New Nuclear Power Plant for Georgia or Anywhere Agree or Disagree

NO and its not healthy

 

I live in Georgia and I am 100% behind these plants being built. We need to be looking at every possible way to generate electricity.

Georgia's current power generation:

• 67% Coal
• 21% Nuclear
• 10% Oil & Gas
• 2% Hydro

 

Presently, that also means you are a supporter of storing the waste in Georgia with no long term disposal planning.

(PS. I was an operator of nuclear plants. While operation of a plant can be made safe, that is the smaller part of being a safe industry. The Japanese disaster had a huge contribution from all the spent fuel sitting in the plants, not just the fuel in the reactors.)

 

The new advanced reactor designs for both BWRs and PWRs incorporate additional, inherently safe, shutdown, cooling and containment capabilities. The biggest problem remains the lack of an isolated and protected spent fuel repository. Once (If!) that problem is solved, I would like to see nuclear generate in excess of 50% of our country's electrical load in order to offset the environmental effects caused by coal.

 

I agree that main problem is disposal of spent fuel and other activated material.

You can't compare Chernobyl to US power reactors because none of them here have graphite moderators.

 

Since the federal government welched on its promise to build the Yucca Mountain Storage Facility, the State of Georgia will have Southern Company build a storage facility as they have already done for the existing nuclear power plants in our state.

 

We must at some point replace the current fleet of Nuclear Power plants since some of them are more than 40 years old. Nuclear power provides a significant portion of our electricity cleanly. Not replacing the old plants will result in more fossil fuel consumption.

 

I voted No.

I agree with the 4th option, but it is not complete. Damage by accident or attack is a serious concern, but is not the only concern. As others have noted, long-term containment of waste is an unsolved issue. Decommissioning of old plants is another unsolved issue.

When the first generation of plants was built, including those built for weapons production, the assumption was made that these issues would be solved in time. Well, now those early plants are at the end of their useful lives, contamination from weapons production is a disaster, temporary storage facilities are over-full and the government has addressed the issue by repeatedly authorizing greater and greater amounts of spent fuel to be stored in facilities designed for much less, and still we have no safe way to store the waste or decommission the plants or clean up the contamination.

In the short term nuclear power is a way to replace fossil fuel. In this respect I'd benefit from it because I am 63 years old, and with luck the house of cards will not collapse during my natural lifetime.

But in the long term nuclear power condemns future generations to an ever-growing risk, eventually approaching certitude, of a large-scale contamination disaster. Just as excessive debt is a way to live beyond our means while condemning the next generation to debt poverty, so nuclear power is a way to live beyond our energy means by condemning future generations to a radioactive planet.

I have a t-shirt with a picture of the sun and a caption which reads: "ONE SOLUTION COMES UP EVERY MORNING."

I think I might have seen another with a windmill and a caption: "THE ANSWER IS BLOWIN' IN THE WIND."

We have answers. We don't need nukes. The only "problem" with solar and wind is that they are diffuse, making it harder for corporations to monopolize and sell the energy. Of course, diffuse means more secure. But corporations don't care about national security; they only care about profits. And nukes allow them to monopolize and sell the energy because only a big corporation can own and run a nuclear power plant.

 

I said "no" but I really mean "yes" but we need a whole new design.
"Small is beautiful" so the SMR small modular reactor is the way I see going. These are ready to go as far as design and availability from a company.

2011 showed flawed design logic for many plants in US too. Not only Japan, but earthquake in Virgina, Flooded plant in Midwest, Forest fire in New Mexico plant all ravaged the plants. Not only that, natural gas has a 2 handle maybe going 1 $buck for Pete's sake.

My father before me was a nuke engineer and started up the first prototype plant in Pittsburgh (Shippingsport 60 MW plant). He was a small reactor expert (subs) and could never really get his head around the massive size of the commercial reactors. If you read up on Admiral Rickover (father of nuke navy) believe he had concerns too.

 

Isn't the local pronuncation (at least one resident from Plains) "Nooklah power plants?"

 

I have no trouble in theory, just failed implementation after another, I was about 7 miles from WNP-3 and 5.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Public_Power_Supply_System#History

 

Probably... I was born up North but I don't tell my neighbors.

 

Just as long as you keep your backup emergency Generators far away from the shoreline, ....wait you are inland, keep them protected from Tornadoes, Hurricanes, Earthquakes, and good ole boys that like to put bullet holes in anything they can sight up!

 

didn't anyone here learn anything from jurassic park?

 

(*pssst!*) I don't know if they ever told you, but that wasn't a documentary.....

There are problems to be sure with nuclear energy, but anybody whose ever driven through "coal country" knows that coal has it's evil side as well.
No matter how much $$ we put into wind, solar and other greener energy sources, we're still a few decades from having them supplant fossil as a primary source for energy in the USofA.
We can build small, safer reactors as a bridging source until we get past all of the folks that don't want wind farms in their backyards, or acres of solar collectors endangering some desert snail darter thingy, or pretty little birds.
Meteors aren't going to hurt them. Neither are kamikaze-inspired aircraft. Well.....probably. There's a famous test where they rocket sledded a fighter plane (an F4, IIRC) into a section of wall used in containment buildings. The wall won---hands down.
That pretty much rules out (conventional) missiles as well.

Spent fuel is a concern, but so is fracking and lopping off the tops of big hills to get to coal seams.

Now.....if somebody wanted to solve the problem, instead of just pissing and moaning all the time, we could implement a system where licenses for new reactors are tied to a mandatory build out for a certain number of megawatts of wind and solar. There are something like 104 "civilian" reactors in the US. They're not getting any younger. Similar requirements could be made for refueling those or retrofitting them with newer reactor technology.

Or.....we could just bitch about something that has already happened and is going to almost certainly happen again.

Your call.

 

chaos theory my friend, chaos theory.

 

I live very near coal using plants and nuclear plants (plural on both). I'd much rather have the nuclear and wouldn't hesitate to see more nuclear built in my state so long as it's east of Nashville. I say east of nashville because of the New Madrid fault.

As to long term storage of nuclear waste we aren't doing much better with long term storage of coal waste and it's pretty nasty stuff http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_ash#Contaminants

[ame]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly_ash_slurry_spill[/ame] that's one county over from my house.

 

http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles 2008/Summer_2008/Reprocessing.pdf

Here's an interesting article on the truth behind "nuclear waste" - the fact of the matter is, at least 97% of what we call "nuclear waste" can be easily reprocessed - reducing the amount of waste by.... well, 97%. But the current administration pulled the plug on reprocessing back in 2009, in addition to scrapping the Yucca Mountain facility.

Political/environmental considerations aside, they haven't offered us any viable alternatives. Countries like France have been in the reprocessing business for years, and some 70% of their electric power is from nuclear sources.

Furthermore, they've had a great safety record, both in preventing malfunctions and avoiding terrorist attacks (and people have had plenty of reasons to hate the French, mainly their colonial empire up until > 1960).

Find me a way to generate solar power when the sun isn't shining (or at least store it through improved mega-battery technology, or better yet, develop a worldwide solar network that can shunt power from one side to the other) and I'm on board immediately. Until then, full speed ahead with nuclear power, which is the option we have.

 

If Georgia stores the waste, good for them. I voted no, its dumb and idiotic to spend government money on something that has so much dangerous waste, I've seen the waste and how dangerous it is.