By the way have you read the Scientific American article written in 2008 about how solar could meet our future energy needs? Here is the link if you are interested.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan&page=1

1. The cost
2. Construction time, and;
3. The political will.

1. Cost reduction is of course possible. Using a different reactor design [Thorium, Traveling Wave, Breeders, etc.] could significantly reduce cost. Enriching the fuel to higher levels would also reduce the number and frequency of re-fueling cycles.

2. Construction time could be reduced by creating a standardized reactor design and then mass producing 300-400 prepackaged sealed reactors of let’s say 1000MW thermal. For example we have lots of coal plants which are currently being considered for carbon capture and/or some type of carbon reduction and this could become very expensive for utilities if or when Cap and Trade is signed into law. The actual power source or heat in a coal plant is of course coal. It is also true that the steam turning the turbine generator doesn’t care if it was made using coal or nuclear – it’s just steam. So we could if we wanted to build a standardized reactor to replace the heat portion of a coal plant and reuse all of the other parts of the existing power plant. This would reduce carbon output, conserve resources, reduce cost and construction time and it is of course technically possible. However, I don’t know of anyone who is even considering such a plan. Why; because coal is currently a cheaper fuel than nuclear.

3. This brings me to the last point, political will. We are currently finishing up one nuclear plant we started building back in the 90’s. New reactor designs are pending before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) by several different companies. However, to my knowledge NONE of the designs are geared towards Thorium, Traveling Wave, Fast Breeder, Molten Salt or any other advanced reactor design. They certainly are not geared towards converting coal plants, creating Hydrogen for cars or designed to make drinking water. They are also not small enough to run a small city/town which would encourage a more distributed generation network. They all seem to be geared to large base load power production. So I guess the only reasonable and logical answer I can come up with for WHY we are not building more nuclear reactors is this:

WE JUST DON’T WANT TO – it’s that simple. We understand the technology, we just don’t have the desire.

tomgarven [AT] hotmail.com

if you write please put “REACTOR” in the subject line.

As for waste, I do not understand why people object to burying it deep underground in geologically stable, dry areas in the form of glass. The only imaginable risk is groundwater contamination, but this is not an issue because a) the material is highly insoluble, b) the chosen areas are very dry (e.g. salt mines)

Nobody wants one in their own back yard. Do you?

Yes it’s fairly clean and yes it has other issues (safety, reliance on foreign sources, waste removal/storage/treatment, etc..), but there is a reason not one new Nuke plant has been started in the U.S. since 1977 despite multiple administrations and 2 energy crisis’s since that time. See above.

2. France does not ‘disappear’ its nuclear waste to Russia, they store it locally in experimental facilities. I watched a documentary about it.

3. Uranium mines do not produce radioactive tailings! After all it’s the radioactive material the mining is about, so that would be a loss.

4. US nuclear waste is stored in cooling ponds and dry casks at reactor sites. Disposal of waste in Native American reservations is just silly and looks like an urban legend to me, the NRC would never give it a go ahead.

5. Proliferation risks are a purely political problem, because nuclear weapons allow previously unimportant countries to gain some bargaining power. I am 100% sure that no country is seriously considering use of nuclear weapons, they function merely as a prestige boost.

Maybe cold fusion is a reality we don`t understand for safe nuclear power. in my mind energy can be converted to mass and mass can be converted to energy so a campfire is low cost low radiation renewable nuclear power.

My thoughts are to cut out the middle man and research solar and hydrothermal power with lava as the thermal source, these would be the ideal nuclear power plants in my uneducated mind Tom.

1. Current cost of construction is prohibitive from the perspective of most utilities. A two unit plant can cost anywhere from 3-15 billion depending upon design and location.

2. Optimistically constructing a two unit nuclear power station takes from 7-12 years.

3. Nuclear fuel is a limited resource just like oil and natural gas but can be extended by utilizing different reactor configurations.

