Posted on 02/05/2007 1:56:56 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
What's always convinced me that nuclear plants are the way to go for power is the US Navy's safety record- been operating nuclear plants in the most hazardous locations ( Marine, submarine ) since the nineteen-fifties without a fatality.
Obviously, they can be run safely with the right personnel and controls.
Well without a reactor related fatality anyway. There was The Thresher incident.
But you are quite correct. Maybe they should let the Navy go into the electrical power generation business for profit. Their safety record is spotless. You know they won't cook the books.
And as a bonus the Navy could afford all the toys they wanted.
L
1) I hope Candians build wind farms: they sell most of their oil to the US!
2) As to bird kills: why not put a whistle on the blade tips? When I toot my horn at 'em, nearly all critters scurry away and birds fly away from the roadway.
3) If the wind farms are located in windy areas, why not plant trees? The wind rustling through the trees will mask the noise of the turbines, as well as hiding them from view.
In my locale, traffic noise is carried on the wind from a mile away. The rustle from my palm trees mask the sound.
Besides, what are the alternatives? Air pollution, NIMBY nuke plant objections, and enriching Middle East sheiks and/or Communist regimes?
NIMBY. Nobody wants energy generation, but everybody wants the lights to come on when you flip the switch. We should be building nuke plants, and be done with it.
Everyone might as well realize that no matter what is done to generate power, whether it be nuclear, or wind, or geothermal, or coal, etc,.
Some jackass is always going to have something to whine about.
Lurker wrote: Maybe they should let the Navy go into the electrical power generation business for profit.
Guys, go inside a Nuke and you'll see quite a few former swabbies and Dolpins, espescially in maintenance, and usually the entire operating staff in the control room.
I've done a little work inside over the past ten years, I've never been in the military. But I now speak the phonic alphabet, give the Orders of the Day and insist everyone follow the posted SOP on all jobs I lead.
On the other hand, I've seen civilian management types order questionable, but discreet, short cuts to get a reactor back online at the end of a refuel outage. There are always those who think revenue over procedure.
I'll never live downwind, inside the dead zone of a Nuke.
I never heard of that before. What does one do with recycled nuclear material from a power plant?
I read (or heard) somewhere about a conflict with the "greens" and the "animals-first" crowd, in that the propellers were supposedly killing endangered birds that flew into them.
I have to laugh. The PC-crowd will be their own undoing.
Good luck with that: which way IS "downwind"?
LOL! :>
Sheila Jackson-Lee could power all of Texas. Bobbie "Sheets" Byrd could cover the rest of the South. Boxer and Maxine Waters could handle the great West, and Hillary could easily cover the Midwest and the Northeast.
Good idea.
If the things generated very much power, I would agree, but they don't.
Build five nuke plants and have a better energy source. Wind farms are definitely "for the birds".
Let's see what I have handy...
There's a better way than burying it- other countries have, for decades, recycled the stuff:
US Nuclear Power Debate
... The Bush administration also wants to explore new technology to recycle nuclear
fuel, increasing its efficiency and possibly reducing its danger. ...
Other info:
Numatec - the Tri-Cities' 'French connection'
... Numatec other parent is Cogema, the owner and operator of facilities used to produce
and recycle nuclear fuel, including many designed and built by SGN. ...
Nuclear Electricity
... gas equivalent). • Uranium offers a long-term source of energy. Unlike
fossil fuels, we can recycle nuclear fuel. We can recover ...
[MMA Alumni] Helping out MMA Nuclear Employed Alumni
... Many MMA Grads are employed in the Nuclear Power industry, ever since President Carter
killed the national plans to recycle nuclear fuel as was always intended ...
[PDF] U. S. Nuclear Waste Policy: Reaching Critical Mass
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML
... An Aside: Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing Overseas In addition to the United States,
only two other countries don't recycle nuclear fuel as a matter of national ...
Salon.com Technology | Nukes now!
... Other countries, such as Japan and France -- which gets about 80 percent of its
electricity from nuclear power -- recycle nuclear fuel, but President Ford ...
So I got that going for me.
L
The big question is what to do with SPENT FUEL. Spent fuel has lots of radioactive fission products.
Simple answer ... reprocess the stuff.
For a 1000 lb fuel bundle that was originally 6% enriched fuel, maybe 30 of the 60 lbs of U235 is gone, and some of the U238 was converted to Pu239. Pull out the Plutonium and Uranium, the fuel cladding (Zirconium) for re-use. Pull out the radioactive fission products (about 30 pounds.) Vitrify the fission products (mix with molten glass) then put them in stainless steel canisters and bury them.
(A typical power reactor might have about 180 fuel bundles, and 1/3 of the bundles are swapped out every 1 - 3 years, typical cycle is 18 months. Typically, power plants will discharge the fuel bundles and let them cool off in a spent fuel pool for about 10-15 years before removal from the spent fuel pool. This is when the starting the reprocessing should occur; at this point, decay heat is very small, and the radioactivity levels are somewhat diminished.)
Hint ... make the canisters recoverable. Fission products contain valuable rare-earth elements that, about 700 years later, the material will be fairly non-radioactive ... less than the original Uranium ore was ... and the rare-earth elements might be used in exotic magnets, superconductor technology, etc.
Much of this reprocesses/vitrification process is proven technology - already done by the French ... who get over 70% of their nation's electric power from nuclear power reactors, and some of them are breeder reactors. The French already do reprocessing of nuclear fuel for the Japanese, who also obtain significant amounts of electric power from nuclear power plants.
Mike
(former Navy Nuclear Engineer)
what about the economics of these things?
how much natural gas, is not burnt?
I could put up with them for $144,000 a year.
Build floating nukes in ships/barges that can be docked in harbors and rivers, and "plugged into" onshore substations.
I kind of enjoy the break in monotany the ones out in West Texas, off I-10, provide. You can see them for miles and there are very few people for them to bother.
They sell wind power kits for home use. They are much smaller than these mentioned.
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