Wow, 1500+ MWe on natural circulation.

Still the problem I see is that there is only one primary circuit of water, you use a steam to power the generator that has been expose directly to the radioactive core...probably thermally efficient but then you have huge problem of managing radioactivity risk a along the whole energy production line. Last but not least, unless you fully recycle the water through steam condensation, you release radioactivity in the environment.

am I wrong ?

Treehugger,
Water is always recycled in a modern steam turbine engine. No water is ever released in the environment. The gain in efficiency is due to steam released at below atmospheric pressure due to complete condensation of the steam downstream to the turbine, thus dropping the pressure.

Anyone have a pointer to US nuclear construction? Stuff actually being built.

All the sites I find are about the state of licensing (the US is doing fine in paperwork about licensing) or operations.

Aside: I was under the impression that Palo Verde in Arizona was the last plant built in the US. That was 1983. But several smaller plants have gone into operation since then. The last in 1996.

K,

The last US reactor to come on line was Watts Bar 1 in 1996. It is owned and operated by the TVA.

The only reactor currently under construction in the US is Watts Bar 2.

Both Watts Bar 1 and 2 were started in the early 1970's and stopped when TVA suspended all of its nuclear construction. Several years later they decided to restart work on WB1. A little over a year ago they decided to restart work on WB2. WB2 is expected to go online in 2013.

No serious new reactor construction can start until issuance of a Combined Operating Liscense. There have not yet been any COLs issued under the new liscensing methodology although the NRC has several under study. Some site preparation work can be performed prior to issue of the COL.

Watts Bar 2 is being completed under the old liscensing rules and will be vulnerable to intervenor challenges and lawsuits prior to coming on line.

Bill

What radio-active foods did you eat this week? All foods have always been naturally radio-active ever since before any life was on the earth. Humans and all organisms have developed mechanisms for dealing with low levels of radio-activity just like we can deal with low levels of exposure to sunlight. There is no way to eliminate the radio-activity in food or the environment. Cells have evolved to deal with small amounts of radioactivity until something kills them. Some cells have a life of more than a hundred years. Some seeds have much more concentrated radio-activity and survive many years in a dormant state. You can get more radio-activity from a granite counter top than a nuclear reactor as a direct neighbor.

Fortunately there were many places in the world where nuclear powerplants were built since 1980 including Canada where some were built, used, shut down and rebuilt and operated. Few of the deaths or accidents in oil fields are reported in world news, but every small burst of a non-radio-active steam pipeline is reported world wide.

Chernobyl was not a catastrophy just a mild industrial accident that killed less than twenty people immediatly and perhaps thirty more died days or months later because of lack of precaution against radio-active exposure whilst fighting the fires. The nuclear reaction stopped with the explosing of the steam pipes. A recent train wreck injured far more people in LA.

The disaster of Three-Mile-Island is that many more thousands of people in the US and elsewhere met their demise earlier than necessary because of air pollution from coal and oil and natural gas and the high cost of fuel and other energy.

All of the spent nuclear fuel rods of the US would fill up only a small part of a Walmart-Superstore. They are more than safe enough for the time being in the used fuel pools, and they would be much more safe buried under Yucca mountain. Or pay money to France, England or Japan to have them reprocessed. Or form them into smaller bundles and build CANDU reactors to use them again. They are a million times, or more, safer to ship than the gasoline truck that delivers fuel to the local gasoline station. Life is not perfectly safe; View the propane truck explosion in Toronto.

The fastest way to reduce CO2 production from New York City would be to build a CANDU reactor a hundred feet or so beneath the city to provide high temperature water for the steam heating systems. It might even produce a little electricity, but the steam can be used to also cool in the summer with absorbtion chillers.

Even if a Chernobyl reactor exploded two hundred feet below Manhattan it would not be noticed by most people, but a CANDU reactor runs only at a warm room tempeature with very hot tubes through the cool water and there is no chance of the water burning like the graphite did at Chernobyl. Uranium did not explode at Chernobyl, but water pipes did, and air got in and started the graphite burning.

Passive safety is useful; pressure relief valves are required on all boilers and now most water heaters even. Three-Mile-Island needed actual interlocks not computer and operator controlled interlocks.

