projects to death. If the people force it to guarantee nuclear project loans, it can no longer profit by this behaviour.
Americans will do well to force their government to guarantee nuke loans. When investors were all on their own, that same government was powerfully motivated to screw them, and gain natgas revenue, and so it did. If the natural gas money it would gain is balanced by the loans it would have to repay, this motivation is absent.
Where are the revolving-door public-servant/gas lobbyists in this discussion?
(How fire can be domesticated)
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Joffan Posted 11:35 am
03 Feb 2009
What is needed is for the government, who decided 30 years ago that they are the only competent actor for spent nuclear fuel, to get the hell on with dealing with it. They have collected a huge pile of cash to do that, rightly charged as part of the value of the electricity, and are now in default of their obligation to act with that cash. Ten years in default. If you think the right way for them to meet their obligations is to build waste-transmutation reactors, well and good. It really doesn't affect the question of new nuclear power plant build, though. The waste is actually fine as it is, hurting no-one and posing no threat, and provided the government eventually gets moving there is no reason to delay further plants on this pretext.
You preach like nobody knows that there have been problems in the past with nuclear. Of course there have. But the solution is and was not to go do something else entirely, some unrelated R&D, but to sort out the power process itself, which is what happened in the 80s and 90s.
I'm not interested in who gets rich. I am interested in not burning fossil fuels. You seem to have some idea that we can stop the world; but we can't. Action is needed on all fronts to displace the fossils.
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amazingdrx Posted 1:31 pm
03 Feb 2009
Nuclear plant operators sued the feds to get the billions collected through the per kwh tax charged to consumers. Yucca has cost over 50 billion so far, the fund only held 18 billion before the lawsuit. Transportation of the waste might cost a lot more than 50 billion.
The government had promised to deal with the waste decades ago, the deadline passed and the money went to pay the cost of storing the waste onsite in the used fuel rod "swiming pools".
"The waste is actually fine as it is, hurting no-one and posing no threat"
Any catastrophe, like earthquake or plane crash or terrorism that drains the water will set off a spontaneous combustion of the used fuel rods releasing many times the radiation of Chernobyl.
"If you think the right way for them to meet their obligations is to build waste-transmutation reactors, well and good. It really doesn't affect the question of new nuclear power plant build, though."
As your hero W said, "Fool me once shame on you... fool me.. we can't get fooled again".
"Action is needed on all fronts to displace the fossils."
Thus the compromise proposal, nuclear power as it exists now is prohibitively expensive and unsafe and does not reduce GHG. Note the lifecycle analysis of GHG due to mining, refining and plant construction and waste treatment and storage.
Many politicians have talked about R&D on next generation reactors, james hansen talked about fast neutron reactors to treat waste. This all maybe new to you, but we have been on this topic for a few years here now.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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Joffan Posted 6:21 am
04 Feb 2009
The spent fuel pools are not as vulnerable, even to "catastrophe", as you suggest. They can easily be maintained even under extremely problematic conditions by running water in, and will not cause a Chernobyl as you attempt to conjure.
W may be your hero, since you enjoy his mangled words, but he's in my Hall of Infamy. I assume that your smearish answer is an attempt to hide the fact that you have no answer.
For energy delivered, nuclear is much cheaper than solar and pretty well equal with wind at present, and safer than both. Of course it reduces GHG, since it replaces coal, and I direct you to the EU Extern-E study for real greenhouse gas information.
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GreyFlcn Posted 7:35 am
04 Feb 2009
Nuclear power cannot get Private Capital Financing. (And this was the case well before this current loan scarcity crisis) It's the exact opposite of what private capital markets want. The return is too slow, the default rate is too risky, and the size of the loan wager is too bulky. What's more, there's never been a US Nuclear power plant that was built on-time, and on-budget. And France's recent attempts (Federally subsidized all the way of course), are showing that on-time and on-budget can't be expected.
http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-5785236/Nuclear-p ...
http://greyfalcon.net/parenti
http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2008/12/08/nuke ...
And they still haven't figured out a single thing to do with the waste. ("10 Yucca Mountain size repositories by the end of the century?", and that's coming from a study funded in large part by the nuclear industry itself) We don't even have anywhere near the money for just ONE of these things. And we haven't collected a dime for it since 1998.
http://grist.org/news/2008/08/05/yucca/index.html
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/6/18/161052/155
http://nytimes.com/2008/02/17/us/17nuke.html
-David Ahlport
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GreyFlcn Posted 7:49 am
04 Feb 2009
If you're talking about tax support that allow for increased capital recovery rates.
