Nice to see the US contributing to advanced energy solutions, although exporting the technology to China always makes one leery.

Nonetheless, at least this might be a good proving ground for the new design, especially since nuclear plant development in the US has been stifled.

The AP1000 that is breaking ground in China, is being ordered in the USA in large numbers.

It is the majority of the 32 orders in the NRC pipeline of new Nuclear plants. The AP600, a smaller version, and the AP1000 were the first of the so-called "standardized designs". These are first of the passive GEN-III+ safer Nukes, to be reviewed and approved by the NRC and are extended and heavily improved versions based on earlier Westinghouse designs for Pressurized Water Reactors, PWRs.

Under the reformed laws, the nuclear plant manufacturers can seek approval for status as a "standard design". The NRC reviews the design, in much greater detail than it did for any custom plant. That can and has taken several years.

When the NRC engineers, and all the solicited inputs from critics like UCS, are submitted and resolved, the NRC will issue an approval of the "standard design". Thenceforth, the design can only be modified by the request of the NRC, or after NRC approval by the manufacturer. The technique of stalling by endless requests for review of designs that was used by environmental obstructionists such as myself, will no longer be allowed.

We get a chance to add input and critiques in the "standard design review" and then are constrained thereafter. The result is that if a Utility orders a "standard design", construction can very seldom be stopped, except for construction sloppiness.

As a result, requests for engineering review that causes significant construction delays that run up costs unreasonably, can no longer occur. To that point the manufacturers are now accepting fixed-price, fixed-schedule to first power contracts.

The Utilities managements, unlike the 1970s experience, can order a Plant and know how much it will cost, and when it will be available to add power to the Grid.

The result is a huge and growing backlog of orders to replace the over-annuated mostly dirty, coal plants that Utilities were expecting to scrap in the 1970s and 1980s. Back then these antiques were planned to be replaced by Nukes that in many cases were themselves scrapped and never completed. These antiques have had to chug on, spewing pollution eve since, and it would be great contribution to clean air efforts to retire these antiques.

The new nuclear Plants will also be powering the fleets of PHEVs soon to emerge from the automakers factories in the millions. Cleaning the air even more and reducing CO2 emissions, if that mattered.

Roll on and roll out standard reactor designs.
They are a key part of the solution to CO2 reduction ( in conjunction with wind, perhaps solar and electric cars of whatever type (xEVs) )

Anyone care to chime in as to global uranium supply relative to national (U.S.) annual energy consumption?

I recall reading that if all U.S. energy needs were satisfied with uranium from yellow-cake (ala Great Bear Lake), we'd only have a ~6 year supply. Breeder reactors could greatly extend this, but to what degree? (not a facetious question, genuine)

Anyone care to comment on the advantages/disadvantages of this design relative to the CANDU design?

@stan

1) Why do you ignore that, without subsidies, there isn't a single nuclear energy power plant in the world that has made a profit to date ? Not one. There isn't a single nuclear power plant in the world that is profitable. Not one.

2) If nuclear energy is so great why is it being subsidized by $145 billion to date in the USA alone ?
I am not for subsidies.

3) With 103 nuclear energy power plants running in the USA, that translates to about $1.5 billion dollars in subsidies per plant, each. Why do you ignore this as being a true cost paid by taxpayers only so that some robber-baron industry takes over it ?

4) Why do you ignore that subsidies equal taxppayers money ?

5) Why do you want to subsidize, i.e., pay for an industry that you will never have a chance to own, much less make a profit ?

6) Why is the nuclear energy industry trying to convince the people to pay for nuclear power plants so that robber-baron CEOs take over and make out with
$1billion dollar salaries ... each ?

7) Why do you ignore that the Council of Better Business Bureaus has stated that the Nuclear Energy Institute, the principal promoter of Nuclear Energy,
should "discontinue" its "inaccurate" advertisements that claim nuclear power is a "clean, green energy source" ?

8) Why do you ignore that U.S. nuclear plants have produced over 40,000 metric tons of high-level radioactive waste, which is deadly for hundreds of thousands of years, and with no safe place in sight where to put it ?

