Reply With QuoteBig Money (11-04-2013)
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'Only NUCLEAR power can SAVE HUMANITY', say Global Warming high priests
What are the antis going to do now? Even bloody James "hockey stick" Hansen has come out on the side of nuclear power!!
Four of the best-known scientists espousing the belief that humanity's carbon emissions are an immediate and deadly threat have issued a statement begging their fellow greens to support nuclear power.
Doctors James Hansen, Ken Caldeira, Kerry Emanuel and Tom Wigley co-signed an open letter over the weekend in which they address "those influencing environmental policy, but opposed to nuclear power". The four scientists write that "continued opposition to nuclear power threatens humanity's ability to avoid dangerous climate change ... there is no credible path to climate stabilization that does not include a substantial role for nuclear power".
Hansen in particular is famous for having more or less personally come up with and promoted the idea of human-caused, carbon-driven global warming being a massive and urgent threat. His long career as a NASA scientist was punctuated by campaigning against carbon emissions, to the point where he was arrested for his behaviour at protests more than once.
Hansen and the other men's position isn't that uncommon. While there are large uncertainties over global warming - that is, how much of it there will be, how soon, what the consequences of that will be etc - the facts of energy generation and consumption are much plainer and simpler. Even under the most optimistic possible assessment, renewable power simply can't provide anything like the amount of energy required for any large proportion of the human race to live a reasonably comfortable life. Renewables are in any case ruinously expensive* - even the tiny amounts of renewable power produced by the UK, for instance, are already causing domestic energy bills to climb seriously. With many of the poorer nations of the world industrialising fast, the idea that demand for affordable energy can even be slowed down much - let alone cut massively - is looking more and more unrealistic.
By contrast with renewables, nuclear power is scalable, controllable and potentially well able to keep the lights on for centuries or millennia. It is also safe compared to all other methods of power generation (in its three "disasters" so far - Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima - the scientifically verified death tolls from all causes have been and will be zero, 56 and zero: a record which other power industries including renewables can only envy). Nuclear waste can easily be reprocessed and used again as fuel, rather than expensively stockpiled or buried**.
Sometimes people ask, what would charge up my electric car of the low-carbon future? What would furnish the energy for the electrically-powered cement and steel industries, assuming they can be made electric as cars and trains might be?
Or, if you're not an electric-future type, what would be used to produce all my clean hydrogen, or synthetic petrol or gas?
Nuclear, is the realistic answer. A nuclear-powered low carbon future is actually practical and feasible, unlike the idea of a renewables-powered one. It also has other attractions, not least among them that the world's wealthy nations would no longer need to pour hard currency into the hands of dubious governments overseas just to keep their lights on, homes heated and cars filled up. Instead they would make quite small payments (the fuel accounts for only a small part of the cost of producing nuclear energy) to friendly countries such as Canada and Australia.
The trouble is, as Hansen and his fellow green nuclear advocates have found, that many if not most people who care seriously about reducing carbon emissions also want just as seriously to abolish nuclear power, and don't care that these two objectives are contradictory.
A frustrated Hansen described this standard hard-green ideology as "a religion of sorts" to CNN over the weekend, acknowledging that he and his fellow pro-nuclear environmentalists have a hard road ahead of them.
Hansen and the other scientist-activists' letter can be read in full here. ®
*Apart from hydropower, which is excellent all round but unfortunately limited in scope for most areas/nations. It's not completely reliable, either, though much more so than wind, solar etc.
**Reprocessing is sometimes avoided as it usually - though not necessarily - involves creating weapons-grade materials. This might seem an odd position to take for a nation which also has a publicly-avowed nuclear weapons programme, like the USA, but it happens anyway.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11..._high_priests/
Last edited by cancel2 2022; 11-04-2013 at 07:17 AM.
Big Money (11-04-2013)
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The Obama administration took a lot of heat -- and rightfully so -- for its handling of $535 million in loan guarantees handed to solar maker Solyndra, a high-risk solar company.
But it may be making a bet on nuclear power that could dwarf the Solyndra losses and compound losses for consumers in Georgia at the same time.
The Vogtle Electric Generating Plant expansion being built in Georgia is relying on an $8.3 billion loan guarantee from the Department of Energy.
You may remember Solyndra, the solar upstart that got a $535 million loan guarantee despite not having a cost-effective solar module.
In rapid fashion, the company built a state-of-the-art plant and quickly found out that it couldn't compete with low-cost Chinese solar modules.
Solyndra went bankrupt in 2011, and the Department of Energy got back scraps on its original investment.
The $8.3 billion being negotiated for Vogtle may seem less risky, but nuclear-plant designer Westinghouse has never completed an AP1000 reactor, the design planned for Vogtle.
Then there's the fact that Wall Street wants nothing to do with Vogtle, or nuclear energy.
S&P downgraded the outlook on Southern and subsidiary Georgia Power's credit from "stable" to "negative".
