Amigo, It's Cold Outside


 
John K BBQ said:
(4) I like the idea of more nuclear power, but I'm in the minority. Practically every ship in the US Navy runs on nuclear power, and I've never heard of an accident on a US Navy ship. Why are we as a country so scared of Nuclear power?
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This is an issue where the education system has been brainwashing our kids in the worst way. I remember helping my oldest daughter on a homework assignment about how awful electricity derived from nuclear was. They were told terrible things about how dangerous the plants were, how their waste was totally overcoming the country, how they polluted the rivers and water bodies. I could not believe the crap they were feeding our kids. And not just in this country either. We got an exchange student from Germany who one day asked me about the plumes she could see sometimes in the southwest (Byron Nuclear plant). When I told her what it was she was absolutely terrified and started spewing all the same garbage my daughters teachers had been stuffing their heads with. Thankfully I was able to set the student's mind right. I also gave those teachers an earful about the garbage they were feeding our kids.
I think the world of teachers but IMO they need to leave ideologies to themselves and out of the classroom.
 
LMichaels said:
This is an issue where the education system has been brainwashing our kids in the worst way. I remember helping my oldest daughter on a homework assignment about how awful electricity derived from nuclear was. They were told terrible things about how dangerous the plants were, how their waste was totally overcoming the country, how they polluted the rivers and water bodies. I could not believe the crap they were feeding our kids. And not just in this country either. We got an exchange student from Germany who one day asked me about the plumes she could see sometimes in the southwest (Byron Nuclear plant). When I told her what it was she was absolutely terrified and started spewing all the same garbage my daughters teachers had been stuffing their heads with. Thankfully I was able to set the student's mind right. I also gave those teachers an earful about the garbage they were feeding our kids.
I think the world of teachers but IMO they need to leave ideologies to themselves and out of the classroom
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We are told that climate change is an existential threat to the planet.

How in the world can nuclear match that kind of threat ?

It makes no sense to reject a proven safe source of electricity. But bottom line is probably like everything else, just follow the money.
 
Lynn Dollar said:
Lotsa meat in that post ...................... but if we're headed to an electric economy, then the solution is obvious, probably too obvious ........... and that's go nuclear and get it over with.

The country will never be powered by 100% renewables because they have a huge problem with intermittency. And its disingenuous to reject nuclear. The fears over waste and safety are way over blown. France gets 80% of their electricity from nuclear. Germany has attempted to go renewables, they've spent trillions of euro dollars and are now burning more coal than ever before and have not reduced their CO2 emissions at all, and have the highest electric rates in the world.

We could replace every wind turbine in Oklahoma with one nuclear plant.

And oh yeah, the Germans are now on the verge of completing a pipeline carrying nat gas from Russia, so they can reduce coal consumption. And at the same time creating huge geopolitical issues.
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I personally have no problem with nuclear power plants, but I have to respectfully disagree with your statement, “fears over waste and safety are way overblown”. Here in Washington state we have been dealing with storage tank leakage, and possible radioactive sludge leeching into the Columbia River. Than you have that incident in Japan a few years ago with the earthquake, and radioactive cooling water dumped into the ocean. I believe more thought needs to be put into where, and how we build these plants.
 
ChuckH said:
I personally have no problem with nuclear power plants, but I have to respectfully disagree with your statement, “fears over waste and safety are way overblown”. Here in Washington state we have been dealing with storage tank leakage, and possible radioactive sludge leeching into the Columbia River. Than you have that incident in Japan a few years ago with the earthquake, and radioactive cooling water dumped into the ocean. I believe more thought needs to be put into where, and how we build these plants.
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Go check out how many people died from radiation exposure in Japan from the Fukishima melt down. It was a handful, as I recall. But 18,000 died from the Tsunami . The two became conflated.

There's been three major nuclear accidents in 50 years, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukishima. Minimal death and health issues from all three. Safety issues have been way over blown.
 
