The nuclear sector today certainly has its immediate challenges. Costs had already been a long problem, but the incident at Fukushima complicated matters even further. The industry and regulators were forced to take a second look at its safety practices and plant designs, creating uncertainty for the sector. As of today, 2006 still remains a peak for global nuclear power generation in terms of total output, and it has steadily declined since then.
There is also another creeping issue for the industry that is raising eyebrows. According to The World Nuclear Report, there are 391 nuclear reactors in operation throughout the world. However, the median age of these reactors is now 28.8 years, due to the majority of power plants being built between 1970 and 1985.
The design specifications for most nuclear reactors envision an operating lifespan of 30 to 40 years. In the U.S. specifically, nuclear utilities are initially licensed for 40 years. Near the end of that initial timeframe, they can apply for an additional 20 years.
While there are many experts who believe that older reactors are not a problem, it is hard to imagine many families feeling safe living next to aging nuclear reactors. Furthermore, with recent evens, even more questions have surfaced about the wisdom of keeping aging reactors plugged into the grid. The Fukushima Daiichi units (1 to 4) were first commissioned between 1971 and 1974, and the license for the first unit had been extended for another 10 years in February 2011. This was just a month before the disaster took place.
Right now, most operators are doing what they can to extend the life of their reactors. However, at some point it won’t be enough.
This brings us to a challenging fork in the road: will we move forward with a fleet of aging reactors, or will we bite the bullet to build new ones? If we decommission them without replacement, how will that power supply be replaced?
Using the age of the Fukushima nuclear plant as an implied but not stated reason for safety concerns is BS.
Build a nuclear facility on an earthquake fault line AND near the coast along the Ring of Fire is an accident waiting to happen.
From other sources we’re worried about wastes that don’t decompose in a year or two. In the best of scenarios the wastes from nuclear power plants will be dangerous for tens or hundreds of thousands of years but hopefully we’ll eventually find some place “safe” enough to store them for the long term.
Nuclear power plants require power from external sources to run and just one Fukushima has polluted the whole Pacific Ocean with measurable levels of radiation. In the worst of all possible scenarios (if we have a world-wide hard grid down situation for longer than a week or so) we will have 391 Fukushima type meltdowns happening world-wide.
Anybody who thinks that it is a good idea to build new nuclear power plants and/or allow older nuclear power plants to run beyond the lifespan they were designed for is insane.
We need to be replacing those old reactors from the nuclear dinosaur age with modern and much safer ones.
But we keep them running because getting a new one licensed is a very difficult thing to do, and the constant barrage of anti nuclear lawsuits will stifle construction schedules and increase costs prohibitively.
So we keep the old ones running and running and running instead of replacing them.
A crash program to produce new ultra safe and inexpensive Thorium reactors would be best of all. They could actually result in every town, maybe every neighborhood, having its own cheap nuclear reactor for its electric generation and remove the need for a national electric grid that is an easy target for a crushing military or terrorist EMP attack on our country.
You might want to do some more research before claiming that Thorium reactors are “ultra safe”. About 30 seconds on the internet found the following:
“Irradiated Thorium is more dangerously radioactive in the short term.” https://whatisnuclear.com/articles/thorium.html
Aravan…………..there are reactor types in play that that use the radioactive waste previously and currently produced by fission reactors which were selected in order to be able to build nuclear bombs.
Nuclear plants are the future for energy production for the world. LFTR’s , or Molten Salt Reactors, etc. will eventually do the job.
You are stuck in a time warp.
And it’s OK to leave a radiation mess for our children for hundreds of generations because you think it won’t be as bad as the other radiation mess? Why are you drinking their Kool-aid? Show me PROOF there is a nuclear technology that has no short term OR long term radiation risk and I might be interested. But anything with thorium in it, including MSRs is off the table based on the link I posted previously. Here’s their link about MSRs showing both pros and cons: https://whatisnuclear.com/reactors/msr.html
Araven, You point out the U-232 thing about thorium decay yet talk of leaving a problem for our “children for hundreds of generations” when its half life is about 76 years.
TIG welders use Thorium rods, which register on a Geiger counter, yet we don’t see a whole lot of TIG welders dying of radiation sickness, now do we?
I assume you believe in anthropogencic global warming too.
Ignorance sort of goes along with ignorance.
If you were active around here you would know that I don’t believe in anthropogenic global warming so I have to assume that you are just a troll, especially since you won’t even assign yourself a name. Thorium reactors work by creating uranium, so the comment about TIG welders is silly misdirection, also something a troll would do.