Nuclear fuel costs much less than any other type of energy for power plants. If coal were delivered free to to a power plant it could only reduce the price of the electricity at the meter by 20 cents out of a dollar. The capital cost of a nuclear power plant is the most important cost. Ten times as much effort shoud go into making a nuclear power plant cheaper than to make it more efficient. Doubling the efficiency of a nuclear power plant would not reduce the cost at the homeowners meter by ten cents on the dollar. There are ten million kilowatt hours of energy in a pound of fissionable Uranion, U235. A low efficiency nuclear reactor can get 2 million kilowatt hours of electricity out of this ten million. It takes a minimum of a hundred and fifty pounds of Uranium to get one pound of U235. At one cent per kilowatt-hour you get $20,000 for the electricity. Uranium costs as low a $8 dollars a pound but speculation has brought it to as much as a hundred recently, but even at a hundred you can buy 200 pounds of uranium for the $20000. At a hundred dollars a ton for coal it would take about $100,000 to make the same electricity. Coal at the mine is much cheaper to get out, or as low as five dollars a ton.

It has been a long time since the Utilities have been able to add significant, MODERN, clean electric generation. The original nuclear additions died, amid pre-planned, forced cost overuns, and forced bankruptcy, by the green community.

The ironical result was that the Utilities were forced to continue to run old, inefficient and VERY dirty, coal plants, with almost no pollution controls, for much longer than wanted. Those "old smokers" run today, even as they were planned to be junked in the early 1980s.

Once again, the phony greens demonstrated that they would rather have pollution continue, as long as they had a reason to keep the checks and subscription money flowing in.

Finally the founder of Green Peace and others,(like myself), said enough, and abandoned the phonies masquerading as concerned environmentalists.

The nice thing about the GEN III+ reactor designs is that they are virtually "melt-down" proof, and passively safe. They answer virtually every criticism that we original, principled, critics of nuclear power had. These plants do not require minute by minute operator control. They are "walk away" plants.

If a problem occurs, the operators need do nothing, unlike the Three Mile Island situation, and the plant will shut itself down, by itself, as the nuclear fire will go out over 72 hours, by itself.

No need for panicked operators to make bad decisions like at Three Mile Island, in an urge to just "do something".

The NRC has teeth now, and regulates but doesn't cheer-lead. And it uses them. Regulation is in place, and demonstrated to be effective in the 106 running plants.

No longer are sloppy construction techniques accepted. Procedures are now in place to force test reports and test details all through construction, as it occurs in the present 106 running plants.

In these new GEN III+ designs much of the critical work is now done in a factory, and only final assembly takes place at the construction site adding to quality. These GEN III+ plants are mathematically provable to be three orders of magnitude safer, than the safe plants running today.

There are only really three standard designs for all 35 plants in the current pipeline. The GE-Hitachi ESBWR, the Westinghouse-Toshiba AP-1000, and the Areva EPR, the French Reactor design. The Westinghouse AP- 1000 has been already approved; the GE ESBWR is two years into a three year approval/accreditation cycle; and the EPR is starting accreditation.

There are a few potential orders for the earlier GE ABWR too.

These 35 plants in the pipeline have millions of dollars invested by the Utilities managements in getting them this far; and 15 applications(representing 24 plants), have now applied for the Combined Operating and Construction license. That is the last step prior to placing a firm construction order with the builder. Although a lot of joint work between the future owners and builders and regulators have already been done.

For example, economic justification to Utility management, State and local utility commissions authorization, site selections, and acquisition costs, builder selection, and and Environmental Impact Statement, EIS, has been prepared and approved. These costs have been incurred, and payed for BEFORE the COL was sought. The actual COL application costs ten of millions of dollars too.

All these 35 commitments, by the Utilities, has all occurred in the last 24 months or so, after Mr. Bush had spent several years essentially forcing the Nuclear plant builders to invest in designing and then getting these "standard designs" approved by the NRC. He has worked to bring these GEN III+ "melt-down" proof designs forward, and getting Congress to pass reform legislation in the 2001 and 2005 Energy Acts, to eliminate the legal stalling methods used to derail the earlier nuclear building era. The necessary preconditions were finally met in 2007, and the Nuclear Renaissance began.

