Gotta give props to President O'bama.  I would imagine that the big names in his party are reaching for the Kaopectate over his sponsorship of the $8 Billion loan guarantees to build two nuclear reactors.

For my two cents, I am not so sure that the government needs to be issuing loan guarantees for private projects.  That said, as long as the power plant itself is put up as collateral against the loan, then I will not object too much.

Nevertheless, the President has taken a bold step that shows he's not 100% beholden to those who would take our energy policy back to the Stone Age.

We need more nuclear plants.

We also need more refineries.

Gotta give props to President O'bama.  I would imagine that the big names in his party are reaching for the Kaopectate over his sponsorship of the $8 Billion loan guarantees to build two nuclear reactors.

For my two cents, I am not so sure that the government needs to be issuing loan guarantees for private projects.  That said, as long as the power plant itself is put up as collateral against the loan, then I will not object too much.

Nevertheless, the President has taken a bold step that shows he's not 100% beholden to those who would take our energy policy back to the Stone Age.


There's been a change of heart about nuclear with some of the green movement.  Not all of it, but some. 

None of us will LIVE to see all those loans paid off if they start building more nuke plants.  It takes a hell of a lot of greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuels to build one of those things...and if something f**ks up, you can forget about living in Picksburgh for the next couple hundred thousand years!
::)

Our luxurious way of life with cheap fuel and cheap citrus year round while living on street grids of nothing but houses with giant lawns is going away.  It's not coming back either.  What we had for a century was an anomaly in human history.  We learned how to harness cheap surface oil to make suburban life possible.  Then we made suburban life "the American dream," and exported the dream to Europe.  And now we're using up the last of the cheap stuff.

No combination of nukes, green energy, and shale oil is going to produce a facsimile of where we left off in 1997.

It's going away.  It's something you can tell your grandkids about after a long day of sowing turnips were the Walmart used to be.

"THE SUBURBS:  The greatest waste of resources in the history of mankind!"

--James Howard Kunstler

http://www.rutlandherald.com/article/20100217/NEWS02/2170355/1003/NEWS02



Cat

None of us will LIVE to see all those loans paid off if they start building more nuke plants.  It takes a hell of a lot of greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuels to build one of those things...and if something f**ks up, you can forget about living in Picksburgh for the next couple hundred thousand years!
::)


Hey Picksburgh is the cradle of nuclear power, Max.  We love it!

I live 5 miles away from the historic Shippingport Power Station, which was the site of the first commercial "nucular" power plant as well as one of the first  breeder reactors.  We're also home to Westinghouse Nuclear Services, which provides the technology used in 42% of nuclear power plants worldwide.  :)  We're also home to the Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory, which is where all Naval nuclear reactors are designed and developed.

The original Shippingport station was long ago dismantled and cleaned up.  However we have two nuclear power units at Beaver Valley Power Station, Units #1 and #2.  (We also have two coal fired jobbies across the street from BVPS too).  8)

I agree that the waste issue needs to be resolved.  My opinion is that our government needs to get over its fear of breeder reactors, where spent conventional reactor fuel is reprocessed into usable fuel again.  Presently a nuclear rector only uses 5% of the energy in its fuel; a truly "green" approach would reprocess the fuel to get most of its energy.  This also generates a VASTLY LOWER VOLUME of nonrecyclable wastes.  To point:  France has a centralized nuclear waste storage facility and it is about the size of a basketball court, because they reprocess spent conventional fuel.  Now, what's left (the non-recyclable stuff) is indeed very nasty stuff, but is is in low volume, vitrified (made into glass), and much easier to guard.

Simply burying conventional spent fuel rods is wasteful and unneccessarily expensive.

Hey Picksburgh is the cradle of nuclear power, Max.  We love it!

I live 5 miles away from the historic Shippingport Power Station, which was the site of the first commercial "nucular" power plant as well as one of the first  breeder reactors.  We're also home to Westinghouse Nuclear Services, which provides the technology used in 42% of nuclear power plants worldwide.  :)   We're also home to the Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory, which is where all Naval nuclear reactors are designed and developed.