All US Nuclear power gets an equivalent of an Investment Tax Credit.
All of their profits that are earmarked for decommissioning are entirely tax free.
http://www.citizen.org/cmep/energy_enviro_nuclear/nuclear ...
Meanwhile the funds are still freely available for high risk capital investment.
http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2008/10/10/fina ...
One might even say it's even better than what Solar gets, since it's a higher percentage of the total cost of ownership, and it's available for up to 60 years.
Where Solar only get 30% of their profits tax free, for 10 years. (Only 10% for 10 years for Geothermal)
http://www.dsireusa.org/library/includes/incentive2.cfm?I ...
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Meanwhile if we want to talk about "New" Nuclear that gets:
A 1.8 cent per kwh subsidy
An investment tax credit
A multi billion dollar cost overrun fund
Nearly 40 billion dollars worth of loan guaruntrees
More R&D money than the entire rest of the electricity industry combined.
And they STILL can get their own private financing.
-David Ahlport
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Karen Street Posted 7:54 am
04 Feb 2009
You say nuclear is equal with wind? Where? Currently wind gets 1.8 cent/kWh subsidy.
Have you seen numbers for wind plus backup, both cost and GHG reductions? Of course both vary, depending on location.
What trends are you seeing in opposition to nuclear power? I'd guess that opposition among the opposed but open-minded group is down by half since 2000, and among the pretty inflexible group, it's down by 1/5. The latter shift means that some people are not as inflexible as they and I thought.
David, er, multibillion dollar contracts have already been signed in and out of the US. The nuclear companies are hiring boucoup workers. The suppliers to said companies are hiring boucoup workers. Construction on a new gen iii+ is expected to begin in 2011. What are you seeing that these companies are not?
Karen Street
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GreyFlcn Posted 8:07 am
04 Feb 2009
Any of which that are near entirely backed by private money?
Contracts that function near entirely outside of Capitalist markets, don't really lend much credibility toward their competence in Capitalist Markets.
Wind still requires a 1.8 cent/kWh subsidy
All US Nuclear power get an Investment Tax Credit.
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2009/2/2/14493/70469#com ...
What's more, Why are you arguing that a fully amortized power plant of any sort should be receiving a tax credit angled at capital recovery? (!) That's disgusting.
-David Ahlport
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amazingdrx Posted 12:39 pm
04 Feb 2009
http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1156164650051
Believing various nuclear industry talking points can lead to confusion. As you can see, the 15 billion collected set against the 50 billion or so to be awarded from the fund to settle these lawsuits won't leave a dime for waste treatment, transportation, or Yucca Mountain, which latest estimates claim will cost 60 billion.
In short, nuclear lobbyists and their cronies in government have left taxpayers with a huge expensive dangerous mess to clean up.
This ought to be avoided in future incarnations of nuclear power. For that oversight will be needed. And some way of actually treating the waste.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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Joffan Posted 1:17 pm
04 Feb 2009
In 2002, however, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit held that DOE could not use the Nuclear Waste Fund to pay the damages resulting from the government's breach of its contracts.
http://www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=8675&type=0
Your link does nothing to assert any different position, no matter how you wish it would.
The NWF is not affected by these payments.
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Joffan Posted 1:28 pm
04 Feb 2009
I can't recall where the approximately equal-costs assessment came from. I think though that it gave a good 30+% capacity factor to wind and no consideration of different lifespan or continuous backup.
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amazingdrx Posted 1:43 pm
04 Feb 2009
So you found one countervaling legal opinion and that exempts you from answering for the other distortions you are promulgating? Evidently so, at least in your own mind that is.
Then taxpayers get to pay the 50 billion dollar judgement, instead of it coming out of the 15 billion dollar waste fund. A fund that is supposed to pay 60 billion for Yucca Mountain and untold transportation, decommisioning, treatment, and pay for 10,000 years of storage?
