Obama is down for nuclear power, can I get a hell yea?

[rcpratt]

Hell yeah.

Whether or not Obama meant what he said, it's coming. Yucca Mountain would be nice, but if the government wants to continue to pay utilities billions of dollars to store waste on site, that won't stop anything. Our country's 104 nuclear power plants create just 200 cubic meters of high-level waste per year, and we can continue to store it on site for quite a long time. There are already plenty of low-level waste repositories around the country.

The ESBWR and AP1000 are great designs, and hundreds of times safer than current reactors. Hopefully America learns a lesson from France and eventually makes nuclear our primary source of energy.

The COLA process is a slow one, but once Dominion's North Anna application and TVA's Bellafont (I think that's the R-COLA for AP1000...?) application are approved, things will move along quickly.

Hell yeah, again

Maybe do something about reprocessing (do they even allow it yet?) or the ban on reactors with any positive void coefficient. Advanced CANDU reactors are awesome, but we can't build them in this country because of that. We aren't trying to build a Chernobyl-style reactor, so it's not like it's a major issue.

America doesn't currently reprocess because the PUREX process separates plutonium...even though it's not weapons grade. Just another political policy fail. There also aren't any American reactors with positive reactivity coefficients, of course. Our current reactors are better than CANDUs anyways. Having to enrich fuel (we don't even have to enrich right now because we have enough enriched uranium from Russian warheads and other sources) is a small trade-off for the increased safety, as you said.

 

[spidey07]

It's a start. But in just the very same sentence he mentioned cap and trade so this may just be a carrot/poison pill to get cap and tax passed.

 

[MotF Bane]

He'll never do a damn thing about it.

Oh, and the ignorance is very strong in this thread.

 

[Double Trouble]

As with any politician, I don't believe a damn thing he says until he puts it into action. Obama hasn't had a pro-nuclear track record in any way, other than blah blah blah while campaigning. If he does strongly support nuclear energy and helps push it back into the forefront, then I'll be very impressed by his leadership in that area. Not holding my breath though.

 

[soccerballtux]

Depends on if it's Thorium.
If it's pebble bed no thanks. Super expensive reprocessing cost.

 

[Schadenfroh]

Hopefully it will be more than just words. I would love to see most of our power come from Nuclear and Hydroelectric dams.

 

[charrison]

Hopefully it will be more than just words. I would love to see most of our power come from Nuclear and Hydroelectric dams.

Just replacing our coal plants with nuclear power would yield significant CO2 emissions.

And with new drilling tech we could probably replace those coal plants with natural gas as well in the short term.

 

[lothar]

When will the President tell Harry Reid to suck it up because we're going to use the Yucca Mountain storage facility we've sunk billions of dollars into? Without a plan for long-term storage of spent nuclear materials, new reactors are not a clean power source.

That will happen when Reid loses re-election.

 

[Double Trouble]

Yep... Reid looks like he's on the way out in the next election...

 

[palehorse]

I'll believe it when I see it...

 

[dsity]

Actually they have the empty space in West Texas that's be perfect plus all the illegal labor they need to build them cheaply

tornado vs nuclear reactor....who wins?

 

[sciwizam]

tornado vs nuclear reactor....who wins?

Plant locations:

F2 Tornado:

Tornado

On June 24, 1998 the station was "directly hit" by an F2 tornado. [6] The plant's switchyard was damaged and access to external power was disabled. Also damaged by the tornado was the roof of the Turbine building and the roof the of the administrative building, the latter having extensive flood damage to the second floor. The plant's reactor automatically shut down at 8:43 pm and an alert (the next to lowest of four levels of severity) was declared at 9:18 pm. The plant's emergency diesel generators powered critical facility safety systems until external power could be restored.[7][8]

 

[JEDIYoda]

He'll never do a damn thing about it.

Oh, and the ignorance is very strong in this thread.

we were waiting for you to show up...now you can crawl back under the cess pool that you came from....

 

[BrownTown]

tornado vs nuclear reactor....who wins?

several nuclear reactors have been hit by tornadoes. A tornado is one of the design basis accidents a nuclear plant is designed to withstand.

On an unrelated note, all those talking about crazy reactor designs like molten salt reactors need to get on the reality train here. The cost of such a reactor would be FAR to expensive to compete with coal or even natural gas. I think some people need to actually go and look at a nuclear plant to understand it isn't a very high tech sort of place. Everything used at a nuke plant has been considered obsolete for 30 years in the commercial field and equipment isn't maintained nearly as well as you might think in order to try and keep costs down. Stuff is constantly breaking down or leaking etc.