The original Shippingport station was long ago dismantled and cleaned up.  However we have two nuclear power units at Beaver Valley Power Station, Units #1 and #2.  (We also have two coal fired jobbies across the street from BVPS too).  8)

I agree that the waste issue needs to be resolved.  My opinion is that our government needs to get over its fear of breeder reactors, where spent conventional reactor fuel is reprocessed into usable fuel again.  Presently a nuclear rector only uses 5% of the energy in its fuel; a truly "green" approach would reprocess the fuel to get most of its energy.  This also generates a VASTLY LOWER VOLUME of nonrecyclable wastes.  To point:  France has a centralized nuclear waste storage facility and it is about the size of a basketball court, because they reprocess spent conventional fuel.  Now, what's left (the non-recyclable stuff) is indeed very nasty stuff, but is is in low volume, vitrified (made into glass), and much easier to guard.

Simply burying conventional spent fuel rods is wasteful and unneccessarily expensive.


I know there are a lot of nukes around Picksburgh.  Just hope they don't eff it up!

Yeah, France uses breeder reactors, but they still DUMP hundreds of thousands of gallons of hot stuff into the ocean via pipeline every year.  They can recycle about 94% of their nuclear wastes.  It's like saying, yeah, we put cyanide in your soup, but don't worry, we got about 94% of it out, so it's safe!
:o

Gotta give props to President O'bama.  I would imagine that the big names in his party are reaching for the Kaopectate over his sponsorship of the $8 Billion loan guarantees to build two nuclear reactors.

For my two cents, I am not so sure that the government needs to be issuing loan guarantees for private projects.  That said, as long as the power plant itself is put up as collateral against the loan, then I will not object too much.

Nevertheless, the President has taken a bold step that shows he's not 100% beholden to those who would take our energy policy back to the Stone Age.


This seems to contradict your disapproval of assistance to better RR transport.  And as far as I'm concerned, nuks ARE the stone age, when we were hell bent on destroying ourselves. 

This seems to contradict your disapproval of assistance to better RR transport.  And as far as I'm concerned, nuks ARE the stone age, when we were hell bent on destroying ourselves. 


Nuclear power is the future.  The cleanliness of Canada and France in comparison to the U.S. is a testament to how much better nuclear power is compared to coal power.

None of us will LIVE to see all those loans paid off if they start building more nuke plants.  It takes a hell of a lot of greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuels to build one of those things...and if something f**ks up, you can forget about living in Picksburgh for the next couple hundred thousand years!


Really?  Hiroshima and Nagasaki are (admittedly rather solemn) tourist attractions.  Bikini Atoll is a great spot for diving shipwrecks.  The area around Chernobyl's slowly turning into a nature preserve, albeit one that you won't want to live in for another few decades.  By reprocessing the waste, we could dramatically reduce its volume, and while it would be much hotter, it would only be hot for a few hundred years.  (Our present system produces a few thousand tonnes of crap that's hot for several thousand years.  Odds are that Yucca, had it been built as originally-intended, would be viewed by our descendants as a mine.  They'd wonder why the hell we buried the stuff when we could have made use of it...  Even our present braindead approach to nuclear power beats the hell out of just dumping the radioactive byproducts of coal combustion into the atmosphere.)


This seems to contradict your disapproval of assistance to better RR transport.  And as far as I'm concerned, nuks ARE the stone age, when we were hell bent on destroying ourselves. 


It's always been easier to destroy than to create.

What's the ROI on a bomb, vs. the ROI on a power plant?  Given the choice, which one would a capitalist build?  Sure, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are tourist attractions these days, but it took years to rebuild those cities.  If you were trying to maximize economic output, why not just skip the bomb part and build something useful?