Arithmetic will tell us that you are laboring under a bankrupt plan to deal with nuclear waste. Wake up and smell the radioactive metal fumes, fumes that Chernobyl control room personel smelled.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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GreyFlcn Posted 1:48 pm
04 Feb 2009
However it IS being used to pay for onsite temporary dry cask storage, and NOT long term storage.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/us/17nuke.html?_r=1
-David Ahlport
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amazingdrx Posted 2:10 pm
04 Feb 2009
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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amazingdrx Posted 2:16 pm
04 Feb 2009
Links to lots of article about accidents, curies, genetic mutation, "Glow Trains", and wasted tax dollars in the 100s of billions do not create a positive impression of nuclear power.
I think talking about compromise, oversight, clean up, and a new generation of waste neutralizing reactors is more positive.
It's a free country, take your pick.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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Joffan Posted 1:53 am
05 Feb 2009
The government prevarication on this topic has led to unnecessary cost to the taxpayers - which is no cause for celebration. But it is not a cost on the Nuclear Waste Fund, and neither should it be, since the money was collected long since for funding the repository and not for funding the government to break its promises.
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Joffan Posted 1:54 am
05 Feb 2009
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Karen Street Posted 2:30 am
05 Feb 2009
So it would not be a discussion that would follow, but another meaningless argument.
Sorry. I will respond to your arguments if you find a way to become seriously engaged in the discussion.
Start by reading Sustainable Energy Future: The Essential Role of Nuclear Energy, from all 12 lab directors, posted on http://change.gov/open_government/yourseatatthetable/C16/ ...
Do you assume that a group that includes all 12 lab directors A) has studied the issue, and B) makes sure the i's are dotted before writing such a report? Let me know after you read the report.
Karen Street
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BILL HANNAHAN Posted 4:42 am
05 Feb 2009
You may have noted That the usual nuclear advocates tend to cool it and move on to other threads once these waste, leakage, safety, and storage issues begin to rear their ugly faces.
That is because waste is boring. Generating a lifetime supply of electricity produces less than 10 pounds of spent fuel, vs. 200,000 lb of toxic sludge and 2,440,000 pounds of CO2 from coal. Most of that 10 pounds is not waste, it is fuel for advanced reactors.
Uranium ore is slightly toxic and is found in deposits scattered throughout the earths crust. These ore deposits gradually erode to the surface where they travel throughout our environment carried by wind and water. This is how the seas became saturated with 4.5 billion tons of uranium.
When spent fuel is removed from the reactor it is 4,000 times more toxic than ore, that is, 4,000 times more toxic than the dirt in many wilderness areas and under many homes. If we isolate it 4,000 times better than nature isolates dirt we are safer right from the start. This is not a difficult engineering challenge.
To say that we have not found a solution to the waste problem is false. The correct statement is that we have not implemented one of the many solutions available to us with respect to commercial nuclear waste. Military waste is being buried in ancient salt deposits that have existed for millions of years. Salt is a plastic material that is self healing and unaffected by radiation. My preference is deep seabed disposal until advanced reactors make recycling cost effective, because the mud is ideally suited to contain the waste. Even if some leaks into the oceans it will take hundreds of years for it to enter our environment by which time it is largely decayed to very low levels. Seawater is naturally radioactive with billions of tons of radioactive material, any leakage would not significantly risk human life.
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/96oct/seabed/seabed.htm ...
The irrational fear over nuclear waste is a monument to the failure of our education system to teach people how to evaluate risk and balance it against benefit.
Uranium has a 4 billion year half life. Converting it into fission products will make the earth less radioactive for the vast majority of its remaining life than if humans had not evolved.
Nature generated over a dozen nuclear reactors 1.7 billion years ago in the uranium deposit at Oklo. For the last 1.699 billion years that site has been less toxic than it would have been had those reactors not formed, because the uranium they destroyed would still be making decay products like radon gas and lead.
http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/factsheets/doeymp0010.shtml
Things Everybody Should Know About Energy
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amazingdrx Posted 5:16 am
05 Feb 2009
That reduces overall radiation levels, freeing more up from the rock with mining produces higher levels in the water the biosphere uses as blood.
Hmmm natural fision reactors? Pretty interesting.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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GreyFlcn Posted 5:35 am
05 Feb 2009
It should be noted that if you include non-proliferation, and R&D. Over 90% of the DOE's annual budget goes toward Nuclear related issues.
And more than 50% of all federal electricity related R&D subsidies go towards Nuclear.
That said, from that it's quite possible to make the argument that the current status quo within the DOE is less than objective about Nuclear issues.
What's more, if we took "Federal Labs" at face value, then Corn Ethanol would be considered the greatest thing since sliced bread.
