I am glad that my car does not have them.

An earlier car sent me to hospital (ER visit & discharged same day) when they went off in a "fender bender".

Front airbags are not much better than a properly secured seatbelt.
But we accept 40,000 auto deaths and 100,000s of lafe altering injuries from cars & SUVs every year.

Alan

See Selafield UK on what all nukes have to look forward to.

And Yucca Mt after you've seen Selafield.

The waste problem will always be with us.

Just cutting off water flow thru a nuke waste site is mega death.

No doubt this is all true. But what is remembered is how much it cost, and the visible bones of dead nuclear plants, commemorate a vast swindle. I'm not really sure safety was the main issue -- I lived in Oregon when all that was going on, and a friend of mine was on the WPPS board. We mostly thought it was just a con game. After all, the really toxic nuclear stuff was /is upriver at Hanford -- and WPPS is small potatoes compared to that.

It was pigs at the trough then, just as now. I'm really surprised anything at all ever gets done constructively. It certainly is easier to tear things apart than to build them.

Government mis-regulation of the nuclear industry in particular.

Right, cuz when the government passes a law, all comply with that law.

Or, did you mean there should be no laws, and let 'the market' act?

You are not clear in your writing on this.

Yeah, damned "Luddite" groups. What is it with them people what want unpolluted soil, air, and water. Who do they think they are? Don't they know they just need to get converted? All they need to do is get themselves an engineering degree and they will become enlightened!

That means they will get these special blinders where all tech appears good and all people opposing tech appear to be damned Luddites.

Rinse and repeat.

The list of poisonous activities started by the engineers and which they promised would not hurt anyone is so long that we would not have the trees to print the list.

#1 and #2 applied for a few years in the 1980s, thats all. Arguments for not starting a new nuke for a few years, and perhaps even slowing or mothballing a recently started new nuke, but hardly the cause of the multi-decade shutdown !

#3 applies to all power plants. Regulated and unregulated. No MWh, no $. Hardly a cause for the phase shift from a "Rush to Nuke" to "No New Nukes" !

#4 was an internal construction problem, a MAJOR point made in the DoE study on how many nukes the USA could build (answer 8 in 10 years) was the industry practice of starting construction before detailed design was complete. This lead to massive cost overruns & delays and torn out work !

Only a "lessons learned" reaction to TMI could be tied to nuke regulation. And that regulation was required only because of faulty design of TMI (a reaction to bad practices by the nuke building industry). If they nuke building industry built good nukes from the beginning, no regulatory problem, no rework !

#5 is a scape goat with little validity. Lawyers are cheap (and a renewable resource in abundant supply) and the delays almost always happened before construction started (delays to start construction, but not after permit issued). Only serious issue post-construction start that I remember was Seabrook & one on Long Island (no way to evac Long Island although utility said there was in application. Utility lied and got caught).

Utilities take longer to get transmission line permits than new nuke permits, and they plan around that delay.

Alan

... if graphite (pure carbon) is a bad thing inside a reactor (as both pro & anti-nukes seem to agree after Chernobyl, although pre-Chernobyl some ultra pro-nukes could point to the "perfect safety record" of RBMK reactors) then very hot sodium (with a sodium-water heat transfer exchanger) with a nuke inside is an even worse idea.

Perhaps, pre-Chernobyl, some nuclear advocates could point to RBMKs' then-perfect safety record, but as far as I know none did. And there was one who, very influentially, did not. As I like to say, outside the former USSR, we learned the lessons of Chernobyl in 1950.

Pure carbon in a fission reactor core is not a bad thing. If you read the above link, it will teach you that the combination of light water and carbon in the same core was the mistake. Had the USSR been such that a Hungarian native escaping that country might have thought, even for a moment, of going to it rather than to the West, the whole world might have learned the lesson the easy way, as we did.

If you Google "fast reactors" you will probably find a history of 10 or 20 liquid sodium reactor prototypes. All have had sodium-water heat exchangers, so all of their designers have had to assume that large leaks through the partitions would occur, and provide defenses. 'WNC observer' commented as if they had done no more than try to prevent such faults, but in fact they have striven to make the plants tolerate them. Not safe from failure, but safe during failure.

As best I recall these defenses always include subdivision of the sodium-water heat exchange capacity into three or more heat exchangers, far apart. In those liquid sodium reactors that were parts of power plants, the sodium-water heat exchangers are also, of course, steam generators.

They all have sodium-sodium heat exchangers, so that the sodium that might contact water in the event of steam generator failure is sodium that has not been in the reactor.

How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?