If you want CO2-free transportation, for example, you're going to need an energy source that runs 24/7/365.  That means it needs to run at night, when your solar panels aren't helping, and 365 days a year, so your wind farm can't be subject to seasonality. 

When/if we figure out the thorium fuel cycle, which solves not only most of the waste problem, but also makes most of the proliferation risk of both conventional and breeder reactors moot, the NIMBYs and the BANANAs (Not In My Back Yard, and Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything) will find something to complain about that too... Most of the cost per KWH of nuclear energy is tied up in red tape.  If it takes 20 years to do the bloody paperwork, most utilities throw in the towel and build a coal-fired (baseline) or gas-fired (peak hours) plant instead. 

When/if we figure out the thorium fuel cycle, which solves not only most of the waste problem, but also makes most of the proliferation risk of both conventional and breeder reactors moot, the NIMBYs and the BANANAs (Not In My Back Yard, and Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything) will find something to complain about that too... Most of the cost per KWH of nuclear energy is tied up in red tape.  If it takes 20 years to do the bloody paperwork, most utilities throw in the towel and build a coal-fired (baseline) or gas-fired (peak hours) plant instead. 

Something about that article makes me feel profoundly sceptical: can we really have been overlooking an energy source that is a fraction of the price of Uranium reactors not just to build but to run, doesn't have the same millennia-long radiation issues and can't be turned into bombs like U235.. and all the designs were done decades ago, but dropped?

If that article is accurate, IMO that's got to be one of the biggest scandals of the century: why did anyone go down the Uranium route for fission reactors?  More dangerous, less efficient, hugely more radioactive...

..or am I missing something?

This seems to contradict your disapproval of assistance to better RR transport.  And as far as I'm concerned, nuks ARE the stone age, when we were hell bent on destroying ourselves. 


Well in the case of the railroads, the government is GIVING $98MM to the railroad, free-and-clear.  And, unlike the railroads, a public utility does not have unfettered pricing power over its customers, as its rate structure comes under the purview and approval of a public utility commission.

In this case (and note that my original post states that I am not a big fan of government loans to private enterprise), the government is issuing a loan guarantee.  I would greatly prefer that even this not be done, but if the power plant is put up as security against the loan guarantee, then I have alot less objection to it.  Without this securitizing feature, I would be 100% opposed to the loan guarantee.
My main thrust to this post is that the President made a bold step in terms of promoting nuclear energy, which I suspect most leaders of his party would never do.

Hey, I am all for increasing the usage of rail-mode transport.  But we got to where we are these days (I am talking freight transport, not passenger transport) because the railroads themselves consolidated, eliminated lots of competition, intentionally took out trackage, intentionally scrapped or idled rail cars... all in the name of controlling capacity downward and jacking up prices.  I have first-hand knowledge of how/why the railroads have been doing this and its effects on the economy and on jobs.

The railroads most certainly do not need a government handout to put up tracks between Ohio and PA.

And in the case of the railroads, even if this were a loan guarantee I would be opposed to it, simply because the railroads already have plenty of borrowing power and, in the end, they will use the new trackage to price-gouge their customers.  Don't expect any rate reductions because of this new capacity.

Something about that article makes me feel profoundly sceptical: can we really have been overlooking an energy source that is a fraction of the price of Uranium reactors not just to build but to run, doesn't have the same millennia-long radiation issues and can't be turned into bombs like U235.. and all the designs were done decades ago, but dropped?


There are some wrinkles with thorium, not the least of which is doing the paperwork, planning, prototyping, and what-not to actually turn it from an experimental technology into a full-scale production technology.  That's at least a 10-year project.

But the real reason is that during the Manhattan Project, we'd invested a substantial portion of GDP into enriching uranium.  By 1945, we figured we might as well get some mileage out of it... Also, back in the early days, nobody worried about proliferation; during the buildup period of the Cold War, everyone was invested in dual-use technologies.  (Ironically, that might have also factored somewhat into the Soviets adoption of the crappy RMBK design, which was the reactor used at Chernobyl.)  Both sides invested in dual-use tech; in the 50s, a design that couldn't be used to transmute uranium into plutonium wasn't anywhere near as interesting as one that could.  Even the Swedes got into the act.)