 

[Codewiz]

I live in South Carolina and I never understood the "not in my backyard" mentality. We have a good amount of reactors and no one really cares.....

The only time people went "Oh shit" was the morning of 9/11. We realized that flying a plane into one probably wouldn't be a good thing for us.

 

[SunSamurai]

How about a collective HELL, NO! WE WON'T GLOW!

Until there's a way to provide 100% guaranteed failsafe protection against sabotage and operator stupidity and to deal with leaks and radioactive waste, one failure can kill thousands if not millions of people and render an area the size of a mid-sized state uninhabitable for centuries.

It may be possible... someday, but it is not, now.

LOL Like there is a such thing as 100% failsafe ANYWERE IN ENERGY. Coal, Gas, wind, nothing is failsafe. A HELL of a lot less people have died from Nuclear than coal or oil disasters.

How uninformed and fantastically alarmist you are. How about you actually go look how modern Nuclear is made. Its orders of magnitude more safe, get out of the 60s and 80s. Screaming 'HELL, NO! WE WON'T GLOW!' makes you look ignorant as hell.

 

[RyanPaulShaffer]

I hope this talk about nuclear power wasn't just more hollow words...

Nuclear is the best technology we have available right now to move us away from fossil fuels until solar/hydro/wind/etc. are developed enough to be feasible. On Pandora, maybe those "greens" techs could power a world...on planet Earth, the "green" techs just aren't anywhere close to being able to realistically do so.

 

[SunSamurai]

tornado vs nuclear reactor....who wins?

tornado vs oil refinery....who wins?
tornado vs solor....who wins?
tornado vs coal plant....who wins?


you vs logic.. who wins? NOT YOU

 

[Zargon]

yes they are so unsafe we havent had a minor incident that caused any harm since 3 mile island basically.

no one seems to know/remember that chernobyl didnt even have a containment dome

 

[GuitarDaddy]

Quote:
Originally Posted by Red Dawn
That'[s why I say they should all be located in Texas.

licence them and i bet texas will take as many as they could build

As much as I love Texas hate'in from other areas of the country (helps minimize the constant flow of idiots moving here from those areas), except for available land area and a desire to dump a percieved hazzard in our great state building new nuke plants in Texas doesn't make much sense. We have the best and most reliable power grid in the country and in my area especially already get most of our power from a nuke plant. Seems to me it would make more sense to build power plants where you need the power

 

[DisgruntledVirus]

Liquid salt thorium reactors.

Half lives under 1000 years for the worst isotopes, 100 fold decrease in waste, 50% more efficient than current dinosaur reactors in our fleet of nuke plants. Passive fail safes that require no human intervention to stop a reaction.

Mining coal kills more people per year than nuclear power has killed since the discovery of nuclear energy.

STOP USING LOGIC AND REASONING HERE!!!

We don't like that here.

 

[polarmystery]

I'd like to hear Harvey's response from this:

How about a collective HELL, NO! WE WON'T GLOW!

Until there's a way to provide 100% guaranteed failsafe protection against sabotage and operator stupidity and to deal with leaks and radioactive waste, one failure can kill thousands if not millions of people and render an area the size of a mid-sized state uninhabitable for centuries.

It may be possible... someday, but it is not, now.

Liquid salt thorium reactors.

Half lives under 1000 years for the worst isotopes, 100 fold decrease in waste, 50% more efficient than current dinosaur reactors in our fleet of nuke plants. Passive fail safes that require no human intervention to stop a reaction.

Mining coal kills more people per year than nuclear power has killed since the discovery of nuclear energy.

 

[rcpratt]

tornado vs oil refinery....who wins?
tornado vs solor....who wins?
tornado vs coal plant....who wins?


you vs logic.. who wins? NOT YOU

I don't really mind him asking that question, it's reasonable. But the answer is simple - the reactor wins. Reactors are designed to withstand tornadoes. They're designed to withstand earthquakes. They're designed to withstand airplanes flying into them. The reactor always wins.

I'd like to hear Harvey's response from this:

It's good in theory, but it's also never been done. The technology is still not ready to be commercialized, it would take at least 10 years for the NRC to license it, and it would be too expensive to be effective. The current plants are more than safe.

 

[hal2kilo]

This is fantastic news and a total move in the right direction. Can I get a collective hell yeah from the crowd?

As soon as you volunteer your state to store nuclear wastes.

 

[rcpratt]

As soon as you volunteer your state to store nuclear wastes.

They can store it in my state, if they want. Anyone that actually understands radiological waste would agree. In fact, they already do store high-level waste in my state. And every other state that has a commercial nuclear power plant.