Lynn Dollar said:
Go check out how many people died from radiation exposure in Japan from the Fukishima melt down. It was a handful, as I recall. But 18,000 died from the Tsunami . The two became conflated.

There's been three major nuclear accidents in 50 years, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukishima. Minimal death and health issues from all three. Safety issues have been way over blown.
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We will never know how many people died as a direct result of the Chernobyl incident. That is for certain. But my biggest concern is the environmental damage. Again, I do not believe the safety issues are overblown. Again respectfully.
 
IMO, nuclear fusion should be the future of power. Nuclear fission, while being currently available, has the significant drawback of too many waste products & side effects.

@LMichaels, yes, education is a huge problem. BUT, BUT, BUT, NUCLEAR! RADIATION! BAD!!!!! Folks, do you have any idea what you're being continually bombarded with? God forbid you learn what you're exposed to on a cross country flight. I've been waiting for decades for the fusion break-through that really makes it a viable source of power.
 
John K BBQ said:
(4) I like the idea of more nuclear power, but I'm in the minority. Practically every ship in the US Navy runs on nuclear power, and I've never heard of an accident on a US Navy ship. Why are we as a country so scared of Nuclear power?
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There's been commercial nuclear power for 50-60 years now? There is still no solution to the problem of the spent fuel rods and other nuclear waste. Also, see Chernobyl and TMI.
 
I don't quite get how France can generate 80% of their electricity from nuclear and not have a waste problem

What is usually referred to as nuclear waste is used nuclear fuel in the shape of rods about 12 feet long. For four and a half years, the uranium atoms that comprise the fuel rods are split apart to give off the heat that turns water into steam to spin turbines to make electricity. After that, nuclear plant workers move the used fuel rods into pools of water to cool.


Four to six years later, nuclear plant workers move the used fuel rods into 15-foot tall canisters known as “dry casks” that weigh 100 tons or more. These cans of used fuel sit undramatically on an area about the size of a basketball court. Thanks to “The Simpsons,” people tend to think nuclear waste is fluorescent green or even liquid. It’s not. It is boring gray metal.


How much is there? If all the nuclear waste from U.S. power plants were put on a football field, it would stack up just 50 feet high. In comparison to the waste produced by every other kind of electricity production, that quantity is close to zero.
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Jun 19, 2018,12:18pm EDTStop Letting Your Ridiculous Fears Of Nuclear Waste Kill The Planet
 
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J Grotz said:
There's been commercial nuclear power for 50-60 years now? There is still no solution to the problem of the spent fuel rods and other nuclear waste. Also, see Chernobyl and TMI.
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There are a whole new family of reactors that are reportedly using the spent fuel/byproduct of the large reactors as their fuel source. Idaho National Labs for example: Oklo’s Aurora would be the first American reactor to run from spent nuclear fuel. I think there are other projects in the works around the world as well.
 
Nuclear is dead in this country there are only 2 reactors being built in the US and those are both in GA. Both of them had multiple delays over the years and the Covid did not help. One is now due to come in service in Nov 2021 the other in Nov 2022 they were supposed to be finished in 2017 originally going to come in at $14 billion now its at least $28 billion. Georgia Power as already stated there will not be another one built until at least 2030 to 2040 and quite frankly I doubt they will ever build another one.

Here is an excerpt from an article I found this was actually from a guy who was on the NRC written back in 2019.

Quote: After Fukushima, people all over the world demanded a different approach to nuclear safety. Germany closed several older plants and required the rest to shut down by 2022. Japan closed most of its plants. Last year, even France, which gets about 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear power, proposed reducing that figure to 50 percent by 2035, because safety could not be guaranteed. Trying to make accidents unlikely wasn’t enough.
And here in the United States, those four new reactors — the vanguard of the “nuclear renaissance” — still haven’t opened. The South Carolina companies building two of the reactors canceled the project in 2017, after spending $9 billion of their customers’ money without producing a single electron of power. The construction company behind the utilities, Westinghouse, went bankrupt, almost destroying its parent company, the global conglomerate Toshiba. The other two reactors licensed while I chaired the NRC are still under construction in Georgia and years behind schedule. Their cost has ballooned from $14 billion to $28 billion and continues to grow.