So the thorium research was an interesting theoretical possibility, but nobody was interested in making the investment.  Switching from uranium-based power to thorium-based power would be akin to getting the country to switch from gasoline to hydrogen - not an insurmountable obstacle, but there's a huge existing infrastructure based on conventional reactor technologies.  Get that difficulty level down to, say, "gasoline to diesel" (which is by no means trivial, but is a much smaller jump to make), and you might see some movement.

Fast-forward to the post-Cold War era.  Both the US and the Soviets have huge stockpiles of uranium from their respective arsenals.  This is very useful as fuel for the present day generation of nuclear plants, as all you have to do is mix in some cheap natural uranium (or even leftover depeleted uranium from the enrichment process that you performed decades ago) and presto!  You've turned megatons to megawatts.  (Such fuel is practically free, because all the hard work was done years ago.  Why risk the money and time turning a thorium-based system into a full-scale plant now that there's a ready supply of free fuel laying around?)

All of this was compounded by the fact that we hadn't broken ground on a single nuclear plant of any type in 30+ years.  After TMI and Chernobyl, a lot of engineers avoided the field out of sheer practicality: why waste a career researching something that nobody'll ever build, even if you proved conclusively that it'd work?  Most of the rest are retiring due to old age.

The first electric cars came about during the oil crisis of the 70s.  They were little more than golf carts, and they failed.  GM's EV-1 experiment was close, but also failed.  Finally, a third spike in the cost of gas, combined with Japan deciding to give the Prius a chance in a market dominated by SUVs, and we've seen the hybrid, the plug-in hybrid, and this year sees the introduction of the first practical all-electric vehicles.  Maybe thorium power ends up like that - discovered, ignored for a while in the States, and then revived once somebody else (in this case, most likely India, which happens to be sitting on boatloads of thorium) figures out how to prove to the States that there's more than one way to make something work.

I can see what you mean - back in the 60s when the research decisions were being made, something that could be used to make bombs was considered a good idea rather than a bad one.  But in a way it's kind of surprising that the nuclear industry once it became private enterprise rather than government run didn't do the thorium research - though now I think about it, the major costs of the nuclear industry (research and waste clean-up) are being underwritten by the government.. so there isn't quite the incentive that there might be to go for a cleaner fission technology.

But I can see why it would definitely be worth the while of a country like India (not to mention Iran) to do the research for thorium-based fission power.. given the political hangovers from traditional fission reactors, it seems truly gobsmacking that this isn't being pushed harder.  Still seems too good to be true, though.

http://www.rutlandherald.com/article/20100219/THISJUSTIN/2190332/1003/NEWS02



Cat

There are some wrinkles with thorium, not the least of which is doing the paperwork, planning, prototyping, and what-not to actually turn it from an experimental technology into a full-scale production technology.  That's at least a 10-year project.


In 1977 the Shippingport reactor (a commercial reactor) was converted to the thorium-fueled Light Water Breeder design and it generated power in commercial service for five years.  Also, the Peach Bottom nuclear reactor burned thorium from 1967 to 1974.

Thorium alone is insufficient to fuel a reactor, and so it still needs to be coupled with uranium or plutonium to sustain a reaction.  And that's the good part, because Russian research over the past decade or so has shown that a thorium reactor is an excellent way to consume and demilitarize weapons-grade uranium, apparently faster than other known methods.

How do you get uranium from ore in the ground to fissionable nuclear fuel without using massive amounts of fossil fuels in the process?
???

How do you get uranium from ore in the ground to fissionable nuclear fuel without using massive amounts of fossil fuels in the process?
???


I'm guessing that centrifuges consume electricity.

