Ok... I read the rest of this thread. Lot of good points made but also some glaring misadventures in logic. I'll share some more of my nuclear trivia and philosophy.

I've been studying the enviromental movement VS. Nuclear power. I've been trying to read the all the classic environmental books like Silent Spring and Population Bomb. You see the anti-nuke sentiment going back a long time. One of the things that started the movement was opposition to atmospheric testing which was basically just us and russia having a ****ing contest. Thank god we stopped. Sierra Club used to be a conservation society and actually supported nuclear power believe it or not. I think that we shouldn't talk down to the environmental movement as we technophiles are prone to do. It's old and it's just as counterproductive as the hippies saying the sky is falling. Much of the movement is reconsidering nuclear. The old guard is still the old guard but the new crop didn't grow up in an era where Erie was dying and gas was leaded and stories about DDT were all over the place. I new a Pakistani kid who happened to have a father high up in the military structure over there. I asked him about Pakistan VS. India. The old folks are still shaking their fists because millions of people died when Pakistan split off but the new generation doesn't have an issue. We all need to consider the prospect of burying the hatchet. Maybe your nuclear symbol could incorporate some sort of peace symbology - just a thought.

Dumping waste in the ocean is a super bad idea. When I start to imagine how Greenpeace and ABC would run with this idea I need go no further - Public opinion nightmare. It's also a bad idea because we would be throwing away fuel as many people have pointed out.

A 1000 MW coal plant requires about a 100 train cars of coal a day... miscellaneous thumbrule of mine. ~3 times as much CO2 comes out as goes in not to mention SOX, NOX and Hg.

A 1000 MW nuclear plant produces 1 cubic meter of waste a year. Mining and production operations for the nuclear industry contribute 2-3% of the CO2 that a comparable coal plant does.

I think wind and solar are very important. PVs are ridiculously uncompetitive but passive solar heating systems can and should be improved. If you look at wind and solar maps you can see quite readily where the appropriate places are. West of the Rockies we have wind because of the mountains but east of them you're SOL for the opposite reason. Geothermal follows the same basic pattern. Solar radiation maps are self explanatory for the most part.

Someone mentioned protecting waste shipments. Here's my logic on this problem. If you are a terrorist organization that has the capabilities to hijack and refine our waste, it would be easier for you to make it yourself. I already mentioned that our waste fuel contains about 1% plutonium. Plutonium is the fuel of choice for weapons because it generally spits out 3 neutrons when it decays and so the chain reaction is considerably more rapid than with it's brother Uranium. Plutonium is more efficiently manufactured in low pressure "research" reactors which operate for several weeks and produce a much higher percentage of Pu. I am very anti nuclear weapons and arms manufacturing btw. My dad and I got lost at Vandenberg one time and we drove by all the ICBM and Peacekeeper bunkers they've got out there - Pure evil man. Anyway, nuclear weapons technologies have proceeded nuclear power technologies in every single nuclear nation.

The transportation flasks for nuclear waste are fancy schmancy. They've got fins and whatnot. I'm sure they've done crash tests and explosive test out the wazoo.

I agree with the counter protests although I believe that we should actually call them rallies and hold them ourselves. I'm also a little worried about this Freedom For Fission name because I think it will easily be cajoled into Freedom From Fission.

Fuel cells... I always think of Fuel cells as a sort of engine or processor and not as a battery as someone said. The hydrogen/methane/gas tank is the battery. Hydrogen comes up to the one side of the FC and the proton goes one way while the electron goes another because of the electronegativity properties of the platinum or whatever they use as a "catalyst film" and this causes a potential difference that you suck a current off of. Fuel Cells will get better and we will all have them in our homes next to our grandchildren. There are a ton of designs out there. Neat reading.

Dams... A good book on dams and water management is Cadillac Desert for those who would like to know more. Many dams if not most dams don't produce any electricity and were built for flood control etc. This is a shame in my mind. I believe that all the dams we built during the 30s-70s have actually had a negative impact on nuclear power. In a state like Oregon and Washington where 80% of the electricity comes from hydro and the costs of this electricity are helping to pay for dam production costs to this day you can see how nuclear power might interfere with the repayment schedules. No wonder Oregon and Washington are anti nuke. A lot of things tie together. I haven't figured it out at all but I just wanted to share some thoughts.