History shows that the expense involved in nuclear power will never change. Past construction in the United States exhibited similar cost increases throughout the design, engineering and construction process. The technology and the safety needs are just too complex and demanding to translate into a facility that is simple to design and build. No matter your views on nuclear power in principle, no one can afford to pay this much for two electricity plants. New nuclear is simply off the table in the United States.

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The incident in Japan (and actually Chernobyl and 3 Mile) have nothing to do with spent rods and in 2 of the 3 cases everything to do with gross negligence. Let's not forget the health hazards and other dangers of fossil fuel plants. It wasn't that long ago an explosion of coal dust that cause a lot of damage and injuries took place in Joliet IL. I am sure more than that one take (or have taken) place we don't even hear about.
 
Shoot, for that matter, for a little light reading, look up _We Almost Lost Detroit_ by John Fuller. The book details a lot of nuclear fission reactor history & accidents, and surrounds why the Fermi1 reactor never went online successfully. Short story: an engineering change introduced some beer can sized diverter fins in the bottom of the reactor chamber, at least 1 broke off and blocked cooling flow. Bad things resulted. I read the book 30 years ago, and found it to be both a very enjoyable read, as well as being quite dismaying in regards to.... I'll leave it at less than optimal methods.
 
Nuclear scares the hell of of me (perhaps irrationally) but my understanding is that there are better more modern ways to build nuclear fission plants much more safely. I still hold out hope that fusion technology comes around but that's always just around the corner and never quite happens. What I strongly suspect is that none of us are smart enough to figure this out. I am smart enough to turn a vent back and forth to cook the food more gooder.
 
Scares the hell of me also who wants to live in a town that has a Nuclear Power Plant cheap housing I guess but not for me or my family. I really don't care about their safety record it only needs to be a disaster one time whether that is user error or whatever. Now I will disagree with Larry respectively on some points not all as Chernobyl was not only about gross negligence a part yes, cover up at the start yes but they had an incident also in 1975 I believe in Leningrad covered up also which if shared what happened with the rest of the power plant operators might have given them some insight how to avoid what happened.

I am guessing that Georgia Power rues the day they decided to go with those additional reactors. And because of those overuns guess what our electricity is estimated to rise about 8-12%. Any additional costs once they are up and running gets eaten by Georgia Power so it will hurt their profits its not all bad those new reactors will be enough to power 500,000 homes.

The power plant​

The Chernobyl plant used four Soviet-designed RBMK-1000 nuclear reactors — a design that's now universally recognized as inherently flawed. RBMK reactors were of a pressure tube design that used an enriched U-235 uranium dioxide fuel to heat water, creating steam that drives the reactors' turbines and generates electricity, according to the World Nuclear Association.


In most nuclear reactors, water is also used as a coolant and to moderate the reactivity of the nuclear core by removing the excess heat and steam, according to the World Nuclear Association. But the RBMK-1000 used graphite to moderate the core's reactivity and to keep a continuous nuclear reaction occurring in the core. As the nuclear core heated and produced more steam bubbles, the core became more reactive, not less, creating a positive-feedback loop that engineers refer to as a "positive-void coefficient."
 
LMichaels said:
I'd live there in a heartbeat. There have been far more issues with fossil fuel plants
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Live where Larry just trying to clarify are you talking about Chernobyl? Sure you can live cheap there not sure the rest of us in the US would want to live there. More than willing to take my chances with fossil fuel plants than blown up nuclear reactors in Chernobyl. o_O
 
Dr James Hansen, considered to be the " Father of Global Warming " , the first person to testify before Congress about global warming in 1989, former head of the NASA Goddard Research Center ............ talks about renewables and nuclear.

He has maintained for several years that the only path to an electric economy is nuclear. The enviro-left has pretty much shut him up, but his views have not changed. Cause the only reason for the opposition to nuclear, is it makes renewables unnecessary .

 
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