But the amount of energy you get from a uranium fuel rod in relationship to it's weight is absurdly high, so the "carbon footprint" of a fuel rod (in terms of life cycle carbon per kWh generated) likely very small. My guess is that there's as much carbon emitted in making the zirconium rod casing as there is in the fuel itself, but I am guessing at that.

Sorry, but I've heard all the scientific mumbo jumbo before, as a kid in the '60s.  Nucs were to be THE POWER OF THE FUTURE, almost free (pollution wasn't an issue), and energy without end.  It's still mumbo jumbo, the god dam things are still not safe, and building more of them is the stupidest idea I have ever heard.

Sorry, but I've heard all the scientific mumbo jumbo before, as a kid in the '60s.  Nucs were to be THE POWER OF THE FUTURE, almost free (pollution wasn't an issue), and energy without end.  It's still mumbo jumbo, the god dam things are still not safe, and building more of them is the stupidest idea I have ever heard.


I'm firmly in the anti-nuker camp, but both pro-nuke and anti-nuke people make compelling arguments.  My scientific background is not quite strong enough to argue the science with the informed pro-nukers.  However, of this I am quite certain, in 25 years the amount of our energy generated by nuclear plants will not be greater than what it is today, around 20%.
::)

Sorry, but I've heard all the scientific mumbo jumbo before, as a kid in the '60s.  Nucs were to be THE POWER OF THE FUTURE, almost free (pollution wasn't an issue), and energy without end.  It's still mumbo jumbo, the god dam things are still not safe, and building more of them is the stupidest idea I have ever heard.


I don't have the numbers, but I would wager a bet that more people have been killed from (a) Particulate emissions from fossil-fueled power plants or (b) Floods caused by dam failures at hydroelectric power stations , than have been injured at nucUlar power plants.

Today's nucUlar power plants are safer (safer, not 100% guarantee) than the prior generation, by a country mile.  But nonetheless they still present risks.  But so do dams and fuel combustors; and other than hydro power, there is no viable base-load power generation technology out there other than good old nucUlar power.

Wind power only works when the wind is blowing, and solar power only works when the sun is out.  Something has to provide the base power load.  People don't like combustion power.  People don't like dams.  People don't like nukes.  Bird lovers are protesting wind turbines.  We could probably resort to people walking in hamster-cage turbines to generate electricity, but that would involve increased methane emissions, so that's out.

In the end everything in life is a risk, and a risk-return calculation has to be done.  If we eliminate power generation from nukes, coal, natural gas, oil, wood, and dams, we certainly eliminate alot of risk.  But we then also don't have any electricity.  So we need to establish what the best risk-return opion is and go for it.

I don't have the numbers, but I would wager a bet that more people have been killed from (a) Particulate emissions from fossil-fueled power plants or (b) Floods caused by dam failures at hydroelectric power stations , than have been injured at nucUlar power plants.

Today's nucUlar power plants are safer (safer, not 100% guarantee) than the prior generation, by a country mile.  But nonetheless they still present risks.  But so do dams and fuel combustors; and other than hydro power, there is no viable base-load power generation technology out there other than good old nucUlar power.

Wind power only works when the wind is blowing, and solar power only works when the sun is out.  Something has to provide the base power load.  People don't like combustion power.  People don't like dams.  People don't like nukes.  Bird lovers are protesting wind turbines.  We could probably resort to people walking in hamster-cage turbines to generate electricity, but that would involve increased methane emissions, so that's out.

In the end everything in life is a risk, and a risk-return calculation has to be done.  If we eliminate power generation from nukes, coal, natural gas, oil, wood, and dams, we certainly eliminate alot of risk.  But we then also don't have any electricity.  So we need to establish what the best risk-return opion is and go for it.