Hydrogen production from electrolysis is ~80-85% efficient. Now this is pretty good. You wouldn't produce the hydrogen at the dam though. Here's the issue: Electrical distribution looses about 3-4% of the energy along the way but pumping hydrogen would require even more energy. I haven't been able to track down any pumping efficiencies but if someone knows this info I sure could use it. Anyway, I think distributed electrolysis stations are the way to go. At night the demand for electricity is about half the demand during the day (depending on season) so you can see how shipping excess electricity at night to electrolysis stations could work. There are other things to consider ofcourse. Thermal efficiencies and all that. I'm still working on my theories and I need feedback.

Oh... one last correction about insurance at nuclear plants. Nuclear plants all buy 200-300 million in insurance. There is also an insurance pool that covers the entire industry to which each power plant contributes 10 million a year for 10 years so this pool is in excess of 10 billion. After these policies the Price Anderson Policy kicks in but the nuclear power industry has never required such help. TMI cost ~300 million. 911 cost ~1 billion in infrastructure costs in NYC. I don't know what Chernobyl cost.

Someone said that fuel burn up is only 1%... this is wrong/misleading... Current designs are able to burn 75-85% of the fuel that was loaded in the reactor. But, like I said, the secondary fuel production plays a considerable part in power production so in the end you get over 100% of the theoretical energy in the fuel that is originally loaded although it's not from the original fuel.

Welcome Lee. Good posts.

Yes, the battery analogy was poor for fuel cells. The processor analogy- a means to use the energy- is better.

I try- not very successfully- to remain professional in my attitude. After dealing with the likes of Russell Hoffman, who was just into hysteria games and conspiracism with regards to his opposition, we can get somewhat defensive.

Out of question, but how many Peacekeeper ICBM's does America operate?

I was under the impression that we had retired the MX missile.

__________________
Anyone who believes in the warning of the bible (prophecies concerning the end time which is now) shall be benefited from my invention. Because they won't be stupid enough to pass this! -Alex Chiu

What's out of the question?

He said 'Out of question' not 'Out of the question'. Sounds like English isn't his first language. Read it as 'Out of curiosity'

Ahh!

I would assume that the exact number would be classified, but I could be wrong.

__________________
"Most editorials are written by people that love to argue but got kicked off debate team for not making any sense." -Seanbaby

Yeah, I'm pretty sure they're all retired. Have you Googled it?

Dang G99 virus. FAS has some info, I'll check there.

I grew up in Eastern Washington. Most of the radical environmentalists are from Western Washington (not surprising, most of the people are in Western Washington). There's a mountain range running down the middle of the state--the west side (the wet side) are liberal city folk, the east side (dry side) conservative farmers.

The environmentalists in Washington aren't just against nuclear power, they're also against dams. They're campaigning to have the dams (or at least some of them) ripped out. The farmers aren't too happy about this--it would cost them cheap power, water, and transportation. Most farmers would literally lose the farm if the dams were removed. The environmentalists want to replace the power from the dams with wind power.

Part of the negative feeling in Washington against nuclear power has to do with a nuclear power program at Hanford a few decades back--WPPS (pronounced woops)--it was a major economic disaster. Various leaks from the storage systems at Hanford get found periodically, which keep people's sensitivity up.

I spent 4 years living up in Washington and I can double up on everything you've said. I've seen a DMB concert at the Gorge for the last 5 years. I've also heard that Washington has the highest concentration of malitias in the US.... Coincidence... Hmmmm...

Farming has always been the largest economic sector in the US so you'd have to think they bend some political ears. (They've got this ethonol BS into legislation haven't they....) At the same time there are power producers and construction firms and their influence on dam and water way construction to consider. I believe it was Mobil & Union Pacific that owned huge chunks of California that were reclaimed and you know they made out like bandits. China Town is loosely based on some dirty water deals. The Bechtel brothers are worth something like 3.5 billion each and their privately owned company (Boston Big Dig, The Chunnel) cut its teeth on Hoover and has been making a killing ever since. The point is that I know that the motivations for water projects aren't completely benign but the end products have made the western states livable. I've often wondered if all the dammed up water has actually added habitat for water fowl in the west. Seems like there's something to this idea... The environmental esthetic thing really doesn't do it for me. If you've ever been in a desert that looks more like mars than earth you really have to reconsider this whole nature is beautiful idea. Nature is all confused... ragtag....a little here....a little there... So what if we pour some order into the chaos for a nice mixed drink. The last thing about dams to consider is that flooding is the number one killer among natural phenomenon... Hmmm... maybe those guys know what they're doing eh? Maybe they deserve some credit? Bah, Civils Schmivils... screw um... bring it all down...

