Nuclear anyone?

[KennyG]

I do voltage regulator work on large generators and have worked in most of the nukes in the US and Spain in the past. There is no better or safer source for power. The biggest problem with them is load control. They don't perform very well at partial power so they are not good for control on the grid. But they make awesome base load units. If they keep closing nukes we are going to be in a place we can't recover from. Thank goodness some of the utilities refused to close their nuke sites. But most of the single unit sites in the US have already closed. DC Cook and River Bend in Baton Rouge are 2 that have survived.

The limitations on load follow capability in the existing nuclear units is just a design choice. Some of the units are designed to quickly ramp up and down from 80% to 100%, some are designed to operate between 50% and 100% but newer units are designed to operate over a much wider range.

It is being suggested that we will develop massive battery storage to make solar and wind more functional, but if we had these unicorn batteries, it would make more sense to expand nuclear since they only need to follow the daily load demand variation, not the seasonal or weather pattern variation in solar and wind production.

 

[Torvy]

I'm fairly certain Nuclear power is safe. That said, being in high school and about an hour or so away from 3 mile Island when they had an accident, don't blame me if I'm not a huge fan of it

It turns out 3 mile Island was more fear mongering than anything else. A small amount of steam escaped. There have been a bunch of studies of people around there and no ill-effects can be attributed to it.

 

[ponytug]

My personal reservations are really around what to do with the waste, not just fuel rods, but also the whole reactor containment vessel and concrete. It is massive and it all ages, and weakens, with radiation exposure. The non-fuel pieces may not be lethally radioactive, but I think that you don't exactly want it around living things. Recycling the material isn't yet in the cards, and I don't see communities clamoring to become large scale waste disposal sites. Which would seem to leave us a few cards short of a full deck.

I'd be a fan if we had ways to recycle it safely and at a reasonable cost. I think we owe that to future generations.

All the best,

Peter

 

[Torvy]

They actually have been recycling the fuel. It turns out they can use it up until the half life is considerably less than the fear we were pitched as kids.

Processing of Used Nuclear Fuel - World Nuclear Association

Used nuclear fuel has long been reprocessed to extract fissile materials for recycling and to reduce the volume of high-level wastes. New reprocessing technologies are being developed to be deployed in conjunction with fast neutron reactors which will burn all long-lived actinides.

world-nuclear.org

 

[5030]

The issue with all Nuclear plants is the lowest bidder syndrome. N facilities all need to be built with built in redundancy. Not the case today.

 

[Rockbadchild]

My personal reservations are really around what to do with the waste, not just fuel rods, but also the whole reactor containment vessel and concrete. It is massive and it all ages, and weakens, with radiation exposure. The non-fuel pieces may not be lethally radioactive, but I think that you don't exactly want it around living things. Recycling the material isn't yet in the cards, and I don't see communities clamoring to become large scale waste disposal sites. Which would seem to leave us a few cards short of a full deck.

I'd be a fan if we had ways to recycle it safely and at a reasonable cost. I think we owe that to future generations.

All the best,

Peter

depleted Uranium gets cast in cement and buried underground, old mines or the desert are perfect place for it. That's a lot better then what the Russian do, simply dump it in the ocean...

 

[gsganzer]

Lawrence Livermore National Labs has successfully repeated nuclear fusion showing that it's possible. Fusion is seen as the holy grail for power production.

Here's the link

Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough

 

[Chewwy]

. .
Thank goodness some of the utilities refused to close their nuke sites. But most of the single unit sites in the US have already closed. DC Cook and River Bend in Baton Rouge are 2 that have survived.

D.C. Cook is a TWO unit site.

 

[Chewwy]

I really don't think we have the intelligence to build new reactors in the US anymore. The NRC is over the top with idiots and I really don't know if they would ever manage to get one built. They built 5 nuclear reactors in less than 5 years at Savannah River Plant back in 1951. It would take them a century to do that now.

The USNRC did not build the reactors at the Savannah River Site. It was their precedecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission. The reactors there were NOT for electric power production. They were to produce Plutonium and Tritium for bomb production.

 

[Chewwy]

They actually have been recycling the fuel. It turns out they can use it up until the half life is considerably less than the fear we were pitched as kids.

Processing of Used Nuclear Fuel - World Nuclear Association

Used nuclear fuel has long been reprocessed to extract fissile materials for recycling and to reduce the volume of high-level wastes. New reprocessing technologies are being developed to be deployed in conjunction with fast neutron reactors which will burn all long-lived actinides.

world-nuclear.org

Not in the U.S. The peanut farmer president fordid U.S. nuclear fuel reprocessing in the 1970s.