I say it's about time. Other countries like France and Korea get much of their energy from nuclear. Our aversion to nuclear power is way overblown, in my opinion.

We'll put the waste in your basement.

It would be nice if the feds insisted as a condition of financing them that the US Navy operate them.

The Navy has an impressive record with reactors.h

"We'll put the waste in your basement." Oh, come on we can put all the waste in Nevada. Actually all the high grade nuclear waste in the world to date would only fill up two tennis courts. I am sure we can find a cave somewhere to dump it in.

It works for the French

An interesting idea to handle the disposal problem is dumping the waste in a subduction zone in the deep ocean. As the tectonic plates converge, the nuclear waste is driven deep into the earth's mantle.

good link mp97303

...all the high grade nuclear waste in the world to date would only fill up two tennis courts.

With a half-life measured in the tens of thousands of years.

John Rettig :
..all the high grade nuclear waste in the world to date would only fill up two tennis courts.
With a half-life measured in the tens of thousands of years.
JK:
According to nuclear physicist, Bill Wattenberg, the 10,000 year half-life is for elements that are not particularly radioactive. The dangerous stuff has half lives in tens-hundred of years.

Makes sense, because nuclear radiation is from atoms falling apart, so the more intense the radiation, the faster it decays (the atoms fall apart to something stable).

Of course the anti-nuclear people encourage this confusion because it suites their purpose. (Just like Al Gore points to things not caused by climate because they further his goals.)

Thanks
JK

JK and others - did you not see the Oregonian (yes, the Big O) story about the movement of contaminated ground water at Hanford, and the actual/projected movement of radiation towards the Columbia River? There will come a day when we won't need lighting on I-84.

Try not to confuse wartime (cold and otherwise) bomb production contamination with peacetime nuclear power generation.

JK: The dangerous stuff has half lives in tens-hundred of years.

If we agree that it's at least that much, that's still too long. It's not only the ground water, it's the transportation, security, monitoring, and stigma attached to the area that ends up with it.

John Rettig
JK: The dangerous stuff has half lives in tens-hundred of years.

If we agree that it's at least that much, that's still too long. It's not only the ground water, it's the transportation, security, monitoring, and stigma attached to the area that ends up with it.
JK: You just take your choice from these alternatives:

1. Continue CO2 emission
2. Reduce CO2 with nuclear
3. Reduce CO2 by forcing electricity prices to "skyrocket" (Obama's word)

You will note that solar and wind are not choices because they don't really work - they require 100% backup for windless cloudy days and windless nights. Further the European experience shows that they save little CO2

JK - missing from your list:

4. Conserve and reduce usage.

And stating that solar and wind don't work because they require backup is a ridiculous argument - when they are working, the CO2 emissions are saved.

Do you have source on your statement that the European experience shows that they save little CO2?

John Rettig JK - missing from your list:

4. Conserve and reduce usage.
JK: That is item 3. (You don't really expect people to cut their consumption to LESS THAN 1/4 by turning off the heat in their home most days and giving up their car, without draconian measures do you?)

John Rettig And stating that solar and wind don't work because they require backup is a ridiculous argument - when they are working, the CO2 emissions are saved.
JK: "ridiculous" only to the un-informed. The experience is Europe is reportedly zero. because the backup has to be kept running. In the PNW, we can adjust hydro and save water. And the cost is MORE than doubled because you have to build TWO sets of generating means.

John Rettig Do you have source on your statement that the European experience shows that they save little CO2?
JK: Yes, Not not t my fingertips. Didn't your green sources mention this little detail?

Thanks
JK

How about, instead of letting valuable fuel sit there and half-life away in Nevada or some guy's basement, we reprocess it and use it for fuel?

When they remove the fuel rods from a pressurized water reactor (the type that we use here in the US for power generation), only about 1% of the fuel has been transmuted into something that captures neutrons rather than continues to give them off. This is why they can't continue running it - the reactor goes subcritical due to "neutron poisoning" and you need to either reprocess the fuel to remove these elements, or put in new fuel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_poisoning

Because we have a standing executive order that prevents reprocessing of commercial nuclear fuels, we let it sit in casks and have arguments in Congress about what to do with it, rather than load it back into a reactor and make electricity with it.

If we were to start using a 'closed nuclear fuel cycle' that included waste reprocessing, we could use the same fuel many times over (getting 60x the amount of energy from it that we do today), requiring less mining and less waste. Oh, and the waste that comes out would only have a half-life of a couple hundred years, rather than tens of thousands.

Nuclear waste is a problem that already has a solution. We just have political boogey-men that prevent us from enacting the solution, and truly getting everything from this resource.

Reprocessing turns spent fuel rods into new fuel material, plus some highly radioactive liquid waste that's even harder to deal with than a spent fuel rod. It also is the perfect time to extract your nuclear weapons materials, if that's what you're into.