Yes about Hanford and WPPS. I don't know much about WPPS but I think Hanford is costing 10 billion a year to clean up. I know that's a big number but that's the one I remember. I've seen arial photos of the radionuclide pollution on the Hanford grounds. Not too bad but not too good either. There are ~10 large above ground tanks at the Hanford site with a radionuclide soup inside them. Very nasty... You have to consider that these were the guys who made the plutonium for Nagasaki and they were in the nuclear weapons business for a long time after that. They didn't know exactly what they were doing and they made huge mistakes and now we are learning from those mistakes. I met a brilliant radiochemist that is working up at Hanford and I know there are more like him that will figure all this cleanup business out. The EPA makes everything tres difficile but there is an honest intent underneath it all so I'm possitive about it.

EDIT: The Hanford cleanup is being run by Bechtel and Washington Group. They are going to be vitrifying (making into glass) 54 million gallons of liquid radioactive waste from 177 underground tanks + surface tanks. The 8 year program is expected to cost 320 million. I imagine the waste will then be sent to the government's 2.2 billion dollar deep geological repository in New Mexico that you never hear a thing about.

EDIT II: The actual costs for complete remediation of the Hanford site might amount to a trillion dollars. That's right... I'm not making this up. I've been adding info as I get it from various sources. The trillion $$ projections comes directly from guys up at Hanford who are in charge of operations. The costs keep on going up because we've been siting on this problem since the Carter administration. It's like a monkey mating a football if you ask me. I wish nuclear power wasn't related to such nightmares but it is... Meh...

What's the deal with this site anyway? Where can I find out about why this site is here and who supports it and whatnot? Seems like it is relatively international which is interesting. Are we all just college students or are there professionals on this board. It seems to me like we (especially the US but also the world) are evolving quite rapidly in regards to internet affairs. On the one hand there seems to be so much babble and misinformation but on the other you can see all the steps that are being taken to weed out the loud mouth gibber gabbers. (google cost of Chernobyl for a lesson in complete BS) We all make mistakes but there isn't an agenda under the mistakes for the most part (on this thread) so that makes me happy. :P

I speak of intent and agenda because I've noticed these links on the bottom of the thread. I followed one of them and was sort of put off. I was just wondering where you guys and this site are coming from. Also, for those of you that are in the nuclear community, what do you thing are the best sites for nuclear info. I use a bunch of government sites like the DOE, NRC, and EIA for info. I've also used that hyperphysics site for good nuclear info and there's a guy named McCarthy (???) at Stanford that has collected a lot of good info. I've cut and pasted 20 something links from this thread that I mean to check up on but I was wondering if anyone had some other sites to throw me. Anything that is practically related to energy - not Helium 3 on the moon - more like energy maps and new building codes or natural gas stuff... international info very welcome... kastenl@onid.orst.edu

This board is just a suppliment to a website http://www.badastronomy.com

Google-powered ads to help offset the server costs.

I work in it so I get my stuff force fed. ("Score an 80 or higher, atta-boy. Score >80, lose your access." Forget to wash off the bottlerocket power from July 4th and you get a flashy red light at the portal and a bunch of unsmiling guys, and gals, with M-16s wanting to talk with ya.) But those are good sites too. (even if they're run by dis-info agents. )

But it's all pipes and flanges, get outside containment and we may as well be running a dirt burner. Heck of a lot cleaner though. Never wear white in a dirt burner.

Yikes! I'm glad that would happen though.

__________________
Anyone who believes in the warning of the bible (prophecies concerning the end time which is now) shall be benefited from my invention. Because they won't be stupid enough to pass this! -Alex Chiu

ahh... I see what bad astronomy is about now... debunking... sorta like Sagan's the Demon Haunted World... the best book on slamming BS I've seen by the way... what plant do you work at Kidd. We probably know some of the same people... definately do in fact... small world..

I guess I've figured out what BA is mostly about... very neat... good stuff... I hope to do the same for nuclear power some day if somebody smarter doesn't do it first... damn the smart people and their cleverness... everything is fake and holodized... I'm very mad at it all... :P

I found an interesting article in Power Engineering.