I agree with everything you say.  Life certainly is a series of trade-offs.  But if a coal, or oil, or gas fired generator blows, a few people might die, but if a nuc blows, good by Picksburg, or Cincinnati, or Dallas - wait a minute, that might not be such a bad idea.  Put one in San Antonio too.  Kidding Texas aside, for me, the risk of a nuc failure far out weighs the benefits, especially when there are lots of places where the sun almost always shines, and others where the wind almost always blows, and lots of places to build hydro plants (some of which could take advantage of tidal flows, like in the bay of Fundy with its 40 foot variation).  All that said, I am certainly not a nuclear physicist nor even an engineer,  so I can only speak as a concerned, somewhat informed citizen.

for me, the risk of a nuc failure far out weighs the benefits, especially when there are lots of places where the sun almost always shines, and others where the wind almost always blows, and lots of places to build hydro plants (some of which could take advantage of tidal flows, like in the bay of Fundy with its 40 foot variation).  All that said, I am certainly not a nuclear physicist nor even an engineer,  so I can only speak as a concerned, somewhat informed citizen.


As for your concerns - the only way to address them is the way that Western nuclear engineers have always addressed them: safety, safety, safety.  

Three Mile Island was actually a success; the safety systems and their backups worked, and prevented a disaster.  By contrast, when you start with three fundamental design flaws (a flammable moderator, no containment system, and a design that speeds up the reaction as things get hotter, rather than slowing down as things get hotter), and you compound those mistakes by turning off the safety systems in order to conduct the experiment that directly caused the disaster, you get a Chernobyl.

For what it's worth, I'd live immediately downwind from any reactor built in North America, Japan (their reactors are fine, their enrichment plants... well, they screwed the pooch on that one about 10 years ago, but even then, nobody immediately downwind got exposed to much), or NATO-sided Europe.  Wouldn't live within 20 miles upwind, or 100 miles downwind of anything in the Warsaw Pact for safety reasons, and for anything in the Middle East because those'll be the first things targeted when anyone gets an itchy trigger finger.

Disclaimer: I'm neither a physicist nor a nukeE either, but before I went into computers, I spent enough time hanging around 'em in college that I picked up a lot.  They really are acutely aware that an accident even as well-handled as TMI, let alone a disaster like Chernobyl, means the end of the industry and (in their eyes) any hope for an economical source of carbon-free energy.


How do you get uranium from ore in the ground to fissionable nuclear fuel without using massive amounts of fossil fuels in the process? ???


But the amount of energy you get from a uranium fuel rod in relationship to it's weight is absurdly high, so the "carbon footprint" of a fuel rod (in terms of life cycle carbon per kWh generated) likely very small. My guess is that there's as much carbon emitted in making the zirconium rod casing as there is in the fuel itself, but I am guessing at that.



What LyricBoy said.  You dig the stuff out of the ground, you put a bit of energy into the stuff to turn it into a suitable fuel, and you get a boatload of energy out.  

Or you use a reactor design that doesn't require enrichment, such as the CANDU design, which, instead of consuming some energy to enrich the uranium, consumes a similar amount of energy into separating heavy water (D2O) from normal water (H2O).

There's no way around putting a bit of energy into the process to get things started, but unlike boondoggles such as ethanol, the EROEI (energy return on energy invested) on modern front-end fuel cycle technologies (centrifuges, maybe laser separation if GE can figure it out, or heavy water plants and CANDU) is huge, and only the first round (the Manhattan Project) of fuel production actually required the use of power generated from the burning of fossil fuels.  


I'm guessing that centrifuges consume electricity.


Yup.  plants.  A centrifuge plant uses about 10-20% of the power of the old gaseous diffusion plants, but even the gaseous diffusion plants had a positive EROEI.

First, the energy sources I mentioned are truly "green".  Yes, it takes energy to build and maintain them but the returns could far outweigh the input.  Second, nuks are not green when you include the entire process beginning with the mining.

First, the energy sources I mentioned are truly "green".  Yes, it takes energy to build and maintain them but the returns could far outweigh the input.  Second, nuks are not green when you include the entire process beginning with the mining.


