The Millstone nuclear power plant’s operating license has been renewed for 20 years beyond the original expiration date, to expire on July 31, 2035 for Unit 2 and November 25, 2045 for Unit 3. The application was submitted almost two years ago.
The number of renewed licenses now stands at 37.
Filed under Industry Performance, NRCWatch, Politics and Regulation
Posted on November 30, 2005 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »
I’m way behind on these, sorry.
The Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards will meet December 7-10 at the NRC headquarters in Rockville, Maryland. Discussion topics include the Vermont Yankee power uprate and the proposed new reactor at Grand Gulf.
The meeting will be held in Room T-2B3 of the agency’s Two White Flint North building, at 11545 Rockville Pike. On Wednesday, the session will run from 1 p.m. to 6:45 p.m. The Thursday session will run from 8:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. The Friday session will run from 8:30 a.m. to 6:45 p.m and the Saturday session will run from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. A complete agenda will be available on the NRC’s Web site at: http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/acrs/agenda/2005/.
Requests for videoteleconferencing should be directed to Theron Brown, at 301-415-8066. Anyone with questions or those wanting to make public statements during the meeting should contact Sam Duraiswamy at 301-415-7364.
Filed under Industry Performance, NRCWatch, New Build, Politics and Regulation, Safety
Posted on November 30, 2005 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »
“We must move toward reliance on clean, safe, renewable forms of energy production that do not provide the materials for weapons of mass destruction and do not poison the environment for thousands of centuries.”
The Integral Fast Reactor meets those criteria. It produces no more radiation than a standard nuclear reactor–3%-8% of background–which is completely harmless, plus inert hot water, and no chemical pollution. It is safe, designed and tested to be meltdown-proof using the same test that resulted in the Chernobyl accident, except that the IFR shut off automatically. It is renewable in that it is a breeder reactor. However, unlike most breeders, it does not require offsite reprocessing and doesn’t produce fissile material usable or potentially usable in nuclear weapons. At the end of the fuel cycle, it produces only short-life fission products useful in batteries. An efficient fuel cycle using IFRs, the Canadian CANDU slow-breeder, and today’s light-water reactors could look something like this:
-Light-water nuclear waste into IFR
-IFR uses remaining uranium, plutonium, and transuranics from light-water reactor waste, producing 5-8 millirem and hot water
-Onsite dry reprocessing removes short-life fission products (15%-20% of total mass), leaving low-enriched, slightly-enriched, or natural-ratio MOX, and producing no chemical pollution. Radiation levels are insignificant, especially compared to the consequences of not using such a system.
-Short-life fission products processed into batteries
-Reprocessed fuel recast into fresh fuel and reused. The IFR does not require precise geometry.
-Thorium fuel into CANDUs or other slow breeders, producing uranium-233
-CANDU fuel recast into IFR fuel
-Go back to the beginning
Already nonexistent transportation problems could be made completely irrelevant by siting a CANDU, light-water reactor, and one or two IFRs on one site. Slightly radioactive fresh nuclear fuel would be transported in, along with battery cases, and hot water, electricity, and batteries would come out.
Filed under Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day, Environment, Fuel Cycle, Proliferation, Radiation, Safety, Transportation, Waste
Posted on November 30, 2005 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »
“I don’t think you can argue that it [nuclear energy] meets the definition of sustainability because it means not leaving a legacy for future generations at all in any circumstances”
-Margaret Beckett
Huh? “Sustainable” means it works for the forseeable future.
Filed under Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day, Environment, Sustainability, Terminology, Waste
Posted on November 29, 2005 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »
Nobody’s been nominated. Somebody has to have a nominee. Please nominate somebody. You don’t have to register.
Please?
Posted on November 27, 2005 by Stewart Peterson | 1 Comment »
“If you ask me, it’d be a little short of disasterous [sic] for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it.”
-Amory Lovins, as stated to Michio Kaku, via Rod Adams
Filed under Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day, Crackpots, Energy, Strange
Posted on November 27, 2005 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »
I was going to use this for an Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day. However, this is just a typical ignorant statement about a typically not-too-difficult scientific topic from the British media. They’re notorious for this sort of thing; the type that would call me a scientist based only on what they have heard here.
“Nearly all Britain’s nuclear stations have been built by the shore, so they could use sea water for cooling and as a sink for wastes.”
-Rob Edwards
For the record, nuclear power plants contain all their waste and use the water to cool the reactor. That’s how they work–the heat from the reactor either heats pressurized water to temperatures well above the boiling point or simply boils the water. The hot water or steam then is used to boil water from the nearby body of water. Thus, all waste is contained within the reactor and the only byproduct is nonradioactive hot water, which can either be discharged or piped to nearby homes and businesses.
This neglects the overall stupid point that global warming can stop the building of nuclear power plants, when nuclear power plants can help stop global warming if used properly. Operative words: “help” and “used properly”–power plants account for less than transportation, and nuclear power plants can’t help sectors that they’re not a part of. They also have to replace fossil-fuel-fired plants instead of being used as expansion on current capacity.
Also, whoever Benny Peiser is, the link to this article is the first useful email you’ve sent me out of about 20. Keep up this latest trend.
Filed under Environment, Physics, Waste
Posted on November 27, 2005 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »
“Dr. Gofman argues that the number of physicians per 100,000 population may be used as a surrogate for the average dose of medical radiation to the population of each census division. However, no data are presented to support this argument…A second limitation of the data used by Dr. Gofman is the assumption that the number of physicians per 100,000 population is a surrogate for dose of medical radiation received by the population. It is not possible to verify the quantitative nature of this assumption.”
See page 576 of BEIR VII.
Filed under Crackpots, Fun With Statistics, Health, Radiation
Posted on November 27, 2005 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »
The video of the NRC’s November 21 meeting is available online.
Morning
Afternoon
(via Rod Adams)
Filed under NRCWatch, Politics and Regulation
Posted on November 27, 2005 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »
“Nuclear reactors produce radioactive materials that not only wreak havoc on our health and the environment, spreading lethal radiation for hundreds of thousands of years to come, but also are used for building nuclear bombs.”
1. Well, hate to break it to you, but we live in natural radiation at levels 11 to 36 times higher than what a nuclear power plant contributes. If you really want to work on lowering ambient radiation levels, you should try to get as much uranium as possible out of the ground and into controlled settings. But you shouldn’t, because the radiation has always been there and the environment was doing just fine before we came along to decide what was “correct.” And yes, it is the exact same radiation. No, it is not in the exact same balance among the three types, but corrections were made for the relative strength of the three types. For example, let’s use a, b, and c as the three types, and assign point values of 20, 5, and 1, respectively. So the two exposures
a=1 count makes 20 points
b=4 counts make 20 points
c=20 counts make 20 points
Total=60 points
a=0 counts make 0 points
b=8 counts make 40 points
c=20 counts make 20 points
Total=60 points
are the exact same strength, and have the exact same effects.
2. Plutonium produced from nuclear reactors always requires as much if not more processing than natural uranium to make a bomb. A nuclear reactor is no more a proliferation threat than one of the world’s many uranium deposits.
Filed under Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day, Environment, Health, Physics, Plutonium, Proliferation, Radiation
Posted on November 27, 2005 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »
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