Two publications, Wall Street Journal and National Geographic Magazine, have published the possible positive effects of hormesis; basically, bad is good in small doses. [Cancerweb - Hormesis: An effect where a toxic substance acts like a stimulant in small doses, but it is an inhibitor in large doses.] Examples were stated such as small amounts of pesticides sprayed onto a plant actually encouraged growth.

A study begun in 1980 by Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health on 74,000 workers at a nuclear shipyard. They were divided into three groups: low levels of radiation, higher levels and a third with essentially no occupational exposure. The report was given to DOE in 1991 and showed that the exposed workers’ cancer rates were significantly lower than the control group.

Prof. S. M. Javad Mortazavi of Kyoto University in Japan has studied the results and proposed three possible factors:
1) Low doses of radiation cause the production of special proteins which enhance the DNA repair process.
2) Exposure may make cells more resistant to damage from further radiation
3) Low doses may simulate the immune system.

All three are plausible and the mechanisms are partially understood.

The main focus of the article was to mention that maybe changing public opinion could become easier than expected.

I wonder if I could get lower insurance rates.

Does anyone know anything about Bjorn Lomborg?

He seems to oppose conventional environmentalists, essentially calling them scare-mongerers. How ridiculous! Who ever heard of an environmentalist who played hysteria games?

I can't any reference to his nuclear stance though. Not that it's important. He's in the politics field.

Well since you asked. A short resume.

Bjorn Lomborg became rather known back around 1998 when he wrote some articles in a newspaper claiming that the conventional environmentalists essentially are scare-mongers as you wrote. He also published a book in danish called the True State of the World. This book was published in English called The Skeptical Environmentalist with minor corrections in 2001. He has been widely critisized by the scientific community for bad science (bias and misunderstanding of statistics). He is not a nature scientist himself (he has a background in political science). Contrary to what is often written about him he is not a professor, doctor or a statistician.

One of his opponents biologist Kåre Fog has made a website where he documents the errors in The Skeptical Environmentalist.
LOMBORG-ERRORS

Kåre Fog himself is also being critisized for misquoting Lomborg
www.stichting-han.nl/lomborg.htm

Some defends Lomborg against the Danish committees on scientific dishonesty (DCSD) as claiming that Lomborg's book is not meant as a scientific work but as a debate book. This is in stark contrast with his current work as director of the Danish Institute of Environmental Assessment, where his book was one of the reasons he was hired. Many of the reports from the Institute of Environmental Assessment has been critisized by scientists and engineers as suffering from the same kind of flaws as his books and hence useless in making assesments on future environmental politics.

As far as I know he has not said anything about nuclear power, proberbly because nuclear power has been political death in Denmark since the 70's.

More fission news: Chernobyl Heart took the Oscar for Best Documentary Short.

*Cracks fingers*

The deal with shutting down the generators was not just confined to the Nuclear power stations, all powerplants connected to the downed grid had to shut their generators down, the Nuclear plants just take more time to bring up and running then oil or coal fired plants.

It is because when a generating system is loaded, when power is being taken from it to be used in other places, a "electromagnitic drag" is induced in the generator, causing it to do work, and also regulating the speed of the generator. But then the load is dropped, say if the plant was cut off from the grid, that counter force vanishes, and the generator startes to turn faster and faster, and that can lead to stress and damage to some very expensive equipment. So the managers of said plant stop the generators, and shut down the plant to keep from causing damage that would keep power generation down longer then the time needed to repair the grid.

As for the nuclear sites, I think that the NRC states that a site is required by law to have both backup on-site power for controled shutdown, but this power can't be derived from the reactor, and a connection to a active grid to draw power for the control systems from, so in the event of a generator failure control would not be lost. So to restart a Nuke plant, you would need to draw from a stable grid for some time before the reactor went critical and begain to generate more power for the grid then it took off.