Actually a big mining issue involving nuclear power is the limited supply of uranium.  Unless the US government gets off its azz and starts allowing MOX fuel and breeder reactors, which serve to dispose of plutonium and tremendously reduce the volume of power plant waste, eventually uranium will get very scarce and very expensive.

Plutonium disposal is a key issue here, since today, all of the plutonium weapons "pits" still exist as raw plutonium.  There are four ways to deal wiof these materials:


Blow them up as they were designed (not a real good idea)
Stockpile them and guard them like crazy (thats what's going on now)
Dilute them with other materials as a glassy "ingot"(they could still be retreived and enriched back to weapons grade)
Form them into MOX fuel and fundamentally consume the Plutonium in a reactor


Burning Plutonium MOX fuel in is the ONLY way to ELIMINATE the elemental Plutonium.  All of the other methods (short of nuclear detonation) are short-term and expensive "solutions".  Britain, France, Russia, India, and Japan already produce MOX fuel. 

If I understand things correctly, there are now two MOX fuel plants under construction (or development) in the USA.  Implementation of the MOX technology can be a big piece of (a) reprocessing spent fuel and reducing waste volume, (b) demilitarizing weapons-grade plutonium, (c) reducing demand for uranium mining.

Actually a big mining issue involving nuclear power is the limited supply of uranium.  Unless the US government gets off its azz and starts allowing MOX fuel and breeder reactors, which serve to dispose of plutonium and tremendously reduce the volume of power plant waste, eventually uranium will get very scarce and very expensive.

Plutonium disposal is a key issue here, since today, all of the plutonium weapons "pits" still exist as raw plutonium.  There are four ways to deal wiof these materials:


Blow them up as they were designed (not a real good idea)
Stockpile them and guard them like crazy (thats what's going on now)
Dilute them with other materials as a glassy "ingot"(they could still be retreived and enriched back to weapons grade)
Form them into MOX fuel and fundamentally consume the Plutonium in a reactor


Burning Plutonium MOX fuel in is the ONLY way to ELIMINATE the elemental Plutonium.  All of the other methods (short of nuclear detonation) are short-term and expensive "solutions".  Britain, France, Russia, India, and Japan already produce MOX fuel. 

If I understand things correctly, there are now two MOX fuel plants under construction (or development) in the USA.  Implementation of the MOX technology can be a big piece of (a) reprocessing spent fuel and reducing waste volume, (b) demilitarizing weapons-grade plutonium, (c) reducing demand for uranium mining.


That's a great point...a limited amount of Uranium ore to be mined in the first place.  What scares me is mixed oxide fuels or no, with nukes, you'll always get a puddle of really scary sh*t in the end and no one can REALLY give me a reassurance that its not going to find its way into the environment, whether by accident or terrorist endeavor.
:o

What scares me is mixed oxide fuels or no, with nukes, you'll always get a puddle of really scary sh*t in the end and no one can REALLY give me a reassurance that its not going to find its way into the environment, whether by accident or terrorist endeavor.

Why so scared of mixed oxides?  Plutonium on its own is as nasty as it gets.

That's a great point...a limited amount of Uranium ore to be mined in the first place.  What scares me is mixed oxide fuels or no, with nukes, you'll always get a puddle of really scary sh*t in the end and no one can REALLY give me a reassurance that its not going to find its way into the environment, whether by accident or terrorist endeavor.
:o



But MOX is a vastly better alternative to today's "do nothing" approach to power plant waste.

And to give you an idea, spent fuel rods are very nasty stuff, and contain the full roster of actinides (Uranium, Plutonium, Americurium, Curium, not sure if the higher-weight elements are in there as well).  And in terms of nuclear waste, today's spent rods present the MAXIMUM VOLUME ALTERNATIVE.  Reprocessing them into MOX or other sorts of reprocessed fuels greatly reduces the volume of waste as well as conserves HUGE amounts of energy.