Until we have solved the above issues wishing for more nuclear plants is just that – a wish. In short they are currently
1. Too expensive
2. Take too long to build, and;
3, We have not shown the social and political will to start re-processing of the spent fuel.

Number 1 and 2 can be solved by technology. Number 3 however may never be solved.

We have the materials to make USA energy independent. Use nuclear power to produce hydrogen from ocean water for automobiles and keep oil and natural gas for making industrial products. We can reclaim much of the nuclear “waste” (like the French do) and what is left over can be launched using a “rail gun” which has been largely perfected for use by the military. (I have video of a military rail gun ’shooting’ a projectile). None of this is Science Fiction. All exist and the technology isn’t new. All that needs done is large scale engineering to deploy these technologies quickly and on a massive scale. Everyone keeps waiting and arguing about the correct course of action while we (USA) become weaker and more in debt. Eventually the economy will turn bad and possibly crash because manufacturing cannot afford the costs of energy for production or shipment of their product and people can’t afford the costs of fuel for their homes or their transportation. It would be a good idea to do this as soon as possible with all safeguards in place.

I like nuclear power but the negative learning curve effect of light water reactors worries me. By the time the new nukes that are being build/contracted in the US are completed they may have already become obsolete on economical grounds. However we shouldn’t be building any more conventional coal powered plants, and for me that’s priority number one.

With Namibia’s globally second-lowest population density, 30-40% unemployment, 2$/day living standards, and 20%+ HIV rate, the Uranium mining companies might affordably budget to pay residents there to eat the radioactive mine tailings. Those companies assuredly don’t face political will to make them pay anything like the real costs of safe mining or remediation, so they don’t pay those costs. The Storm material, being a life cycle analysis, incorporates such costs, thus definitely derives a higher energy cost than current Namibian practice.

Another mine often cited to demonstrate the affordability of mining low-grade ore-bodies, Olympic Dam in Australia, achieves its remarkable cost effectiveness by operating outside The Aboriginal Heritage Act 1988, the Development Act 1993, the Environmental Protection Act 1993, the Freedom of Information Act 1991, the Mining Act 1971 and the Natural Resources Act 2004.

If exempted from law, environmental and public health responsibility, and effective safety regulation, and consideration of proliferation risk, nuclear is clearly the affordable choice.

Breeder reactors have so far proven unworkable by a combination of market forces, safety and proliferation risks. It would be inadvisable to hold one’s breath for news of net-energy-positive seawater Uranium extraction, unless one lives in Namibia.

Storm van Leuween is also quite fond of quoting the energy intensity of enrichment in the inefficient gaseous diffusion plants, rather than the much more efficient centrifuges that now dominate the market. He not very fond of mentioning CANDUs which use natural uranium or “spent” LWR fuel without enrichment. He doesn’t like to mention insitu leaching, far more energy efficient but unable to recover valuable byproducts like copper.

Energy intensity is clearly not a serious hindrance for mining low-grade ore-bodies; but it could be the case that it’s somehow uneconomic to mine low-grade uranium for other reasons. I don’t think that would be the case either as a pound of yellowcake, costing about 60$/lb, will give you ~50 barrels of oil equivalent of heat in a light water reactor and ~5000 BoE in a breeder reactor.

The cost of natural uranium is a vanishingly small part of the cost of operating a nuclear plant. It’s not even a large cost of the fuel elements themselves(enrichment and fuel fabrication/cladding both being much larger parts). LWRs could easily afford to pay 10 times the price for yellowcake and breeders 1000 times the price. At such prices it becomes, at some point, economical to mine sea-water with ion-exchangers. Sea water contains an estimated 4.6 billion tonnes of uranium, that’s about 1000 times more uranium than we’ve ever mined(and it’s in equilibrium, more will leach into solution if you remove some; until a new equilibrium is reached).

And then there’s thorium; molten flouride reactors look promising but only a few experimental ones were ever built(it wasn’t what the navy wanted and it eventually got mothballed).