Just my 2%,

An interesting quick overview on Nuclear Weapons Developement...

http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/nu...4nukenote.html


Los Alamos would probably have some info too

www.lanl.gov

My grump about that statement is, can they prove it was the nukes and only the nukes that caused them to take so long? That rings of the uninformed jumping to a conculsion. It takes a while to get anything back on line. Hundreds of breakers to reset, a few older transformer probably blew before circuits opened requiring replacement, etc. Nukes don't draw that much extra power sitting idle. Saying the nukes caused the blackout to last 4 times as long makes my BS meter peg. :x

Hmm, and now to delve into the deep dark hole where I store my generator ops info (actually my stuff is in a deep dark hole somewhere as they decided it's remodeling time and kicked us out into temporary offices). IIRC the ironic thing about generators is it takes electricity to make electricity. You have to supply power to the exciter on the generator to get it to function. Thus, unless you want to risk bad fluctuations in the grid, you bring the plants on one at a time, waiting for each to stabilize before going after the next. This isn't so obvious when you have a full grid and are syncing one generator into it. But when most of the grid is down, one generator suddenly becomes a major item. So, depending on how Ontario's generating capabilities are, they probably took their time so they didn't bring the whole thing down again tying a plant on.

Somebody feel free to correct me on this, I do my best to get no closer to the generators than walking by the turbine building on the way to tthe offices.

I know, but the NRC are just a little bit up-tight about such things. I use to work at the Research Reactor at my university and for about three months I was incharge of updating the NRC reg books that are kept in the Health Phyisics offices. That was over 15,000 pages for regulations, just for a small 10 MW research reactor that did not produce a single watt of power, and I hear that the regs for a power reactor are much worse. I think that the claim that the Nuke plants caused the black-up to be longer are just a bit funny myself, I think that most of the time was spent repairing blown tranformers and then bringing the grid back up slowly to keep it stable. I don't think that anyone has ever had to bring such a large grid completely up before. Most lay-people don't realize that it is not as simple as flipping a big switch somewhere.

Personaly, I think that the NRC over regulates things, and that the push for more power generation systems should include more nuclear plants. Coal and oil can be used in so many different ways that it almost seems a crime to burn it.

I don't even want to think about what it would be like to spin up all those generators and then sync them. I'm now happier then ever that I desided to stay as far from power engineering as I could. Transistors and resistors are more my speed.

Edited twice due to my bad spelling, I'm a engineer, not a english teacher!

I have a question I was hoping someone on here might have an answer to. I heard there is a thumbrule concerning power plant construction. It goes something like you can double the size of a plant but the price only goes up by 66%.

Now, I know I read this somewhere and it makes sense on the one hand but not on the other. Most of the power plant construction costs I see are always listed as $/Kw which implies a linear price increase with size. Any thoughts?

I guess it would depend on what was meant by it and for what. If you're talking nuclear, adding units to an existing plant does save money in that you don't have to buy land. You don't have to have all the pre-construction land tests and surveys to see if the land acceptable for a nuke etc. The security force is already there, you might have to beef it up a bit more but the's core part's there at least. It takes almost as many people to keep a two unit plant running as it does a one unit one; going from say 2 to 4 wouldn't be that big of a personnel increase either. (I'm meaning more of engineering and maintenance side, not operators, that would have to have a full staff for each unit.)
I can accept the 66% idea. Also, a recent survey suggests that Americans are becomming more acceptable to new reactors especially if built at a site that already has them.

For most industrial plants of any type, there are a lot of components that are identical regardless of the size of the plant. The control room, for example: you only need one.

Also, when you scale things up, there isn't a linear relationship between materials and capacity. A pipe for example: doubling the diameter doubles the circumference and doubles the amount of metal, but increases the cross sectional area and thus the capacity by a factor of four. Also, it doesn't take all that much more effort or time to install a 2" diameter pipe than a 1" diameter pipe.

Heck, even more basic than that, next time you go to the grocery store, compare prices and sizes. Why would you think the same rules of economics wouldn't apply to commercial products?

I've had similar thoughts about scaling up and saving on personnel, piping and redundant systems. Given this I don't understand why power plant prices (gas, coal, nuclear) are given in terms of $/Kw... but they are.

I've seen gas turbine plants quoted at 600-800$/Kw and nuke plant quoted 1000-1500 $/Kw.

Maybe this is just a trick to get away from quoting 2-3 billion for 2000 MW nuke plant. Hmmm...

I think you'll find that doubling the radius increases the amount of material by more than 2, because you need to scale up the strength of the pipe. (Messing up scaling leads to problems, like the Kansas City Hyatt Regency catwalk collapse)



edit: fix silly math error

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