Nuclear’s Glacial Pace—There’s a reason it takes so long to approve a new reactor design.

[OKIsItJustMe]

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602155/nuclears-glacial-pace/

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Nuclear’s Glacial Pace[/font]

[font size=4]There’s a reason it takes so long to approve a new reactor design.[/font]

August 23, 2016

[font size=3]Climate change has forced us to rethink how we get electricity. Use of renewable sources like solar and wind is rapidly increasing, while nuclear, though long a reliable source of carbon-free electricity, is not. Meanwhile, a number of startups are promising cheap, safe, proliferation-­resistant nuclear energy in the next decade (see “Fail-Safe Nuclear Power”).

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The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been waiting since 2014 for applications for design certification licenses for small modular reactors—smaller versions of the large and extra-large operating light-water reactors, with additional safety features. Such plants, which could be factory-built and snapped together on site, hold the promise of providing cheaper nuclear power in a more distributed fashion. Other designs are on the horizon, including molten-salt reactors, which are promising but won’t be ready for decades.

In 2015, the General Accountability Office reported that it takes 20 to 25 years to develop a new reactor in the United States—10 years for the design phase, 3.5 years for a design certification license from the NRC, four years for a combined operating license, and another four years for construction. And that’s only in an ideal world where no unexpected problems occur.

…

Some people blame the regulators for holding up the plants. Yet the NRC hasn’t been presented with any applications for new reactors and probably won’t be for years. Data from prototype plants would be helpful, but then many of the “new” designs are not so new at all. Sodium-cooled fast reactors have been built by countries including the U.S., Japan, Russia, Germany, France, and India since the 1950s, but no country has been able to make a plant cheap and reliable enough to even come close to being a viable energy source.

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[guillaumeb]

1. Long term storage of waste is still a huge obstacle.

But only for 45,000 years or so.

[madokie]

2. We were sold a pig in a poke

way back in the early to mid'50s so they'd have the fuel for nuclear weapons. My dad had a friend who was a mathematician who worked on the Manhattan Project even though at the time he had no idea as to what he was working on. Once they dropped the bombs on Japan it became evident to him what he was part of. I remember he and my dad talking about this and how he was scared to death that they'd try to 'tame' the process for electricity production. He thought they were nuts for even considering trying to harness the power of an atomic bomb to boil water.
Because of the lie that was, 'safe, cheap and clean' nuclear energy we wasted years that could have been better used in developing alternates to burning fossil fuels. If they were hell bent to burn coal for boiling water they should have at least used a gasifier process as it produces from 50 to 60 percent less carbon dioxide. Even if they didn't do anything else it would have resulted in much cleaner air today but no the nuclear industry pushed for the lie that it was so the coal industry never really explored the gasifier. Gasifiers have been around for years so it wasn't like it was new technology, rather it was well understood.
I've often wondered what the nuclear industry played in the decision in building direct fired coal plants knowing full well that we'd wind up where we are and then maybe people would warm up to the use of nuclear energy. Trouble is Nuclear energy never panned out like its promise was, safe, clean or cheap. for instance it takes a lot of energy just to make the fuel for a nuclear power plant as well as to build the power plants.

I say we continue to develop alternates to fossil fuels and nuclear.

[mopinko]

3. leave it all in the ground.

unless you are gonna get nuclear fuels from the fracking waste that we are dumping willy-nilly out west. and the coal ash.

[NNadir]

7. Your dad may have "known" a mathematician, but I doubt that anyone...

...in a family of anti-nukes actually know anything about math at all.

One cannot know even simple arithmetic and consider that seven million deaths every year from air pollution isn't dangerous, climate change isn't dangerous, but somehow nuclear power is.

Real scientists - and this isn't people whose dad claimed to know scientists - can show that nuclear energy saves lives, having saved millions of lives that otherwise would have been lost to air pollution, and having prevented the accumulation of 60 billion tons of carbon dioxide.

This is something called a scientific publication: Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power

The numbers in this paper, which includes the effects of both Chernobyl and Fukushima that dumb mathetmatically illiterates are always burning coal and gas about which to prattle, are irrefutable to anyone who can compare data and numbers.

The "calculation" that poorly educated illiterates make is that one death at any time in history from anything related to nuclear energy is worth tens of millions of deaths that occur continuously while we wait for the stupid and expensive fantasy that the "other stuff," the toxic and expensive and failed solar and wind industries will "work."

They're not working. They haven't worked. They won't work.

We spent trillions of dollars on this useless rickety and unreliable junk, with the result that the rate of climate change gas accumulation is the highest ever observed, as is the death rate from air pollution.

It's time that we put the assholes in the anti-nuke industry, a front for the fossil fuel industry, out to the pitiable crackpot intellectual wastelands that their weak and frankly dangerous ideas deserve.

None of the seven million deaths taking place each year from air pollution is necessary.

Nuclear energy need not address the concerns of every uneducated radiation paranoid, nor need it be perfect and completely risk free to be vastly superior to everything else.