9) Why do you ignore that undoubtedly more civilized and smarter countries than ours such as Sweden and Germany have entirely dismastled their nuclear energy programs ?

10) Why do you ignore that subsidies for renewable energy total less than $5 billion to date, more
than what the single 2005 'Energy' bill will pay to the nuclear 'industry' ?

11) Why do you ignore that the State of Washington is being sued by Wall Street for defaulting on $22billion of public issues, i.e., bonds that carry the full trust and faith of the State, used to subsidize the construction of two nuclear energy power plants in Washington, initially to be built for about $100 million ?

12) If you live in California, why do you ignore that you are paying for the decomissioning of the
only two nuclear energy power plants in the State (Diablo Canyon & San Onofre) ? All you have to do is look at your monthly electric bill.

13) Why do you keep ignoring that, when factoring all energy costs for uranium ore mining, refining and transport using fossil fuels, nuclear energy produces more CO2 than what it is supposed to reduce ?

14) Why do you ignore that legislation has been passed that exempts the nuclear energy industry from any liability in case of a nuclear accident ?

15) Wouldn't it be nice to be allowed to drive totally drunk and nobody cared or gived a damn ?

16) Why do you keep ignoring that there isn't a single insurance company in the world that will insure a nuclear energy power plant ?

17) Do you want or like to be a nuclear Katrina victim ?

18) Why do you ignore that nuclear materials are among the most toxic materials on the planet, they kill you twice, once for being extremely poisonous (1 millionth of a gram is sufficient to poison and adult), and second will kill you by cancer causing hard radiation ?

19) Why do you ignore that one spoon of plutonium Pu-238 if properly distributed to every living human being on the planet would kill every man, woman or child twice, once by poisoning, and twice by radiation ?

20) Why do you keep ignoring what happened to Marie Curie, the discoverer of radiation ?

21) Why do you make useless claims that nuclear energy is green, safe or viable ?

What she said +...
Not to mention that we have enough night time capacity for millions of PHEV's without any additional energy sources.

Also not to mention we could always try something like this...
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan&page=1

Hey julia I've read most of your posts and it seems that your pretty much against everything. Are we now supposed to go back to horses and candlelight, cause that would be a blast and I'm sure everyone in all countries would go for that. Oh but wait we would probably have to subsidize candles so every one could get enough to have light and then you would be against that.

Julia sounds like she wants to save the Earth from global warming only if it can be done at a profit. We will all benefit from greenhouse gas reductions, and so we all will pay for it.

Ok ill explain..

1 The fuel in a reactor is mostly not fuel at all. Its a different form of uranium. Of that small amount that IS fuel only a small amount then becomes waste.. typicalt after 5 years of use only 3% becomes waste and the rest is still fuel.

Currently the us and many others do once through and then store the tesy for later reprocessing.. as in waay latwe.

So you can imagine that not only is the amount of waste we currently have actualy a buttload of fuel BUT its also just a small amount of waste mixed in with a fair amount of non fuel and fuel.

And of course uranuym us VERY heavy so all 53000 tons of it fuel non fuel and a bit of waste.. is alot more compact than one might expect.

Abd then you add mthe fact we never realy mined much for the fuel in the us arnt currently planning to because of cheap fuel elsewhere and add in the reprocessing factor... we have no worries on fuel running out anytime soon.

Aa doe subsidies.. we sub energy to make it cheaper for the same reason we sub food water fuel housing roads rail planes minkies hippos and prolly even fruitcakes.

The world is full of people who are ignoring you and will continue to ignore you and they are funding and pushing nuke power. At least im not ignoring you.. tho I am pointing at you and laughing...

Why do we still have people who would rather have polluting dirty coal fired power plants instead of cleaner up-to-date more efficient Nuclear power plants to meet core energy demands.

One hundred large nuclear power plants could replace current outdated polluting coal units + supply most of the extra energy for 100 to 200 million PHEVs and BEVs.

Solar + wind + Hydro + geothermal etc should also be used to supply part of the clean energy required.