Vogtle 1 and 2 were originally estimated to cost $660 million, but costs ballooned to $8.87 billion by the time they were done.
At one time, Solyndra seemed like a great idea to the DOE...
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/10/13/this-could-dwarf-the-solyndra-debacle.aspx
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Originally Posted by Big money
http://www.yournuclearnews.com/ap100...ina_67241.htmlSanmen 1 is one of two AP1000 units being constructed at the site and is the lead unit of four AP1000s currently being built in China, the other two being at Haiyang. All these are scheduled to begin operating between November 2013 and March 2015.
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Remember when liberals and Earth-firsters were all "No-Nukey"?
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This from Wiki so that even Desh can believe it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanmen_Nuclear_Power_Plant
Last edited by cancel2 2022; 11-04-2013 at 02:32 PM.
Big Money (11-04-2013)
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The AP1000 is an evolutionary design not a revolutionary one.
http://www.power-technology.com/proj...inghouseap100/AP1000 developed from AP600 power plant
The AP1000 will generate around 1,150MWe, and uses a similar principle to the existing AP600 Pressurised Water Reactor (PWR) design. The two-loop configuration needed minimal changes to the AP600 design with, for example, the nuclear island footprint and the core diameter being unchanged.
The passive safety systems are significantly simpler than traditional PWR safety systems and do not require the large network of safety support systems needed by typical nuclear plants. That includes AC power, HVAC (heating, ventilation & air conditioning), cooling water systems – and the seismic buildings needed to house these components.
"The four plants will be the first implementation of Westinghouse's new AP1000 reactor design."
Passive systems use gravity, natural circulation and compressed gas. No pumps, fans, diesels, chillers, or other rotating machines are used in the safety sub-systems. That means 50% fewer valves, 83% less piping, 87% less control cable, 35% fewer pumps and 50% less seismic building volume than a similarly sized conventional plant.
The simplified construction will also reduce operator actions. The passive design means operators would not need to take immediate action after an accident, with the reactor instead safely shutting down on its own.
All the passive systems have been designed to meet the NRC single-failure criteria and its recent criteria, including TMI (Three Mile Island) lessons-learned and unresolved / generic safety issues. Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) tools have also been used to quantify the safety of the design.
Two steam generators
The AP1000 Nuclear Steam Supply System (NSSS) plant configuration consists of two Delta−125 steam generators, each connected to the reactor pressure vessel by a single hot leg and two cold legs. Four reactor coolant pumps circulate the reactor coolant for heat removal. A pressuriser is connected to one of the hot leg pipes to maintain subcooling in the Reactor Coolant System (RCS).
AP1000 fuel design is based on the 17x17 XL design used at plants in the US and Europe. The AP1000 has a taller reactor vessel than the AP600, larger steam generators (Delta−125), a larger pressuriser and slightly taller, canned reactor coolant pumps with higher reactor coolant flows. As with AP600, studies have shown that AP1000 can operate with a full core loading of MOX fuel. The AP1000 has a modular construction, allowing many construction activities to proceed in parallel. Site construction schedule is 36 months from first concrete to fuel loading.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) approved final design certification for the AP1000 in January 2006. The Westinghouse AP1000 standard plant design is the first Generation III+ reactor to receive FDA from the NRC. Generation III+ is the new generation of competitive reactor designs that will follow the Generation III Advanced Light Water Reactors developed in the 1990s.
China looks to nuclear future
China generates nearly 80% of its electricity from coal, resulting in huge pollution emissions. Major Chinese cities are already suffering power outages, and consumption is expected to grow from almost 2 trillion kWh today to 4.5 trillion kWh 2020. The country is building dams, windmills and nuclear power stations in response.
China now has nine nuclear reactors in operation, two more connected to the grid and around eight more under construction or about to start construction. Nuclear capacity is planned to be 40GWe by 2020, at a cost of around €40bn, involving another 30 or so new power plants. That would nearly double the nuclear electrical share from just over 2% to 4% by 2020. It will, however, increase its already heavy reliance on imported uranium for fuel.
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Westinghouse has never completed an AP1000 reactor...
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Yes I know but they are building four in China right now and one of them goes live very soon. The AP1000 is a true 3rd generation reactor with totally passive control meaning that it doesn't need external generators and shuts down without any intervention.
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Should Obama be guaranteeing a loan in the USA for the technology?
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Of course, Westinghouse technology is in around 50% of the world's reactors they are not some startup company like Solyndra. Gordon Brown was an arsehole for selling off British Westinghouse to Toshiba in 2006.
http://ap1000.westinghousenuclear.co...00_safety.html
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Are you aware of the cost overruns that plagued earlier projects?
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Any new technology can suffer cost overruns, however in this case the Chinese reactors will become the test beds for the US reactors.
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Why the Westinghouse Advanced Passive Pressurized Water Reactor, AP1000®?
http://www.djs.si/proc/nene2011/pdf/803.pdf
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