An interesting entry in the nuclear field is Abu Dhabi, which is planning on using three reactors. A French concern is attempting to sell the use of thorium rather than uranium as an energy source. Cleaner and less hazardous, Thorium may be a new way to sell nuclear energy.
A successful attack on a nuclear plant will kill thousands of people and poison many square miles of land.
Until those problems are resolved nuclear energy is a dicey proposition at best.
There is about 77,000 tons of nuclear waste parked at various nuclear power plants around the US. Since the mid 1980s, the US government has prepared Yucca Mountain as a repository for this material spending 100s of millions of tax dollars in the process.
The government identified target: storage for 10,000 years, even though the waste will be deadly for more than one million years.
Above is from a new book “About a Mountain” by John D’Agata.
0bama’s sudden interest in nuclear power is a head fake.
He has no intention of allowing our country to have energy.
In the latest edition of National Geographic, there is a short essay about two new types of small nuclear power plants that are under development, and may be representative of the future of nuclear power.
In a nutshell, instead of building a single centralized 1200 Megawatt nuclear plant that costs upwards of $12 Billion+ and a decade or more to construct, why not build several 25-50 megawatt plants for around $50 Million each? That kind of a price difference puts a small nuclear reactor in the range of small remote towns in Canada and Alaska, not to mention rural electrical co-ops around the Country. That’s the market that is being targeted by the smaller nuclear technology that is under development now.
The nuclear units are self contained and sealed, and are good for about 30 years, at which time the company who put it in replaced it with another sealed unit. Some have no pumps whatsoever, and the reaction is cooled by convection currents. It’s an over-simplification, but you essentially hook up your conventional steam generator to the unit, and then power conventional turbine generators with it.
You do not need to have any nuclear qualified staff to operate the reactor. The reactor itself is buried in the ground in what looks much like a missile silo, or at least similar construction.
As for nuclear waste; I have never understood why the United States has not vigorously pursued the recycling of “spent” power plant fuel rods. France generates the majority of their power with nuclear and they have led the world in developing nuclear fuel reprocessing. It can be done, and it makes absolutely no sense to bury and abandon such valuable fuel under Yucca Mountain, or anywhere else. The “spent” fuel may not be suitable for use in a 1200 MW reactor, but even the waste heat that one fuel rod assembly generates is usable.
We have got to find new ways to get modern nuclear power back into consideration, and smaller plants are very competative with some of the green projects that are being sold out there that don’t generate anywhere near as much power as nuclear.
HMM