Coal should be banned until it can be used without polluting.

GreenPlease,

Uranium is not a particularly rare element. In the late '60's and early '70's it was thought to be and there was a big push for breeder reactors which are much more fuel efficient. Uranium has about the same natural abundance as tin.

Conventional wisdom was that the nuclear industry was going to die out after the accidents at TMI and Chernobyl. There was, therefore, little incentive to prospect for additional uranium. Then there was a treaty between the Russians and the US which has flooded the uranium market with diluted uranium from excess demilitarized weapons.

In the last year, since the market price of uranium spiked, prosecting has started again and reserves are expanding rapidly.

Breeder reactors are far more fuel efficient than the AP1000 or the CANDU style reactor. They are more expensive to build and operate, however. Fuel is a relatively small part of the cost of generating electricity with nuclear power in the US so there is little enthusiasm for breeders by the utilities in the US.

The CANDU style reactor is more fuel efficient than any of the light water reactors, such as the AP1000. Because CANDU uses natural uranium rather than enriched uranium, it generates a larger volume of used fuel than light water reactors. Many people equate used fuel with waste and therefore consider the CANDU to have a greater waste stream.

The next generation of CANDU is supposed to use slightly enriched fuel. Using slightly enriched fuel, the advanced CANDU should be able to match or better the burn up achieved by the light water reactors. This should resolve the issue of greater volume of used fuel.

Bill

hmm. maybe with that $145 billion in nuclear subsidies we should invest in a national DC electric grid using highly efficient composite cables. then we could viably get ALL of our electricity from a small section of desert in the southwest. check out Ausra's solar thermal technology. it can produce electricity for 8 cents/kwh UNSUBSIDIZED. plus, the heat can be stored and used at night to provide baseload power.

nuclear energy is a giant toxic scam. we have much better (and less expensive) alternatives.

With present technology it costs about 210$/kg to extract uranium from seawater (there are billion of tons diluted in seawater) eco-friendly. That's about 6 times the actual worldprice of uranium, so nobody does it.
Since the uranium-price is only a very small part of the electricity price, even an increase to 6 times the actual price wouldn't change the electricity price much.

I don't know if it will take 50, 100 or 1000 years before we will have an adequate alternative (fusion ?), but one thing is for sure : we wil never have a shortage of uranium.

It is perfectly possible to transmutate all the radioactive components of nuclear waste to harmless stuff. (although it's cheaper today just to store it).
With a few more technological advances (we are working on that), we will certainly do that soon. and it will not take thousands of years. most probably, the transmuation process will produce even more energy.

Actually $210/kg is a little less than the spot market price for uranium, $0.24 million per tonne (to get this, multiply the pound-U3O8 price by 2600). I don't share Alain's certainty that nuclear waste will be transmuted. There is little enough of it that holding onto it for a few decades, then burying it a few hundred metres deep ensures that the overlying rock naturally contains more radioactivity than what is buried; like getting rid of a used wooden match in a forest that has recently burned.

Remember how antinuke luddites usta say that plutonium was almost as deadly as botulism toxin? That was so cute.

Dare you to ingest some. Maybe an anti-wrinkle plutonium shot. Go ahead. Try it, you'll like it.

@Julia,

Please remember I was a principled opponent of Nuclear power in the 60s and 70s long before idiots like Ralph Nader came along and started leading the chanting for "No Nukes". Nuclear Energy as practiced then, suffered from some very real problems; none of which your 19 points even came near to addressing.

The Plants were not fully tested. Unbelievable but true. No one fully tested the safety systems. Why?Because it would take a $5 billion dollar plant and destroy it, to simply find out if the safety systems worked. Instead they did paper studies, htat predicted they would work.

The Regulators weren't regulating; they were cheer leading nuclear power and studiously looking the other way at problems, conveniently.

No one had actually calculated what the probabilities of a Loss of Coolant accident (The Dreaded China Syndrome) would be, for one plant or a fleet of 100 or a 1000 plants. We could and did do exactly that for the Apollo Project, but no one did that for the Nukes then extant. We said they absolutely must do so, to calibrate the risk.

