The U.S. government said it will stop issuing permits for new nuclear power plants and license extensions for existing facilities until it resolves issues around storing radioactive waste.
h/t Pete
The U.S. government said it will stop issuing permits for new nuclear power plants and license extensions for existing facilities until it resolves issues around storing radioactive waste.
h/t Pete
The candlestick makers are doing a jig.
The Mars rover Curiosity, a vehicle about the size of an SUV, sports an Nuclear Power Plant. Well I guess that’s the end of such thoughts of future automobiles being powered by same on our highways?
Crap. More short-term bad news for my Cameco stock share value. Since energy doesn’t grow on trees, perhaps I’ll stock up on some more. It’s only a mater of time..
These would be the same people think piplines are the sum of all evil.
Good luck with that.
They should store the waste at that multi-billion-dollar facility at Yucca Mountain … oh, wait …
Toronto: a kinder, gentler, society of urinators.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRA2UVAqAHw
“Diversity is our Strength”.
This is another part of the US economy that Obama has thrown a monkey wrench into when he pulled the plug on Yucca Mountain. Congress is trying to get it going again and dingy Harry Reid has stalled. The Courts are involved and the permits will be issued because thousands would die if the Nukes had to be shut down. Fortunately there isn’t a big technical problem, it’s always been political. The Dems are trying to get Romney to come out in favour of nuclear power which will galvanize the brain-dead vote against him.
When the brownouts and blackouts hit, we can always just speed up the windmills and solar cells. Oh, guess not:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/08/09/wind-power-not-coming-through-for-california-power-alert-issued-by-the-caiso/#more-68938
Since the sun is one gigantic nuclear reactor, just shoot the waste a mere 93 million miles into the sun. Piece of cake compared to landing on Mars. Option 2 would be to drop it all into the Tonga trench. At average depth of 20 000 plus ft it would take Godzilla forever to surface. option 3 would be to give it to the Chinese as they would turn it into something and sell it back to us. Option 4 would be to load it into B52’s and drop it all into Iran. Karma. Pick one and problem solved…..no charge.
Option number five, drill baby drill. Dang Zeros already done that to the boilers of perfectly good coal fired power plants.
Nuclear is a huge bust anyway every bit as subsidy reliant as ‘renewables’ and it’s NOT because of the safety regulations.
Governments around the English speaking world have been hijacked by envirofascists intent on destroying industrial civilaztion, reducing the number of humans on the plant and generally creating their own little aristocracy to rule the remaining serfs..
John Chittich has it exactly right.
No, peterj, we don’t want to shoot it into the sun. It can all be reprocessed into new fuel.
As usual, I see LAS is talking out of his a$$ again.
LAS it would be sweet if you could add a link to some of your ..thoughts.
This is a political problem. Uranium can be reprocessed and thus waste largely eliminated…. the French do it with their nuclear waste. The waste can be safely stored …. Yucca Mountain storage cavern hasn’t moved away. Reactor design can be changed to utilize Thorium which largely avoids the problem of nuclear waste.
We need nuclear power more than ever as there are valid concerns with CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere by an increasingly affluent and growing world population. But at every turn the politicians find that someones (corporations are people) ox is being gored. This results in gridlock. Politics is difficult, perhaps too difficult to solve this problem until events become so dire that the solutions are removed from the political arena. I only hope I am long since dead when that happens as it will be a grim time.
@David in Michigan
The only concern about the CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere is that we’re not doing it fast enough.
Even the (tainted upwards by placement) measurements of atmospheric CO2 put levels at ~388 parts per million.
Only twice in the last 600 million years have levels fallen below 400 parts per million. The era that gave rise to mammals (and had the most abundant and varied amount of life on the planet) had levels around 8,000 parts per million.
More CO2 in the atmosphere means that plant life grows larger, faster, and with less water. This leads – among other things – to more abundant food production, particularly in the third world where agriculture is still largely primitive.
Even if increased CO2 levels do lead to minor increases in temperature (a point that is debatable), the fact that we are currently in an Ice Age suggests that there is plenty of room for the Earth to comfortably warm – and historically, warmer periods have been periods of prosperity for humanity. It’s cooling we should be worried about.
It’s amazing to watch the environMENTALists plan start to come together. No pipelines, no drilling, no fraking, no coal and now no nukes forcing solar and wind power on us. With the laws forcing ethanol on us, over 50% of US corn crops have to be used for that purpose instead of cattle feed. Result is much higher beef prices resulting in the promotion of a vegan agenda.
It is to weep!
