US power company abandons reactor construction

[nadinbrzezinski]

A US power company says it will abandon plans to build nuclear reactors in Texas, amid the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan.

NRG Energy, which operates the South Texas Project nuclear station, planned to build the 2 reactors with Japan's Toshiba Corporation.

The company said on Tuesday that it will write off its investment in the project, citing extraordinary challenges facing US nuclear development due to present circumstances.

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/20_21.html

[damntexdem]

1. Thank goodness. Stop all new nukes.

The old ones will be trouble enough, whether shut down or not.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

2. actually, the new ones would be far safer,

especially over 40-50 yr old designs, but I still agree with you.

[nadinbrzezinski]

4. You know how I'd agree with you

and it would be as safe as humanely possible... USE NAVAL REACTOR STANDARDS... they are so stringent though that all these plants would have to be socialized. There is no profit there.

Talking to a few people who have worked both sides, the NRC is a joke.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

5. Thank Hyman Rickover for that.

[nadinbrzezinski]

7. There is a reason he never worked in the civilian sector

:-)

[ChairmanAgnostic]

8. other than being a tyrant, impossible to please,

extremely secretive and demanding, and in effect, a monarch over the nuke navy?

[nadinbrzezinski]

11. Yep, pretty much, he was all that

but... the safety protocols work. They are so damn expensive though that this is why the CIVILIAN sector never even got to the tip of it. If we insist on nukes (and for the record I don't)... then have those protocols... (watch reactors decom on their own by the way... too damn expensive, and not good for profit)

[jtrockville]

6. Well, sure.... imagine trying to promote something LESS safe than a GE Mark 1.

They new ones are still dangerious, just slightly less so. And they're still dirty. I'm hoping for a new era of clean, renewable energy.

[Ezlivin]

3. Now we'll have deal with Governor Perry's desire to put windmills on cars

It's his idea of how to harness the power of traffic.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

9. with all that energy transfer taking place in Texas

you'd think that they'd be able to capture all that hot air.

[rgbecker]

10. There are already more than 100 sites in the US which are forever contaminated.

We don't need to have any more. Each one of these places will never be clean enough to habitate for 1000's of years. No one has even started to think about how those sites will be managed for those years...Do the pro nuclear people out there think when these reactors are burnt out, the metal and concrete compromised, that there is going to be some sort of Mr Mom clean up crew that is going to come in and package up all that radioactive stuff, put it in a garbage truck and take it to the town dump? I suggest we look to energy conservation to save the available 30%, increase renewables to 30% and spend the money engineering clean consumption of the remaining oil, coal and natural gas.