It is inhumane, ignorant, paranoid to insist that every other form of energy on this planet be allowed to kill at will because there are some stupid people who can't do simple comparisons.

Fukushima and Chernobyl combined didn't kill as many people as will die today and tomorrow and every other day after that, 19,000 people a day, from air pollution.

Anti-nuke moron rhetoric is a crime against humanity, and a crime against all future generations.

[NNadir]

4. The reason it takes long to build a reactor is stupidity; setting standards for nuclear...

Last edited Sat Aug 27, 2016, 06:18 AM - Edit history (3)

...that no other form of energy can meet.

There are seven million people dying every year, each year, from air pollution, constantly, without let up, while shit for brain people are still crying over radiation releases from Fukushima.

Millions of people die each year because we don't spend a dime on cleaning up fecal matter, but we'll spend billions of dollars to "clean up" a radioactive site so dumb shit radiation paranoids will have radiation exposure less than that of a dental x-ray.

842,000 deaths related to a lack of sanitation

If we built nuclear plants exactly the way we built them in the 1960's the risk of death from them in the next ten decades from thousands of them would not be nearly equivalent connected to the risks associated with what dangerous fossil fuels will kill this week.

I note that this kind of stupidity - these criticisms that nuclear energy is "too slow" is very popular with the set of people who prowl around the pop literature looking for lab scale "breakthroughs" for the useless, expensive, worthless and unsustainable so called "renewable energy" industry, which after half a century of mindless cheering has never been able to produce as much climate change free primary energy for which nuclear energy industry was able to build infrastructure in twenty years more than 30 years ago.

This selective attention is precisely why the dangerous fossil fuel waste is killing tens of millions of people every decade while accumulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at a rate that is accelerating into the complete destruction of the planet climate at an ever faster rate. We're now at the point where CO₂ concentrations are rising a 3.00 ppm per year, whereas they were usually "only" 1.00 ppm in the 1970's, around the time that we all started hearing how the wonderful so called "renewable energy" industry would replace the nuclear industry, but not, tellingly, the dangerous fossil fuel industry.

It would be just, and slightly more intelligent, if critics of the nuclear industry who support the unreliable and rickety solar and wind industries would shut their mouths until their trillion dollar scan gets to half the primary energy of the nuclear energy, which is roughly 28 exajoules per year.

I've been hearing about the "renewable energy" miracle that will take place or could take place my entire adult life and, um, I'm not young.

In my lifetime, the carbon dioxide concentrations in the planetary atmosphere have risen close to 100 ppm, and I attribute this to all the assholes who sat around complaining that "nuclear energy is too slow" while doing everything possible with their stupid rhetoric to make it slower by insipid remarks that it was "dangerous" while not looking at the numbers for solar and wind, not to mention dangerous fossil fuels. As I often say, these people are nothing less than arsonists complaining about forest fires."

They deliberately trashed the work of some of the finest minds of the twentieth century because they were incompetent to do simple mathematics or learn basic science.

They bet the planetary atmosphere on technologies that have not worked, are not working, and will not work, while offering idiotic platitudes like, um, Hydrogen Cars May Hit Showrooms by 2005.

Abraham Lincoln once said something very wise: "Of all God's creatures, the chicken is the wisest; it only cackles after it has laid an egg."

The anti-nuke advocates of the failed solar and wind industries have laid down lots of manure, and cackled quite a bit, but the real results are written in the planetary atmosphere. No one alive today will ever see readings below 400 ppm of CO₂ on this planet again.

History, should history survive, will not forgive this ignorance; nor should it.

Have a nice weekend.

[kristopher]

5. Pssst. Hey, Clueless. (Countries that support nuclear energy lag on climate targets)

Study: Countries that support nuclear energy lag on climate targets

Madeleine Cuff
23 August 2016


Countries with a strong national commitment to nuclear energy tend to make slower progress towards meeting their climate targets, compared to countries without nuclear energy or with plans to reduce it, according to research published yesterday by the University of Sussex.

The researchers looked at the progress of European countries towards cutting carbon emissions and increasing their share of renewable energy under the EU's 2020 Strategy. They found nuclear-free countries such as Denmark and Norway have made the most progress towards their climate targets, while pro-nuclear countries such as France and the UK have been slower to tackle emissions and roll out clean energy sources.

...

"Looked at on its own, nuclear power is sometimes noisily propounded as an attractive response to climate change," Andy Stirling, professor of science and technology policy at the University of Sussex, said in a statement. "Yet if alternative options are rigorously compared, questions are raised about cost-effectiveness, timeliness, safety and security."

"Looking in detail at historic trends and current patterns in Europe, this paper substantiates further doubts," he added. "By suppressing better ways to meet climate goals, evidence suggests entrenched commitments to nuclear power may actually be counterproductive."

Countries which have no nuclear energy ...

http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/2468561/study-countries-that-support-nuclear-energy-lag-on-climate-targets

[KellyW]

6. I appreciate your information but

Please remove the word ‘clueless’ and maintain civility