Construction standards were also very sloppy. No one was minding the store. Operators were not being trained adequately. These things should be changed. In short, the Regulators should regulate.

Three Mile Island generated the pressure to do all these things and actually solved one of the toughest problems.

TMI destroyed a $5 billion dollar reactor through the stupidest operator actions that could be envisioned.

It was the Test to Destruction that we wanted, all along and that no one wanted to pay for. TMI passed the Test. Safety Systems worked; and no one died and no one was injured. Just like all the paper studies said. But now there was real Proof. Now we could believe the paper studies.

The AEC was later split in two. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was created to R-E-G-U-L-A-T-E, and they do. With a vengeance and will. The Cheerleaders went elsewhere in DOE.

The Apollo safety calculations were mandated, and the "WASH 100" study was conducted to calibrate safety systems and accident probabilities. They turned out to be one accident in 10**5 reactor years. Once every hundred thousand years! Well past being Safe Enough.

Reactor rooms were examined and deficiencies analyzed. Current reactor operator rooms were redesigned, as much as feasible. Operators received and were/are constantly tested for updated and recent training.

The current Plants themselves were recognized to need too much operator control in too short a time.
With lots of alarms going off in TMI, the operators couldn't divine the wheat from the chaff. They couldn't determine what was important, and what was not. Too much data, coming at them too fast.

The US government entered a government-industry partnership to develop a new generation of safer more passive Nuclear reactors during the Nuclear Interregnum. These new Plants would be much more "Passive". That means in even abnormal conditions, the operators don't have to do a damn thing. The Plant will simply slow down and glide by itself to a stop. The plants will simply shut themselves down, without using or relying on any active piece of equipment like a pump or motor or valve (that might fail). Gravity and Thermodynamics does it all for a couple of days.

The Plants were specified to be an order or more of magnitude even safer than what is running today; and that safety statement now could be actually measured.

The Westinghouse AP1000 is approaching 1 in 10**7 (one accident in every ten million years) reactor years between expected failures. The GE design is approaching 1 in 10**8 failures per reactor years,(one accident in every 100 million years) while the NRC requires a rating of but 1 in 10**5 years, and aimed at 1 in 10**6 for the new ones.

As mentioned we currently do once-through fuel use. Some dingbats figured that if separating the used fuel from the unused fuel and then burning the unused fuel again, would contribute to "proliferation", somehow. So we didn't do that, although the rest of the world does and thinks we are daft.

Now we know that the new reactors are the only places to burn up, forever, the nuclear warheads in the inventory of the worlds militaries. The new reactors have been designed to burn Mixed Oxide fuel. Translated that means you can combine some weapons grade Plutonium and highly enriched weapons grade Uranium with the unenriched uranium or thorium to make the MOX fuel.

Over 10,000 (!) nuclear weapons warheads are committed by treaty for permanent and forever destruction in these new Nukes that can burn MOX. Current reactors were not designed to do so.

To me, that is THE reason aside from all others, to support the building of a fleet of GEN III+ reactor power plants. The world needs nuclear disarmament and this is the first GENUINE nuclear disarmament.

Fuel is not a problem. Once-through usage creates much more apparent waste than is actually there. Using reprocessing, will solve the fuel issue for a time, say roughly 5000 years or so. But the Sea has perhaps 35,000 to 50,000 years worth of Uranium in it. And no mid-east Sheik or rag headed terrorist controls the Oceans.

Now I don't really believe in the hysterical fear of CO2, but many of you do. If you do controlling CO2 may be a benefit.

Nuclear provides the motivated electrons for the conversion of the auto fleets away from hydrocarbons to electrons. And the Nukes don't generate CO2 when in operation.

It is utter drivel and assinine propaganda to say that building a plant that is mostly steel, cement, sand and rocks, and that uses a few tons of actinide metal fuel per year is CO2 intensive. If you really believe that, I have a Bridge to Brooklyn that I can sell to you, real cheap.