It is ignorance to believe the story given by the TPTB about anything – especially something as dangerous as radiation. Again, show me PROOF that there is a nuclear technology that is not a short OR long term radiation risk and I will listen. All I hear is an ass braying insults, which says something about your level of intelligence.
I’m all for keeping with safe technologies like wood and coal until somebody can rediscover Tesla’s energy technologies or come up with something better.
Aging nuke reactors need to be shut down, dismantled, with the radioactive parts sealed underground where water isn’t a factor. Why? Because long-term exposure to radioactivity degrades the containment and makes the probability of radioactive exposure to the surrounding suburbs much greater. Such a facility was developed in NV, however Harry Reid has blocked its opening due to pressure from homestate constituents.
Diablo Canyon here in CA was built despite the knowledge of a nearby earthquake fault. Now it’s been discovered this fault is part of another fault system, and the locals are still trying to get it shut down. Our other reactor, San Onofre, located on the coast between two large population centers, was shut down when it was discovered the operator used the wrong sized cooling tubes w/o NRC approval (and other violations). It will cost $4.4 BILLION to decommission the plant.
http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/nation/2014/08/02/dismantling-california-nuke-plant-will-cost-44b/13509585/
Nukes aren’t the answer, nor is the centralized model of power production. Technology marches on, and with solar, wind, and fuel cell development, there is no reason why homes, factories and schools cannot be independently powered off-grid.
Coast – your Utopian world of solar and wind belongs in Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Decades into the future the wind towers will be a monument to the stupidity and waste by governments on a grand scale. At the rate those towers are butchering the birds and bats, the insect population will wind up causing extreme havoc and untold numbers of deaths – which is what the Eco-Nazi’s desire.
Aravan,
Your drop to ad hominem indicates you have no reak argument on your side and know it.
That “show me proof that” stuff is downright stupidity as an argument, in fact it isn’t one.
Westcoaster,
Educate yourself: http://www.anl.gov/articles/nuclear-fuel-recycling-could-offer-plentiful-energy
What I am about to say has in the past always managed to get me verbally beaten BUT when did old Bea ever shy away from a topic for fear of a beating, so here goes:
In the not too distant future you (yes, you) will purchase a fuel cell that you will hook up to your natural gas connection at your home and YOU will produce the electricity on site for your own household. The USA!USA!USA! is silly with natural gas and down the road we will be using many times more NG to power all manor of things.
When this comes to past, will nuclear power plants be that relevant?
From the article pointed to by Anonymous:”To date, nuclear energy remains the only stable, large-scale source of carbon-free electricity. ” I rest my case. Anybody that calls nuclear energy “stable” has a screw loose. The article talks about reducing nuclear waste, not eliminating nuclear waste.
BEA,
You can already do that in Japan, and I believe they are being tested here for commercial use by several companies on a preliminary testing basis.
The problem is that to get them accepted you have to get past the environmental morons -who are really just self hating anti human groupies- that oppose anything carbon related including the production and use of of natural gas.
There have been a few problems with them that have shown up in initial use, but what Beta test of anything hasn’t shown problems (which is the purpose of Beta testing in the first place).
Fuel cell technology will also make electric vehicles supreme -even heavy trucks- since it is actually an advance over internal combustion engines and not an attempt to make something nowhere near as good somehow good enough to compete with them (Imagine, say, a Tesla that didn’t need batteries and frequent lengthy recharging, just quick fuel refiling the same as any other vehicle).
I usually get beat up in various forums for pointing that out too, but not as severely or as often as I used to so some progress is being made.
Amazing, isn’t it, how the troll cheerleaders come out of the woodwork whenever anything pops up discussing nuclear power.
Kokoda, if wind isn’t a viable source of power, why then is Germany over-producing? All that needs to happen is for battery tech or fuel cells to catch up.
http://grist.org/business-technology/germanys-solar-power-success-too-much-of-a-good-thing/
And Anony; key words in your link “could offer”. It’s not here yet. But I’ll tell you what I would get behind and that’s “cold fusion” which is now getting serious attention as something real. I’d go even further and say cold fusion just might be the key to “zero point energy”.
Westy,
“Could offer” doesn’t mean anything other than it has to be implemented. It is a viable process and there are operating fast reactors in use at research facilities.
The “could” part depends on the will to do it, not on the viability of the process.
