Not if the cities and states were doing the same thing. How much does the average city or state spend on power (heating, lighting, etc for buildings, traffic lights, street lights)? Would the money the saved make up for the lost revenues?
Also, just to feeding the coal plants leads results in continuing enviromental disasters in the form of mountain top mining.
Ironically enough the environment has been recovering surprisingly well in the region surrounding Chernobil. Yes, its unihabitable to humans, but short-lived animals that don’t live long enough to develop serious cancers are boucing back…
I think it’s funny that nuclear power is still just a fuel for superheating water and not harnessing atomic energy.Nuclear ships are steam powered even.We’ve been hooked on steam for entirely too long.
Why can’t they harness the energy straight from the fission itself? 
I suppose that would create radioactive gases that can’t be safely vented.I’m not educated in this field…if you are,don’t laugh at me please.
little odd that in the end its just a waterwheel. but i guess if it aint broke.
if a nation has plenty of uninhabitable space, rich uranium sources and is capable of enriching it to non-military grade without international scorn, by all means do it.
but very few countries has that much wasteland to be put away for nuclear waste storage. for most the long term cost of storing and managing nuclear waste alone out weights the benefit of current methods of muclear power.
i’ve read in an scientific american a long time ago that there are researches into generating power with the nuclear waste themselves. if that technology is mature, then bring on nuclear power.
What does France do with theirs?
i’ve read in an scientific american a long time ago that there are researches into generating power with the nuclear waste themselves. if that technology is mature, then bring on nuclear power.
The waste is generally too ‘cool’ to be useful, although the line demarcating ‘too cool’ might be pushed down over time.
what they do is link them up in parallel like batteries i think… i don’t remember, twas a long time ago, before 2007. i just did some googling, and the newest article in the similar vein is from 2009.
http://blogs.nationalgeographic.com/blogs/news/chiefeditor/2009/01/nuclear-fuel-disposal.html
You guys are operating off some bad info regarding nuclear waste.
…the “used fuel” is put into a large “swimming pool” for several years, until it has lost 99.99 percent of its radioactivity by natural decay. Then it is usually put into a dry fuel cask, and stood up on a concrete pad in back of the power plant…it poses no hazard in this form, and can be stored thus for decades, when it will then be recycled to produce more fuel
Source: ‘American Society for Mechanical Engineers’
http://memagazine.asme.org/Articles/2009/december/FACTS_FISSION.cfm
Im too lazy to find the article I read on the subject but advancements in plant design significantly lessen the chance of a catastrophic failure, even with older plants I wouldnt exactly say the chance was high. The waste products can at least be contained, no way to stop coal electric plants from dumping toxins into the air. Solar power would be nice but we just dont have the tech or the resources to build solar panels in sufficient quantity or of sufficient quality to harness the energy to meet our requirements. Wind is not good at all. We still dont know the impact windmill farms have on weather patterns and wildlife, besides the fact that they require an ungodly amount of real estate and you only get power when the wind moves.
Whatever we do though I say putting trust in the government to get it right is a fools hope. They are no more incentivized to get it right than a corporation, in fact less so. Do you really want some bureaucrat slashing budgets on plant upgrades so he can pretend hes ‘balancing the budget’? The most important part is accountability not ‘regulations’.
Well said, LordCorbin.
Worry about the release and accumulation of radioactive materials in the environment has led to much hand wringing over the risks of accidents at nuclear power plants and weapons facilities.
But what about radioactivity released from burning coal?
W. Alex Gabbard, a nuclear physicist at the Oak Ridge (Tenn.) National Laboratory, did a little calculating. According to Environmental Protection Agency figures, an average ton of coal contains 1.3 parts per million of uranium and 3.2 parts per million of thorium. Both naturally occurring trace metals are radioactive. Of the uranium, roughly 0.71 percent is U-235, the fissionable variety used by nuclear power plants.
Thus in 1982, he estimates, U.S. coal-burning power plants, which collectively consumed 616 million tons of coal, released 801 tons of uranium and 1,971 tons of thorium into the environment – virtually unnoticed.
Roughly 11,371 pounds of the uranium was U-235.
Moreover, global combustion of 2,800 million tons of coal that year released 8,960 tons of thorium and 3,640 tons of uranium, of which 51,700 pounds was U-235.
Ironically, in 1982, 111 U.S. nuclear power plants used 540 tons of nuclear fuel to generate electricity. Thus, “the release of nuclear components from coal combustion far exceeds the entire U.S. consumption of nuclear fuels,” Gabbard notes in the fall issue of the OAK RIDGE NATIONAL LABORATORY REVIEW.
Gabbard then calculated the energy value of the lost radioactive materials. He found that the nuclear fuel released by burning coal has one and a half times more energy than the coal itself.