Good news, so long as the reactor designs pushed are right. Here's an interesting concept: http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2005/07/68045

This is why OSU should not be "partnering" with Westinghouse to develop "safe" nuclear plants. I believe Westinghouse is involved in these two plants. We claim to be "green" in the NW and we have this great wildlife refuge called Hanford. The population there: radioactive deer and rabbits.

HERE is a list of tritium leaks and probable leaks in Vermont, Illinois, Arizona, New York, and France.

JK, one good thing I see in your fixated intractable info-denial position is serving as a reference point in history, perfectly preserved in the present, from which to gauge the distance and velocity at which the major mass of people have moved ... forward, in sentience.

An important early step in voter- and taxpayer-education on the subject of nuclear power, is to deMYSTIFY its workings. The way it works is the nuclear reaction heats water to boiling, and that steam is jetted out nozzles pointed at turning regular ol' turbine blades, generating electricity. We can get the same results from a wood bonfire boiling water. Or solar (reflector) water heaters boiling water. to steam. nozzled at turbine blades.
there's more than one way to turn a turbine axle ... cuckoo clocks do it with falling weights ... that could be gravity-generated electricity, eh?

The significance is that neighborhoods and communities can make bonfires or build solar water heaters, down-scaled to human life size; but nuclear reactors are TOO BIG and don't scale down. The most electricity is conserved by eliminating the transmission losses along the wire to the home from the generation plant, and that conservation is obtained by generating electricity at home and in the neighborhood.

Think globally. Act locally.

I'm still seeing a 'revelation' of the future, depleted of petroleum, where North America is inhabited like it was when Lewis & Clark came along: a scattered distribution of sustaining settlements and villages, reduced populations in urban density, (less than a million), and so on and such, and every one carries a '2-way wrist tv' with point-to-point global communication and knowledge.
... which is maybe a description of what we got today if you took away all the 'corporations'

JK: You don't really expect people to cut their consumption to LESS THAN 1/4 by turning off the heat in their home most days and giving up their car, without draconian measures do you?

Europeans have about half our energy consumption, on average. I wouldn't call their conservation measures draconian compared to ours.

The experience [of shutting off backup] in Europe is reportedly zero. because the backup has to be kept running. In the PNW, we can adjust hydro and save water.

And your point out of this is?

Didn't your green sources mention this little detail?

No, probably because it isn't true. You made the assertion, Jim, so the burden is on you to prove it - convince me with your source, don't ask me to prove that the converse is false.

Tenskwatawa: I'm still seeing a 'revelation' of the future, depleted of petroleum, where North America is inhabited like it was when Lewis & Clark came along: a scattered distribution of sustaining settlements and villages, reduced populations in urban density, (less than a million),
JK: And what have you done with the 300 million people in USA? Nazi stye death camps or Stalin style starvation?

BTW, the mere fact that you think we will run out of petroleum, shows you lack of knowledge. In order to believe in peak oil, you have to ignore economics, chemistry and history:

economics (supply goes up with price)
That is why we have recently had a series of dramatic announcements of new discoveries - the recent high oil prices have brought much new exploration which has found more supplies. (Just like we all learned in Econ 101 - you did pay attention, didn’t you?)

chemistry (you can make the stuff)
The Fischer–Tropsch (see fischer-tropsch.org) process and the Bergius process, both used from the 1930s on, make liquid fuels form coal. Methane instead of coal can also be used a starting point. Sasol (http://www.sasol.com/) has been producing commercial quantities of oil from both processes for years.

History (Hitler ran a war on manmade oil).
The Role of Synthetic Fuel In World War II Germany Said this: “The percentage of synthetic fuels compared to the yield from all sources grew from 22 percent to more than 50 percent by 1943"
(airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/aureview/1981/jul-aug/becker.htm)

Tenskwatawa: and so on and such, and every one carries a '2-way wrist tv' with point-to-point global communication and knowledge.... which is maybe a description of what we got today if you took away all the 'corporations'
JK: And who will make the technology in that '2-way wrist tv' in your fantasy corporate free world? Do you really think a village industry can make affordable ICs? Affordable computers? Why don’t you give us a few examples?

If you really want to get rid of corporations, why don’t you move to one of the few corporate free paradises on this Earth: North Korea or Cuba. You’ll absolutely love their high tech industry that is still trying to figure out how to prevent starvation.

(I don’t have time to address the rest of your infantile claims above this one.)

Thanks
JK

Why do the Nuclear Energy companies have to get government money and backing?

Because no one will loan money or provide insurance due to the risk not being worth the reward.

That pretty much tells all.

And human-caused global warming is looking more and more like bad science.

Ralph Woods Why do the Nuclear Energy companies have to get government money and backing?

Because no one will loan money or provide insurance due to the risk not being worth the reward.

That pretty much tells all.
JK: Except for ONE little detail that you left out:

Much of the cost problem is because of the constant lawsuits from the anti-nuke lobby. You know, the people who are now screaming to shut down the ONLY other viable power source, CO2 producing power plants.