As "nasty" as people may thing reprocessing is, it is actually being done to a large degree in modern reactors, albeit on a smaller scale than a full-out reprocess or breeder reactor technology.  Modern plants today use a "high burn rate" fuel, in which, as part of the process, plutonium is generated as a byproduct of the initial uranium fission reactions, (ie, plutonium is "bred"), and then it is subsequently fissioned in the reactor.  This "self breeding" or "high burn" process accounts for about 30% of the energy output of a modern reactor such as the one that the O'bama loan will be financing.  But it only scratches the surface of proper waste minimization.

That's a great point...a limited amount of Uranium ore to be mined in the first place.  What scares me is mixed oxide fuels or no, with nukes, you'll always get a puddle of really scary sh*t in the end and no one can REALLY give me a reassurance that its not going to find its way into the environment, whether by accident or terrorist endeavor.
:o


By burning it in reactors, you not only get rid of a lot of it, the puddle you end up with (the really-spent fuel) is much hotter than what we currently produce.  The fact that it's hotter is a good thing; it decays to background levels in decades/centuries, not millenia.  That means you don't have to worry about storing it for timeframes longer than human civilization. 

As for the terrists, the hotter the waste is, the less likely it is they'll get their hands on it.  It's the difference between "drop dead in hours" and "drop dead in minutes". 

As a final bonus, the longer you leave Pu-239 in a reactor, the more likely it is that it'll capture a stray neutron and become Pu-240.  Leave it in long enough, and you end up with something that's not only chemically nasty and egregiously radioactive, it's utterly useless for building bombs. 

In terms of the amount of uranium available for conventional reactors vs. breeder reactors, both are stopgap technologies, but in thse sense of whale oil giving way to petroleum, and petroleum lasting us long enough to come up with semiconductors (solar), nuclear, and superconductors (which will help all technologies, but especially wind, which is characterized by large distances between the individual windmills and the rest of the grid).

Burned conventionally, there's enough uranium to run our present society, even if we transition to electric cars, for ~100 years.  Waste reprocessing takes that to ~500-1000 years.  Even if we never master fusion, that's long enough to build offworld factories that can crank out orbital solar power transmitters, and/or to mine asteroids for more nuke fuel.  But even if we stick to the bottom of the gravity well and conventional reactors, that first 100 years will last us long enough to make a transition to the thorium fuel cycle, which also gives us enough fuel to get back into the 1000+ year timeframes.  There's nothing wrong with using stopgap technologies, as long as they give you enough time to build something better.

  There's nothing wrong with using stopgap technologies, as long as they give you enough time to build something better.


As I think you alluded to in your post, in the end ALL technologies are stopgap anyway.

-First man burned wood for heat
-Then coal was burned
-Wind power was harnessed mechanically
-Water power was harnessed mechanically
-Then petroleum was discovered in the 1800's and we started burning that stuff too
-Coal, wood, water power were used to drive electric generators
-Nukes came along and added to the mix
-Solar started to appear

Technology tends to build upon itself, and as superior substitutes arise, its in with the new and out with the old.

Of course another way to reduce the VOLUME of nuclear waste would be to simply burn fuel rods that are enriched to a higher concentration in commercial reactors.  Today's commercial fuel is (I think) enriched to only 5%, and they have to be changed out fairly frequently.  However, naval reactors burn fuel rods that are 20% enriched, so that they can run without refueling for something like 20 years.

There is one problem though... a reactor that burns 20% enriched fuel has a higher natural disposition to "going critical".  :-\\

Sorry, but I've heard all the scientific mumbo jumbo before, as a kid in the '60s.  Nucs were to be THE POWER OF THE FUTURE, almost free (pollution wasn't an issue), and energy without end.  It's still mumbo jumbo, the god dam things are still not safe, and building more of them is the stupidest idea I have ever heard.


Canada and France have proven you wrong.  Canada has much cleaner air than we do in most of their metropolitan areas, and France also has done quite well for itself with nuclear power because they aren't dependent on oil and gas from Russia (insulating them from Russia's agendas).