-David Ahlport
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Joffan Posted 3:21 pm
05 Feb 2009
Clearly you prefer to argue on the basis of conjecture and projection rather than facts - what was that corn ethanol remark about? I hope someday you will see the folly of this approach.
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GreyFlcn Posted 5:52 pm
05 Feb 2009
But Nuclear projects in general on the DOE payroll do.
http://www.cfo.doe.gov/budget/09budget/Start.htm#Summary% ...
And taking your curiously-phrased statement about "federal electricity related R&D subsidies", which in itself is a clear indicator of cherry-picking, it is also false, since nothing like that amount of R&D is spent on nuclear power - noting your use of the present tense.
That's because Nuclear power has gotten over half of all federal electricity related R&D subsidies over the last half century, and individually every year for the last decade.
http://greyfalcon.net/energyresearch2.png
http://greyfalcon.net/energyresearch.png
what was that corn ethanol remark about?
Federal studies are presently about the only source of publications that say that corn ethanol is at all beneficial from a greenhouse emissions standpoint. Argonne National Labs in particular.
http://i-r-squared.blogspot.com/2006/09/postscript-with-w ...
-David Ahlport
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Joffan Posted 12:55 am
06 Feb 2009
Fossil: 0.5bn R&D + 2.7bn tax_ex (disgraceful!) = $3.2bn
Renewable: 0.3bn R&D + 0.8bn tax_ex = $1.1bn
Nuclear: 0.6bn R&D + zero tax_ex = $0.6bn
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amazingdrx Posted 1:30 am
06 Feb 2009
The nuclear power industry was born of the military industrial complex. The very same contractors, under ever shifting chapter 11 inspired names to avoid responsibility for criminal negliegance, bribery, and fraud, have been behind the bomb and nuclear powered ships, that are behind nuclear power.
And the really expensive cleanup to come is totally unaccounted for. only one reactor has been decommisioned so far. The core lies in an unlined trench in a landfill in South Carolina, contaminarion leaking into nearby groundwater and rivers. I bet you are going to say that you want a nuclear core landfill in your backyard, right?
Dig that hole deeper, nuclear power can't be buried deep enough. hehey.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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GreyFlcn Posted 5:52 am
06 Feb 2009
If you're talking about tax support that allow for increased capital recovery rates.
All US Nuclear power gets an equivalent of an Investment Tax Credit.
All of their profits that are earmarked for decommissioning are entirely tax free.
http://www.citizen.org/cmep/energy_enviro_nuclear/nuclear ...
Meanwhile the funds are still freely available for high risk capital investment.
http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2008/10/10/fina ...
One might even say it's even better than what Solar gets, since it's a higher percentage of the total cost of ownership, and it's available for up to 60 years.
Where Solar only get 30% of their profits tax free, for 10 years. (Only 10% for 10 years for Geothermal)
http://www.dsireusa.org/library/includes/incentive2.cfm?I ...
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On top of which New Nuclear power plants get:
An Investment Tax Credit (Or equivalent there of what Solar Gets)
A Production Tax Credit (Equivalent to what Wind Gets)
A multi-billion dollar cost overrun fund
The entirety of the financing risk for those power plants being shouldered by US tax payers.
_
As for conventional light water fission R&D, yeah they have their hands out for that too.
http://inl.gov/featurestories/docs/inl_07-13543_08.pdf
-David Ahlport
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Joffan Posted 6:29 am
06 Feb 2009
But equally obviously, funds which are paid into (not merely "earmarked for") a dedicated decommissioning fund are not profits. Your claim that they are available for "high risk investment" is clearly not true, since the article you link to points out that they were not hit as hard as would be expected by the slump, because they were trust-fund managed.
One might say... that your comparison with solar is completely out to lunch. Solar gets 30% of yearly profits tax-free and this is real profits, not a future expense that is being allocated for in advance. Nuclear pays tax on all its profits.
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What on earth is your point 3 on New Nuclear plants about?
As for the other benefits; since we need carbon-free electricity, we have to encourage the build out of infrastructure to produce it. I don't think nuclear really needs the production tax credit to be honest, but I guess they asked anyway to level the playing field. I do know that it only applies to the first 6GW built and only for a limited time.
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What's your problem with an R&D plan? Wouldn't you regard that as a Good Thing if say the wind industry and government got forward to propose a plan for the next twenty years?