Others have pointed out that if you reprocess and remove the 3% of the spent fuel that is true high level waste. And then re-burn the previously used fuel again,ther is less real waste to dispose of. There is enough room in the Desert Valley mine in Yucca mountain to hold all the high level waste that we have now, and all that we could create in a few hundred years of operation. Don't forget it was sized ot throw away the 97% non waste wiht the 3% waste. There is simply no disposal problem.

Now others have talked of Actinide Burners that transmute the small amounts of real high level waste into other elements that are much safer and not as long lived. I believe we will and should do that.

But those are the only fast breeders that I could support. I consider them way too dangerous, and I would want to see their safety lifetimes like those quoted above. I just don't believe they can ever get anywhere near those safety ratings. And the so-called GEN IV breeders are not designed yet and are totally unnecessary, as Fusion plants will be being designed at exactly the same time. I'll take inexhaustible and clean Fusion instead, Thank You.

Join me on the ramparts for that battle if you like.

I always assumed that the present plans for waste disposal would not work any better than King Tut's plans for his tomb did. The power metals in the waste depository would be just too attractive to leave alone just like King Tut's Gold. People would eventually break in to get it. It's better to separate out and remove the Gold equivalent from the burial; or turn it into dross instead, in an Actinide Burner, before you bury it.

I hope this makes some sense to you Julia. I appreciate your enthusiasm, but it is a tad misdirected.

@ Dominick,

I can't believce that you are actually taking serious that fantasy fairy tale of Solar Power proposed by the gentlemen (ahem) writing for formerly good journal Scientific American. Editor Renne apparently knows no Science, and is happy to order articles on trendy psuedo-scientific nonsense. My subscrition to the magazine can't be much more than 40 years old, but I have never seen such a bizare idea. I checked to make sure it was not the April Fools edition.

These writers actually talk about paving from 50,000 to 250,000 sq kilomters of the Amercan Southwest with silicon solar cells, to generate about only one third of the Amercan electric needs in 2050. They say they ONLY need a mere $420 billion dollars of subsidy! If your going to be a thief you may as well think big.

It is such a farce that I don't know where to even start. Try this for a start.

How would ever get an Environmental Impact Statement approved that says you barbeque and fry every living plant and animal in three States of America. I somehow doubt your application would even get a hearing. I have no idea how many species you would propose to exterminate. Say several tens of thousands as a quick guess.

Then I'd like you to consider what that would do the local climate over the three States. Creating a blacker than the best black body radiator over the area of three states and trying to pipe off the surplus energy across the country is beyond daft.

I suspect that what you would actually create is enormous columns of rising colmns of hot air, over the arrays that would resemble permanent tornadoes. Permanent tornadoes over 50,000 sq km.

I also suspect that the resultant winds might just do some damage(!) to your carefully crafted arrays of 12-14% efficient solar cells. (Disregarding the agregating area for wiring).

I suspect these new columns of hot air just might change the air patterns over area in adjoining states who might object to the weather alterations. I think I would object to a permanent Gale force wind blowing toward the three States.

Then what electricity you managed to create would serve to only heat the direct current high tension power lines snaking transcontinentally to areas of electric need like New York City and Boston.

I was a co-founder of a Earth day organization that was the Society to Prevent the Reduction of the Albedo in the US, SPARE US. We were pointing out that solar energy is not perfect, and it is not clean. Wide scale adoption has side effects, lik ecreating Sahara Deserts. The low solar intensity means that enormous areas must be affected to create only modest amounts of power. Solar has a "scaling" problem. Lots of waste heat to dispose of too. Then turning these areas into the heart of the hottest Sahara Desert just might be objectionable.

Reducing the reflectivity of the Earth Surface to 12-14% blacker than perfect black over 50-250,000 sq km is likely to be a smidgeon disruptive to the "local climate". Absorbing that much more energy should raise the temperature a mite, don't you think, as you reflect less energy back to space?

If you're dumb enough to think building nuclear plants is an intelligent idea than I guess I'm dumb enough to think solar power generation is the way to go.