I had a hard time following your units and their meaning.

if a uranium-tonne-equivalent in natural gas is (at current prices) to cost $400 million $640 million rather than just $4 million $4.5 million... a uranium-tonne-equivalent in actual uranium, for use with neither enrichment nor reprocessing, costs $0.24 million $0.234 million

At the nuclear plant nearest me ... or anyway nearest me by road, maybe some across Lake Ontario are closer as the crow flies ... a tonne of uranium gives 164,000 thermal MWh, i.e. 559591 mmBTU. According to http://money.cnn.com/data/commodities/ the natural gas price is near $8/mmBTU, so 559591 mmBTU from natural gas costs $4.5 million. However, according to http://uxc.com/ a pound of U3O8 costs $90, and converting that to a price for a tonne of U gives $0.234 million.

The nuclear power station nearest me is part of a very simple system: no enrichment, no reprocessing. Add reprocessing plants, and replace the power station with one cooled by something other than water, and the tonne U could be entirely or almost entirely fissioned, yielding all or most of 23,600,000 thermal MWh, 80 million mmBTU. From natural gas, that many mmBTU would cost $640 million.

How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?

I believe that the problems were very largely technical. A lot of work had to be torn down and redone repeatedly as the required tolerances were a lot higher than anyone, in the UK, had worked to before. Physicists and civil engineers operate in very different worlds and what is acceptable to a civil engineer may not be acceptable to a mathematician or physicist.

As is usual with large projects, there were a lot of changes that came along at a late point which also necessitated unravelling existing structures. As any programmer who has worked on a large project knows, the specification tends to be a moving target.

Also, industrial relations were abysmal and it was not unknown for large metal nuts to "accidentally" fall close to managers and engineers who were walking a long way below the reactor's roof. Don't forget, these are gigantic structures.

On the other hand, the UK had a huge pool of highly qualified and experienced professional engineers and skilled workers at that time. Today, I doubt if bringing in "Polish plumbers" would be of much help.

If anyone out there wants a bet, I will wager that some of the important structures and facilities for London's 2012 Olympics will not be ready on time. Many thought the Greeks cut it rather fine, I think the British will outdo them.

Nah, I think it's universal. The same goes for us Finns.

To paraphrase a famous American leader:
"When you go to build yourself out of an energy crisis hole, you build with the idiots you've got not the idiots you wish you had."

From the time you place an order for a wind tower to when first electricity is generated is much shorter than for a nuke.

Granted, if you want more electric power 7 years from now then nukes can get it to you as reliable base load capacity.

Nuke time from order to first day of operation is going to probably shrink down to 4 years in a few years. But we aren't there yet.

Since we can get wind sooner than nukes more wind is good. But we need more nukes too. Our coal is going to peak. Our natural gas has probably already peaked in North America. Russia's natural gas might have peaked. Certainly Europe's has.

Again, we are in deep trouble. We need multiple non-fossil fuels energy sources.

Combined cycle gas turbines (the efficient ones), hydroelectric power, pumped storage and coal plants can all load follow (nuke cannot) as wind and demand both vary. Wind tends to arrive in large multi-hour blocks and, with geographic diversity is not more of a challenge than 6 PM vs. 3 AM demand.

Most of the wind in Denmark is in Jutland (the peninsula) and most of the demand is around Copenhagen, and there is NO direct electrical connection between the two parts of Denmark, so national statistics used to disprove Danish wind power, etc. are generally useless and invalid due to this technical fact.

Alan

I don't really think that wind power does anything very useful.

I live in a village of less than a thousand. We've got 220 wind turbines going up within a six miles radius of which I'm aware. You're suggesting that this approximately half a billion dollar investment is ... not useful? I'm curious to hear how you arrived at this determination.

What I know about state of the art nukes is small, I did like the idea that when we had Maine Yankee we produced 80% of the power needed in Maine. I have two other experiences. I had an oceanographer friend
who worked on the impact statement for millstone in Connecticut. Two days before the report was required all the hard drives failed. Went in one morning and the tech staff said sorry. All data was lost, all data on the temp change created by the out flow of warm water was gone. It was deemed unnecessary by the PTB, to redo the survey. The locals were thrilled, a huge change in the fishing. I had a great time using the plant boats to sail out there.

Now he builds boats, gave up on the hypocrisy.

2'nd is not so nice, brother in law joined the navy. Ended up on a nuke sub in power plant. Died at 32, two young kids, lukemia. When we tried to find shipmates in his working group to come to the funeral, only 2 out of 16 were still alive.

I guess I'm not thrilled with it and like most of everything else I have sincere doubts we are seeing accurate info. But the little deaths get glossed over in the big picture.

I really don't have any other way to to think about things, than my own personal experience, time and again people lie, and cover up for money. I can look at big pictures, and because I'm me I enjoy it, but we are a missing the small stuff, and its the small stuff that will tell us when the shit is really going to hit the fan.

Kayaking to my favorite island, with beautiful Suzlon 2.0MW turbines in the background. I wish they were more plentiful and larger, but this was a private development - corn farmers decided they like to raise some wind, too.