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Joffan Posted 6:36 am
06 Feb 2009
So where is this mythical cleanup that you want to pin on the nuclear power industry, and how was the mess created? Hmm? Let's see you join the dots rather than just throw your innuendo about.
Show me you care about reality.
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GreyFlcn Posted 7:18 am
06 Feb 2009
Why is it your talking point to argue that power plants that have recovered all of their capital costs, aren't presently receiving assistant for capital recovery.
And then therefore equivocating that it's cheaper to build new versions of these power plants.
Even when new versions of these power plants would receive far more capital recovery assistance.
_
You seem to be forgetting that there hasn't been a new Nuclear power plant built in over 30 years.
Where as wind, has has a dramatic increase in installations over 2007.
-David Ahlport
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Joffan Posted 12:15 pm
06 Feb 2009
---
Meanwhile there have of course been nuclear power plants built in the last 30 years, although not as many as there should have been. Perhaps if the electricity market had not been deregulated we could have gotten rid of coal by now. Deregulation of electricity was the real killer to significant investment in both new plants and the grid.
No doubt when Watts Bar 2 opens you will only say negative things about it; but I will cheer that less coal is used.
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amazingdrx Posted 2:29 pm
06 Feb 2009
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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amazingdrx Posted 2:52 pm
06 Feb 2009
http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:M7KzNaHD7OwJ:www.ans. ...
This also puts the lie to the safety of the sodium cooled Toshiba reactor.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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amazingdrx Posted 3:00 pm
06 Feb 2009
A nightmare waiting to happen.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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GreyFlcn Posted 3:57 am
07 Feb 2009
Basically PTC's and ITC's exist for the purpose of capital recovery.
However it'd be rather silly to argue that a power plant that has recovered all of it's capital cost, should be getting help recovering it's capital cost.
You proclaim "Wow look at Old Nuclear it's not getting help recovering it's capital cost, that means it's less expensive to build New Nuclear power plants"
When that's just silly when you consider all the capital recovery assistance New Nuclear power plants are scheduled to get.
-David Ahlport
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BILL HANNAHAN Posted 4:40 am
07 Feb 2009
Drx, if an old reactor vessel made of steel 4-6 inches thick falls off a train, do you really see the public running to it en mass and draping their bodies over it, would you do that?
Sounds a bit Darwinian to me, not all bad, but it would take160 days, 24 hours per day, to acquire a lethal dose.
So what exactly is the nightmare?
Things Everybody Should Know About Energy
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Joffan Posted 6:42 am
07 Feb 2009
Detroit Edison's prototype sodium-cooled fast breeder reactor, the 94-MWe Fermi-1 unit, operated from 1963 to 1972. In October 1966, the plant suffered a partial nuclear meltdown. No radiation was released off-site, and no one was injured. The accident was attributed to a piece of zirconium that obstructed a flow-guide in the sodium cooling system. Two of the 105 fuel assemblies melted during the incident, but no contamination was recorded outside the containment vessel. The plant continued to operate until September 1972. Fuel was removed from the plant in 1975.
Is it possible you missed the fact that the fuel was removed? Did you notice that the reactor operated for 6 years after a couple fuel elements partially melted? Isn't it clear in subsequent paragraphs that the reactor vessel is still in the same place? I'm sorry amazingdrax, but this selective attention strikes me as deceptive.
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Joffan Posted 8:45 am
07 Feb 2009
And as you say, current nuclear plants get nothing in this line, and a moderate but limited tax credit is potentially available for the first few years of the first few new-design nuclear power plants. This is pretty much explicitly connected with the additional costs of rebuilding the supply chain for nuclear plants. So, when we get there in 5-6 years or so, you will have an argument that nuclear is costing taxpayers more than some other power sources - although not really very much for the amount of power delivered, and nothing at all for most of the plants currently in application.
What we need is a method of paying for electricity that encourages infrastructure development and discourages the use of carbon fuels. What we have is the opposite, because the price of electricity is allowed to vary sharply on the cost of the fuels used - the major cost of running a gas plant in particular - but in many places takes no account of construction costs, which at present with steel and concrete prices yoyoing, is pretty variable itself. And no-one seems to be paying for the grid.
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GreyFlcn Posted 5:14 pm
07 Feb 2009
You do realize is the exact same 1.8cents per kwh subsidy Wind gets, right?