So far, no one has ever demonstrated “cold fusion” on anything even coming close to a repeatable and reliable basis, or even determined exactly what the process is if it is actually taking place, or if it is taking place and not the effect of something unrelated to the experiment.
It’s like all those “free energy” things people try to push on the gullible, no one ever actually has one that works and shows it to the public (I stress “actually works” since there are plenty of fraudulent demo’s aimed at attracting gullible investors out there).
Coast….When you read biased articles favoring your bent, you will get what you want. However………….
Renewable is very costly and affects the poor. Their energy density is low and their energy output is unreliable and intermittent.
Read this article – it doesn’t reflect your position (this one on solar). I could find more and some directed to wind, but why bother – nothing on earth will change your mind.
We could always kill 6 1/2 billion people and go back to burning wood and coal.
I wonder how many people in the future are going to starve to death because Fukushima killed all the life in Pacific Ocean? Maybe I’m just being a drama whore, let me try again; The solution to pollution is dilution, right? It’ll all work out just fine and dandy, I bet.
Araven,
You seem to be operating on the assumption that coal and oil are “safe”; they are not. The death toll from use of coal and oil far exceeds the documented deaths from nuclear power to date. Unfortunately the absence of electric power also increases fatalities from food spoilage, lack of heat or air conditioning, etc. I don’t have enough information to make a guess at the expected fatalities from Fukushima, with all the coverups and misdirection going on, but I’m quite willing to have a liquid thorium reactor in my backyard as opposed to an ancient design like Fukushima or no electric power.
A few points to make here….
Molten salt reactors in general are far from safe and effective, which is why the US Navy abandoned work on them decades ago.
The USS Seawolf was originally fitted with a liquid-sodium molten salt reactor, which was ripped out and replaced after a few years with the standard pressurized water reactor (PWR) used in other nuclear submarines.
A molten salt reactor failure caused the worst nuclear disaster in the US.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-09-29/worst-nuclear-disaster-us-history-you%E2%80%99ve-never-heard-about
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_Reactor_Experiment
By the late 1960s, two uranium-fueled molten salt breeder reactors had been operating in the US: An experimental breeder reactor (EBR-I) built in Idaho in 1949 to prove the principle of breeding and the Enrico Fermi breeder reactor near Detroit, Michigan, for which construction started in 1963. Both used liquid sodium as coolant, which has ideal nuclear properties for working with fast neutrons—useful for efficient breeding of plutonium. Sodium is a solid but soft metal at room temperature and reacts strongly with water. This, as researchers discovered, makes it difficult to work with: EBR-1 suffered a partial meltdown in 1955, as did Fermi in 1966, both from blocked coolant channels.
As for using thorium fueled breeder reactors, the LMFBR (liquid metal fueled breeder reactor) program (1967-1979) made very slow progress and was eventually abandoned entirely, meanwhile it diverted resources away from improving the more common light water reactor designs already in use around the world for power generation.
http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/news/10.1063/PT.5.2029
“I worked for Shaw in the mid 1950’s on the Shippingport reactor which later in the 60’s installed and operated a breeder reactor core with pressurized light water and did breed. The problem with breeders is the necessity for separation of fuel produced in a highly radioactive environment. Extremely high radiation levels is the problem in spades for most reactor designs other than light water; thus difficult to maintain and repair. In that light Shaw was wrong. I certainly would not buy into any current attempts to use liquid metal or salts. Gas cooling would need a great amount of further research and I do not see benefits over light water even if one worked well.”
– Gene Rogers, Naval Reactors, 1954-1987
The Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Storage Facility was a pork barrel project for Harry Reid, who personally championed it, got rich off land speculation based on it (becoming a multi-millionaire), and then later became its chief opponent. The construction dollars it brought to Nevada made Harry a favorite son of Nevada and guarantied his election as senator for several terms.
A successful thorium fueled, molten salt cooled, breeder reactor has yet to be built and operated by anyone, period.
That particular combination is probably 15 years down the road at this point.
The Chinese are actually in the lead in new nuclear design right now. China-Sinap has the thorium fueled graphite moderated thermal-epithermal design they are currently building….a baby step in that direction. The one party Chinese government doesn’t care what the NRC says, they do not care about fossil fuel lobbies, they do not care about the current technology nuclear lobbies, and they do not care about the anti-nuclear-everything lobbies. They are moving ahead with their fluoride-salt cooled high temperature reactor or PB-FHR. It uses graphite (moderator) coated thorium pebbles embedded in a molten fluoride salt coolant. It should come online in 2016.