Because electric utilities are not perceived to be as hazardous as nuclear power plants, “large quantities of uranium and thorium and other radioactive species in coal ash are not being treated as radioactive waste,” Gabbard says.
“These products emit low-level radiation. But because of regulatory differences, coal-fired power plants are allowed to release quantities of radioactive material that would provoke enormous public outcry if such amounts were released from nuclear facilities,” he adds.
“Nuclear waste products from coal combustion are allowed to be dispersed throughout the biosphere in an unregulated manner,” Gabbard concludes. Such wastes accumulate on electric utility sites and are “not protected from weathering, thus exposing people to increasing quantities of radioactive isotopes through air and water movement and the food chain.”
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Radioactivity+from+burning+coal-a016387382
you see, that’s all nice and well when a large portion of the country is dry and deserty (if that’s not a word it is now) with sparse population .
when you are from places that are wet and damp, what happens is the storage containers rust and erode well before the waste looses radioactivity through natural half life.
and before you can dump it into a pool or put away in storage, there’s the transportation. imagine what happens when a truck or boat load of nuclear waste on their way to be stored away encounters accidents.
also, you need a lot of water for nuclear powering. the runoff usually is at a higher temperature than the body of water it is released into, which in itself is an environmental disaster.
handling and managing nuclear waste is not cheap. that is why Russia is making a bunch of money off of taking in nuclear waste from other nations. I’ll go back to the boat load of waste that sunk to the bottom of the ocean point.
Please take a moment to review the followup post regarding the tons of radioactive material being released into the air each year under the current coal system which continues to exist primarily as a result of anti-nuclear advocacy.
It’s ironic, the people who have protested nuclear power have essentially caused a massive release of radioactivity by their actions.
that’s what a lot of clean coal technology aim to resolve. there are a few fronts of clean coal technology. one is to remove minerals and impurities, one is to clean up the flue, and one is making the process more efficient, so we get more energy from the same amount of coal.
i think comparing coal and nuclear power is just about the less of two evils. especially when it comes to the mining part. Uranium mining is pretty much all strip mining.
If the waste can be better handled or can generate more energy, thus eliminates the need for transportation, then nuclear is definitely the way to go. but at the same time, green coal energy is worth researching as well. Since the US has a lot of it.
The entire concept of ‘clean coal’ is a hoax by the coal industry. They’ve made some improvements with scrubbers and such, but the radioactive material is still blown into the air. The focus of modern ‘clean coal’ stuff is CO2, and even there it’s semi-effective at best.
we recently defeated a clean coal propositio here in NE Iowa. I was happy that those involved look past the tax revenue into the quality of live in the Cedar Valley. Especially sinec Iowa is a booming wind power state.
Where is it?
Emphasis on “the first few years…” What happens after that?
To be honest, if there is a catastrophe, my extremely uneducated guess is it’ll be within two time frames. First is within 6 months of going into full operation. The second, and what I feel is more likely, is after 5 years when people have gotten used to it and the need for PR has waned.
That and nuclear plants will be Skynet’s first targets. (:
Fastcart: A note, nuclear power is alive and well in France. They’ve got 58 plants operational and haven’t had any catastrophes. Compare, once again, the tens of thousands who die from Coal power, both those killed directly by mining accidents and the unknown additional who fall prey to the pollution and acid rain this industry creates.
Nuclear power is CLEAN and the waste is contained unlike the systems that currently exist. There are practical limits to how much solar power we can capture currently. As our technology develops, this will get better, but if wishes were fishes, we’d all be drowning in trout. Nuclear power is clean power now. How many need to die while we keep waiting for the perfect solution that may never come? What is the appropriate cost in lives?
I had hoped I made it clear that I fear American nuclear power companies. Europeans and Japanese (thanks for that info earlier) got their acts together and I’m thankful they do. I’d be fine living in a Japanese or European neighborhood near a plant. Seriously, as long as I could afford the lifestyle and rent, and the neighborhood was safe and wheelchair accessible. d:
I just don’t trust American companies to do right by the environment, their workers, or the community. If they feel there’s too much oversight, they’ll lobby for deregulations and fewer limits. If the waste turns out more harmful than they anticipated, they’ll try to cover it up or minimize the backlash through PR and other means (Erin Brokovich for example). Depending on the policies of the day (no matter which party holds congress or the White House because lobbyists knows how to get their way), the nuclear industry could just takes the place of oil companies politically. And, frankly that scares me.
Finally, I’d like to know what those specific plants in Georgia are going to do with the waste. Just because there are great disposal systems in place, given certain American industries histories (I posted quotes and links in a previous post), it doesn’t mean these plants plan to use those systems.
Well, in that case, I note that we have 108 nuclear reactors in the United States. We have had civilian nuclear power plants in operation in this country for roughly 60 years and there have been no (as in zero (0)) fatalities.