It is strange how the fascist/socialist leaders of the world would just as soon ruin the economy as they are micromanaging people’s lives. Third world dictators seem to retain power longer and have bigger Swiss accounts when they destroy the economy.
LFTR
Lets see, can’t use nuclear, can’t use coal, they are actually decommissioning hydro dams in the US. Wind and solar are a double whammy; they don’t work in the sense of 24/7/365 power, and they are more expensive than nuclear. I guess that leaves natural gas as their sole means of industrial scale generation.
So here’s the plan:
1. Do everything possible to prevent nuclear power plants from resolving the problem of nuclear waste, including getting the Yucca Mountain project shut down.
2. Demand that nuclear power plant construction be halted because they have failed to resolve the problem of nuclear waste.
Now I admit that only an imbecile could fail to see the crass hypocrisy behind such a plan, but hey, we’re dealing with the American public.
@ LAS
Subsidies on Nuclear:
http://www.dailyfinance.com/2012/01/04/the-real-costs-of-alternative-energy/
I too agree with John Chittich.
Britain has gone big on Windmills and it has been so successful that:
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-2046827/5billion-sea-cables-import-electricity-ministers-fear-UK-blackouts.html
Well since Saddam’s yellowcake was sent to Canada for use as nuclear fuel why not offer to store the spent fuel here? There are played out iron mines in Northwest Ontario and I’ll bet there are some abandoned potash mines in Saskatchewan that could be used as well. For a purely nominal fee (paid in gold not US$) I’m sure it can be done at a profit.
Seriously though, What The Hell is the US Govt thinking?
The four things vital to human survival are shelter, potable water, food and energy. Without electricity to pump water, cook food, heat or cool houses, control the street lights and power the subway etc, large cities would collapse and have to be abandoned. The green meanies are opposed to coal, nuclear, oil and natural gas powered electrical production. These are the only means of generation that can be relied on 365 days out of the year.
Nero only fiddled while Rome burned. The environmentalists are running around starting fires.
Yucca Mountain? Harry Reid?
Anyone? Bueller?…
The storage problem for nuclear waste was solved at Chalk River 20 years ago. The waste is formed into a tough ceramic material. For ultimate safety,
blocks of this material can be buried in salt domes, which, of course, have no water seepage or flow through them.
But it’s August, and hot, and the moonbats are in full bark.
I don’t think Usama bin Laden hated the US the way Obama does.
A wonderful reminder of who is responsible for the high Energy prices….Obama you are imploding, faster fool…
Mitt just has to point at the EPA & Van-Jones the (self admitted Communist) green Jobs Tzar.. Where did all those jobs go?
hmo
No nukes, no frac, no coal, no pipelines, no nuthin.
Nuclear waste is nowhere near the problem lefties say it is. Their thinking is outdated, modern nuclear reactors such as our Candu use spent fuel rods from older reactors as fuel; IOW they are the ultimate recyclers. My understanding is the waste from one Candu reactor for one year would fit in a pop can.
Temporary storage before being “burned up” in Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor. 90+% of energy remains in the “waste”.
Can this be done? Yes, it was demonstrated before. Time to finish the engineering job.
The problem isn’t so much Yucca Mountain, but rather the environmentalists and their anti-nuke fearmongering. That means that US reactors have little to no MOX capacity by law. Because they can’t use plutonium for fuel. They ship the fissile material to Canada, Japan, Europe and S.Korea where it’s used in our reactors. The US has no breeder reactor program, meaning viable fuel which can be reprocessed from waste can’t be done either.
New anti-nuke laws in the US mean that even the medical isotope industry is suffering there, most of what they get comes from Canada.
Shamrock, a CANDU reactor uses about 30 cubic metres of fuel a year. Nearly all of it is the same U238 that went into the reactor when it’s taken out. Only about 1.5% is new material, half of it fission fragments and half of it transuranics like plutonium. So, that’s about 0.22 cubic metres of actual waste, all the rest of which can be reused.
Put it in personal terms. If you got all of your electricity from nuclear power for your entire average 85 year lifetime, your personal nuclear waste share would be about the size of a golf ball.
peterj, I don’t buy any of those figures Daily Finance claims comes from the US EIA until he breaks out what’s included. More damningly, the author doesn’t reference a source document. In any event, LAS is still a liar. Even accepting those numbers, the subsidies for all forms of energy are still trivial except for the renewable ones.
Remember the motto of the revolutionary Left, which created the Obama presidency: Worse is better.
Their philosophy is that when the rolling blackouts caused by shuttering hundreds of coal plants, hydro dams, and nukes begin to happen, the masses will clamor for relief. The Left and their marketing arm, the mainstream media will be there with a Renewable Energy plan that will be hard sold as expensive, but worth it to end the blackouts.