Each standard design is reviewed by the NRC in a multi-year effort, third party critics like the UCS can comment, review and sue; but after the standard design is approved, there is no legal standing to sue and stall, as used to be the case.

BTW these 35 plants, online about 2016-2018 wil raise US nuclear generation to some 35-40% nuclear, up from 19%, and together with Hydro, will make the US dependent on fossil for less than 50% of it electricity generation.

They will also provide the clean generation for the coming flood of electrified autos, in the next decade.

Without doing anything else, that will drop fossil use by 15 million barrels per day in the US, and reduce CO2 emissions to the levels well below 1990 or even 1970 levels, and well below Kyoto targets, not that that actually matters.

Meanwhile every clean coal plant built, will retire a coal plant that is 4/5th as efficient, while removing most actual, toxic, pollutants that the "old smokers" don't. That is pure gravy.

@treehugger,

The BWR type reactors have a closed cycle that goes through the turbines and closed condensers. Isolation takes place at the lower pressures in the condenser system, rather then in a high pressure/temperature environment in primary and secondary steam exchangers. Thus it is less likely to suffer leaks and consequent contamination there.

Unlike the PWRs that use a secondary steam cycle to isolate the primary steam at much higher temperature and pressure in a primary steam cycle, while using the secondary steam that goes through the turbines and condensers.

The water in a BWR is much cleaner than in an PWR, and has little Boric additions, that are corrosive. The Steam in the turbines is slightly radioactive, but the the primary radiation is from Nitrogen-16 that decays in a few seconds. The Turbine hall is accessible to personnel a short time after the reactor is shut down. Essentially by the time the turbines cool down from the heat, they are radio-logically safe to open and work on.

But it is true during operation the turbines need radiation protection.

I find it interesting that no one has questioned where the radioactive waste from all these reactors is going to go.

Point of information: Does anyone know which type of reactor generates the smallest volume of waste between

* PWR
* BWR
* Pebble bed

??

Construction for the EPR (Gen III + ) has already started in Finland and France. US and China are next.

France designed 2 reactors (900 MW & 1300 MW) and built nearly 59 reactors using those 2 designs. No wonder they can get 80% of their electricity from nuclear and also able to export to other countries.

Yes, most of the cost for nuclear comes from the opposition and it comes mainly from fake environmentalists who get their money from Oil lobby to stop the nuclear progress. They will soon give up as the rising oil prices are biting every country's economy.

Here is a table of reactors.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/reactors.html

439 reactors are able to produce 373,000 MW of capacity with an average reactor producing 850 MW. Its a lot of clean electricity that could be matched only by hydro at this point.

Polly,

The loan guarantees are just that:guarantees. If all goes well, it costs the government(taxpayer) nothing.

There are two types of guarantees being offered: loan guarantee where the government functions rather like a cosigner on the construction loan and delay insurance where the government will partially reimburse the first couple of reactors for delays caused by the government. (This was a major cause of overruns and delays in the last big build in the 1970's).

The first couple of new reactors are eligible also for a production tax credit. It is at the same level as the PTC for wind but is limited to a couple of years rather than permanent.

Nick:

BWR and PWR have almost equal volumes of used fuel for a given amount of electricity generated. (Actually BWR's have slightly more but not enough to worry about.)

Pebble bed reactor used fuel volume will depend on the level of burnup. If the burnup is comparable to BWR and PWR, there will be more used fuel volume with pebble bed. Proponents of pebble beds hope to achieve a higher burnup than BWR/PWR which will reduce the volume.

Bill

Secret Fallout - Dr Ernest Sternglasss

Killing our Own - the Disaster of America's Experience with Atomic Radiation - Harvey Wasserman

Read these books - skim them. If you still want nuclear power you are criminally pathologically insane.

Nuclear Power is destroying us all right now. The plants MUST all be shut or the Human Race is dead.

Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor.

What a sick joke. BWRs leak radioactivity like a sieve - at least PWRs are somewhat better contained. Now let's have an even cheaper BWR to really spray it out. Ha Ha ha.

Read Secret Fallout if you want to live.