And as you say, current nuclear plants get nothing in this line
No, that's as you say.
I still contend that the decommissioning fund loophole has virtually the same effect as an Investment Tax Credit.
Tax free, at the time when it is actually expensed? Sure.
A large portion of the cost of ownership, tax free for 40-60 years, that's disgusting.
first few years of the first few new-design nuclear power plants.
Except that they really are merely modified versions of existing light water reactors.
And no-one seems to be paying
No-one seems to be paying for nuclear waste and non-proliferation either.
Gotta love this MidEast Nuclear arms race they got going on with the excuse of "Peaceful" Nuclear power, eh?
Wonder how much we're going to have to spend on dealing with that.
If only we had a better alternative than "No you can't, but we can" hypocrisy.
-David Ahlport
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GreyFlcn Posted 5:54 pm
07 Feb 2009
http://greyfalcon.net/dubainukes.zip
-David Ahlport
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amazingdrx Posted 1:33 am
08 Feb 2009
http://www.scdhec.gov/thefullstory/chem-nuclear.htm
http://www.palmettoscoop.com/2007/08/26/breaking-criminal ...
http://www.wrdw.com/politics/headlines/9425206.html
http://www.charleston.net/news/2007/aug/30/demand_barnwel ...
http://a4nr.org/library/waste/waste.lowlevel/11.15.05-apw ...
http://www.southernstudies.org/2008/01/italian-nuclear-wa ...
Some additional light reading on the waste problem.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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Joffan Posted 1:47 pm
09 Feb 2009
The Canadians produce quite a lot from heavy-water reactors. It's not a problem there, either.
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Joffan Posted 1:56 pm
09 Feb 2009
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amazingdrx Posted 3:07 pm
09 Feb 2009
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/2014509.stm
A spokeswoman for the Environment Agency, which checks tritium levels, said: "In 1998, when the bioaccumulation of tritium near Cardiff became known we asked Amersham to drastically reduce discharges.
"As a result of this pressure from the Agency, Amersham is currently developing a plant to recycle tritium instead of discharging it.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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Joffan Posted 12:17 am
10 Feb 2009
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amazingdrx Posted 2:36 pm
10 Feb 2009
Drink up, that's good neutron water.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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Joffan Posted 11:33 pm
10 Feb 2009
Acknowledge this and maybe we can debate something real.
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amazingdrx Posted 11:53 pm
10 Feb 2009
Here's the wiki explanation of how tritium forms from radiation sources like reactors, cosmic radiation, or water running over radioactive waste:
Tritium is produced in nuclear reactors by neutron activation of lithium-6. This is possible with neutrons of any energy, and is an exothermic reaction yielding 4.8 MeV, which is more than one-quarter of the energy that fusion of the produced triton with a deuteron can later produce.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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Karen Street Posted 1:40 am
11 Feb 2009
Exposure to radioactivity for someone living near a nuclear power plant is less than for someone who smoke one cigarette/year.
A Musing Environment
Karen Street
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Pangolin Posted 6:15 pm
11 Feb 2009
Put the Carbon Back
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amazingdrx Posted 6:45 pm
11 Feb 2009
Radiation turns hydrogen to tritium by adding a neutron, eventually that neutron is emitted as radiation, if it happens inside your body it will cause mutation of your DNA.
The reactor vessel from the melted down reactor in michigan that is now lying in the unklined trench in South Carolina was not covered until recently, rainwater streaming around and over it was exposed to radiation from it and turned into tritium containh water molecules.
That tritium mixes with ground water and is ingested with well water from the area. Tritium can't be filtered out, it is within the atomic structure of hydrohen atoms and the molecular structure of the water.
Microorganisms ingest the tritium, it is concentrated as it moves up the food chain into fish and eventually into humans who eat the fish.
This is only one contamination path from reactors and nuclear landfills. Stronyium 90, cesium 137, Plutonjium, and many other dangerous contaminants are leaking into groundwater from various reactors and nuclear material processing plants that make fuel for reactors. Actual chunks of fuel rod were flushed into the columbia river and a horrendous plume of contamination in groundwater is heading for the river.
The Colorado and Ohio and Savanah rivers are all carrying contamination now and it flows right down into the Mississippi. Is every plant releasing contamination? It very well might be, no regulation is in effect except industry self regulation.
Do we really want nuclear bidness as usual to continue?
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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