Nuclear waste? Soer of like Helium, which was a reviled waste gas until non-hat-air baloons became used in warfare.
And that is why “wasre” is not re-processed, despite being about as radioacrive as raw ore. About a jalf-century ago, the powers which already had nuclear capanility decided to agree to no reprocessing, in the first SALT, so as to keep down availability of Plutonium.
Cgh – do you know the waste figures for US reactors, which are light water designs?
The amount of waste is really irrelevant, and Nevada is the ideal place to store it, as there is no groundwater near Yucca Mountain.
Small c: the reactor type really doesn’t matter very much. A 1000 MW reactor will produce just as much or as little waste as any other type (fission fragments).
Think about it. Regardless of reactor type, you need the same amount of nuclear fissions to produce 1 MW. Those fissions will produce essentially the same fragments. The most common fission fragments are Cesium and Strontium, but there is also a low percentage of other fragments such as Iodine 131, etc. There are some minor variations, but for our purposes it’s the same, both in mass and in radioactivity.
What will vary is the transuranics. Heavy water reactors are more efficient that light water reactors and will produce somewhat more plutonium, americium etc.
What varies between the fission fragments between heavy water and light water reactors is that heavy water reactors will both make and fission somewhat more plutonium, resulting in different kinds of isotopes. The difference is not much significant; they are all highly radioactive with short halflives.
In both cases, heavy water and light water reactors, most of the used fuel is U238, all of which can be converted to Pu239, a very good reactor fuel, in a breeder reactor.
The waste issue has always been bogus. Think about it for a minute. A uranium atom has a certain amount of energy to give off before it reaches a stable element, lead. It doesn’t really matter whether it is fissioned in a reactor or allowed to decay over time. The end states may be different, but the total energy release is essentially the same.
Finally, the presence of groundwater is virtually irrelevant to the safety of waste storage. Oklo is a uranium mining site in Gabon, mined by Areva. About 2 billion years ago when the proportion of U235 was much higher than today, water got into it and it started to fission. The “natural nuclear reactor” continued on its own for about 40 million years until it used up most of its fuel. Despite water flowing through it, none of the fission fragments and transuranics moved more than two metres from where they were created.
@ cgh at August 10, 2012 3:09 PM
When I first saw those figures I did confirm them with the EIA releases and they were accurate. The only difference was the nice neat little package instead of the dozens of mindnumbing pages I had to go through on the government side. All I remember was that it was a two beer venture as opposed to the one swig from Daily Finance.
You asked for links and that’s fair.
http://reason.com/archives/2012/06/25/no-to-nukes
A 2009 Massachusetts Institute of Technology study led by physicist Ernest J. Moniz and engineer Mujid S. Kazimi showed that nuclear energy costs 14 percent more than gas and 30 percent more than coal. And that’s after taking into account a baked-in taxpayer subsidy that artificially lowers nuclear plants’ operating costs.
But producing nuclear energy in France is not magically cheaper than elsewhere. French citizens are forced to pay inflated costs to support grand government schemes, such as the decision made 30 years ago to go nuclear at any cost after the first oil shock in 1974.
In a 2010 paper published by the Institute for Energy and the Environment, Vermont Law School economist Mark Cooper found that the overall cost of generating nuclear power in France is similar to that in the United States. The price range for the two countries (after adjusting for purchasing power) overlap, despite the fact that the U.S. has a relatively strict regulatory regime and France has a relatively loose one: France’s estimated cost for a kilowatt of power is between $4,500 and $5,000; the estimated cost in the U.S. is between $4,000 and $6,000. Those figures remain stubbornly high, despite decades of efforts to get them down to manageable levels.
It’s called pulse warfare
The late Petr Beckmann (author of “The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear”) always said that nuclear waste should be stored in salt deposits, because there was no water near them, therefore no leaching was possible.
@Alyric: Really, I find it insulting that you should attempt to lecture me about CO2 and plants. I have been a working biologist for over thirty years and your argument, while holding some truth is a simplification beyond further consideration. Intelligent people take the facts as they are …. CO2 in the atmosphere has increased rather dramatically and CO2 IS a known greenhouse gas, and the world’s population IS increasing and IS becoming much more energy demanding …. and make a reasonable conclusion that we should have some level of concern.
@LAS. I researched both of the named authors and found them to be mostly credible (with some caveats) but I was unable to find the paper you cited. Linking to another blog which cites such paper does not really establish your statement. Can you provide a link to the actual paper?