Nuclear greenhouse gases: though the nuclear reaction that produces heat and thereby electricity produces no CO2, that’s a minuscule part of the equation.

Life cycle analysis (LCA) of nuclear energy clarifies CO2 outputs: 1, mining, milling, and processing of the ore chain; 2, construction, operation, maintenance, and decommissioning of plants; 3, transportation, excavation, construction, etc., to sequester waste. These inherent parts of using nuclear are fossil-fuel intensive and would make nuclear’s CO2 production exceed other nonrenewables once our rich ores are depleted within decades.

Nuclear’s amount of energy cf. fossil fuels: excellent point, and the crux of nuclear’s risk. Because nuclear is so energy-dense _at the moment_, some are tempted to pursue it at the dire opportunity costs of lost investment in renewables and other localized, sustainable solutions. We would need such technologies as the Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) of nuclear turns negative anyway, and lost time will compound the chaos of such a fundamental cultural transition.

“cost” vs. solar and wind: nuclear has a price advantage over these, but not a cost advantage. We are not paying the full costs of nuclear now, just as we are only beginning to pay the full costs of fossil fuels i.e., climate disruption. Dollar per MWh subsidy comparisons are fallacies for the same reason: nuclear is energy-dense at the moment with decreasing EROEI, while renewables are energy-distributed with increasing EROEI.

Uranium supply: only adequate as a means to help us transition to renewables within the next 30-60 years.

See http://www.oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk/publications/briefing_papers/pdf/energyfactsheet4.pdf

Toxics: Chernobyls are far from the only risk. Just as one example, humans cannot control our nuclear wastes over an historical span (e.g. fissiles proliferated from a fractured USSR), so there is less than reasonable hope that we could do so over geologic time.

It’s time for us to step up, make real technological change, and end the denial/bargaining stage of our collective easy energy grief.

1) Dr. Thomas Hinderling, “Solar Islands: A new concept for low-cost solar energy at very large scale”, 20 May 2008.(http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4002).

The article states: “All current solar solutions are at least 5 times, most often rather 10 times (500%-1000%) more costly than .”

2) WallStreet Journal, “Wind ($23.37) v. Gas (25 Cents)”, 12 May 2008. (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121055427930584069.html?mod=Letters)

The article states: “The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) concludes that solar energy is subsidized to the tune of $24.34 per megawatt hour, wind $23.37 and “clean coal” $29.81. By contrast, normal coal receives 44 cents, natural gas a mere quarter, hydroelectric about 67 cents and nuclear power $1.59.

1. Nuclear Energy creates minuscule greenhouse gases.
2. Nuclear Energy is the only other alternative energy proven to provide the amounts of energy comparable to what oil and coal currently produce. Hydro-electric is next in line. Solar & wind power, as great as they are, cost more than 1000% more to operate and require a great deal more precious of our real estate.
3. The U.S. currently has a large domestic supply of Uranium, as long as we don’t keep exporting it to China & France, so we will not be dependant on foreign resources.
3. The U.S. has been a leader of Nuclear Technology – an expertise under-utilized in this country only to be put to use (with critical acclaim) by countries like France.
4. Nuclear waste, while some if it is extremely toxic, can be controlled and protected. A Chernobyl style melt-down is the overarching fear. Modern designs have made that type of meltdown near impossible. Even then, the deaths & environmental impact due to nuclear energy is negligible compared to oil fires, oil spills, coalmine disasters, etc.

As importantly, any investment in nuclear is continuing a path of diminishing energy returns on energy invested. Uranium is finite, requires massive fossil fuel inputs for mining, and will only require more as rich ores are depleted within the next hundred or so years.

We need to focus our full political, social, and technological will on the transition to renewables – whose EROEI will continue to increase – so that we can live within the physical limits of our planet. If we don’t self-impose such limits, climate change, irradiation, nuclear war, or simple Malthusian reality will set them for us.