First U.S. nuclear reactor built from scratch in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia::ATLANTA — A new reactor at a nuclear power plant in Georgia has entered commercial operation, becoming the first new American reactor built from scratch in decades.
Oh, neat. My state did something not completely stupid. I’ve got some reservations about nuke power as opposed to renewable, but this is definitely better than continuing fossil fuels.
Fission and fusion reactors are really more like in-between renewable and non-renewable. Sure, it relies on materials that are finite, but there is way, way more of that material available in comparison to how much we need.
Making this distinction is necessary to un-spook people who have gone along with the panic induced by bad media and lazy engineering of the past.
LWR fuel is incredibly limited without a massive fleet of breeders (and no breeder has ever run a full fuel cycle, nor has second generation MOX ever been used. First generation MOX is also incredibly polluting and expensive to produce).
The industry is already on to tapping uranium ore sources that are less energy dense than coal, and this is to provide a few % of world energy for a handful of decades.
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I’m spooked by the fact that you have no idea how the US enriches uranium, or the difference between a power pressurized water reactor and a fast “breeder” reactor (if you were thinking of plutonium) or a centrifuge.
The US enriches uranium using a gas-centrifuge. The US also no longer recycles spent nuclear fuel, but France does.
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Nuclear plants don’t enrich. Enrichment would happen without power plants. Bomb fuel and power fuel are not the same.
Too bad the energy companies essentially never dispose of the waste properly, because it’s too expensive if they want to give the huge bonuses to their CEOs and buyback thie stock. Even when doing it “properly” it’s basically just making it the problem of future generations once the concrete cracks.
And to reprocess the waste and make it actually safe energy would mean no profit at all plus the tech doesn’t exist yet to actually build the reactors to reprocess the waste. I mean we understand the theory, but it would take at least a decade to engineer and build a prototype.
Compare that to investing in battery tech which would have far reaching benefits. And combining that with renewables is much more profitable.
To be fair, nuclear waste tends to be disposed of much more properly than coal waste.
There’s also orders of magnitudes less.
True, but still not anywhere near “clean” as it’s always marketed as.
This is a stupid take.
Coal power puts out more radioactive waste than nuclear does, and coal sends it right into the air where we can’t manage it.
Nuclear waste is kept solid, and contained. We know exactly where it goes and as long as the rules are followed it’s not at risk of polluting anything.
Sure solar and wind don’t have any by product once they are setup, but they also don’t fit the baseline power need that nuclear does.
Problem is it’s not profitable to follow the rules, and conservatives have blocked building a national “permanent” storage site for decades. The IS has no where to put it. It’s just sitting in storage facilities, above ground and in many states in places where an earthquake could cause it to leak into ground water and make the area unlivable for centuries, or cost trillions to clean up.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-waste-is-piling-up-does-the-u-s-have-a-plan/
Quite a large number of Republicans, including Trump himself, spend decades trying to ram Yucca mountain through. It faced heavy resistance from both the Clinton and Obama Administrations, the State of Nevada, and myriad of environmental organizations. Trying to blame it on “Conservatives” is pretty ridiculous.
https://www.ktnv.com/news/history-of-yucca-mountain-1982-2018
Yucca Mountain was killed by decades of persistent interference by opponents of nuclear power.
Yucca Mountain was a bad site. Once they started digging they found that the ground was too loose. It wouldn’t be able to support the weight without sinking. Have you ever seen the foundation of a house that sank on one side? The concrete buckles as the weight of the house slowly compacts the soil. The same thing will happen with millions of tons of waste, steel, and concrete. It’s why missile silos were built in bedrock, not loose soil. Not to mention the technology wasn’t going to allow digging deep enough to store all that much. It would mostly be used for waste from nuclear weapons, ship reactors, and other military projects. Not really that much space would have been available for commercial power generator use.
The conservatives who pushed for it did it because the contractors paid them to. It was blocked because the waste would leak not in thousands of years but in maybe decades. Not to mention the land was stolen from Native Americans and they didn’t want nuclear waste in their stollen land. Among many other issues.
Edit: besides the Clintons have always been conservatives, too. So they’re in that bucket. They’re just moderates.
Not a single power source we have is clean
How is solar, wind, or hydro not “clean”? The generating of the power, not the building of the facilities, building anything is never clean.
People count material, fuel and ecological with nuclear as well, so why not count it with hydro, wind and solar? Concrete is concrete.
Because all technology will require that. If we want energy, we have to build stuff. But there’s no fuel to buy, generally much less ecological impact due to limited waste products since no fuel is being “burned”. And the building cost is one time and generally subsidized, and maintenance is considerably lower, not to mention labor since you don’t need nuclear specialists to run the day to day.
Removed by mod
~said the 1850s train conductor