re: Boards opinion on new nuclear power plants?

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Their are some seriously dumb people walking around, and they vote.

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*there

Without it we will fail to meet our growing energy needs — unless we burn a frickload of carbon

Want electricity for your Tesla? Nuclear.

If we don’t ramp up here I worry about the down line of energy availability in terms of cost/demand

Government isn’t gonna get out of the way when it comes to nuclear power plant regulations. The southern Company Vogtle 3 and 4 plants started early site permit work in 2006, it took until 2009 for construction to begin, Unit 3 is still trying to come online consistently so that’s 15 years from permit to first MW, Unit 4 still isn’t complete.
The cost overruns have been in the billions and current estimates are about 25 BILLION dollars, most companies aren’t willing to risk this kind of cost expenditures and 10, 12, 15 or mores years to build a plant that they know the government will be so heavily involved in impacting.
They can build multiple units with 1 on 1, 2 on 1, or 3 on 1 combined cycled natural gas fired technologies in a fraction of that time and for that cost they could build 20 or more 550 MW units at current day cost. They can build multiple wind farms and multiple solar farms for that cost and in a fraction of that time and at the same time, please the environmentalist groups that have made it so hard to build coal and nuclear units.

My step son is a disciple of Elin.
He tried to tell me that solar panels are more efficient, pretty square foot than nuclear.

Arggggg

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I'm not anti-nuclear...but how do we prevent a Fukushima or Chernobyl-like disaster? Thats my only concern.

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Modern fourth (fifth?) generation reactor designs are generally designed to fail safe without human interaction and to do so through passive processes that require no inputs of any kind into the plant. Everyone can leave and cut the power lines to the plant, shut everything down, and modern designs just kinda coast to a shutdown state and sit there. They are designed so that the critical configuration that can maintain a chain reaction must be constantly maintained. Loss of control means the reactor naturally puts itself into a non-critical arrangement. For instance, in a molten fuel design, you take advantage of geometry to limit where a nuclear chain reaction can occur. Geometry is very important for reactions, so you make the reactor in a shape that will support a reaction and plug the bottom with a plug that will melt if not constantly cooled or if control is lost and the chain reaction begins to accelerate and generate more heat than can be rejected by the main cooling systems. The plug melts in an accident and the liquid fuel just drains down into a giant bathtub below the reactor that can hold the entire fuel inventory, take the heat without melting, and doesn't have the right shape to allow further reaction in the liquid fuel.

After passive shutdown, newer designs often include design elements that ensure that the decay heat produced after shutdown can passively escape the reactor without causing a meltdown. Hell, a lot of the new designs have molten fuel, so it's ALREADY melted if working properly. You just make sure that bathtub you drain the fuel into is designed with plenty of surface area to get rid of heat. The entire containment building might get up to a couple hundred degrees in the process, but you basically end up using it as a giant radiator to let the heat out to the surrounding air and the fuel eventually just solidifies into a block under the reactor vessel in the event an accident occurs. The whole of everything inside the containment building is likely trashed and is a total loss at that point, but everything remains nicely shutdown and stable inside the containment building instead of blowing the roof off and spreading over thousands of square miles.

Further, there are some fuel cycles that don't use uranium/plutonium based fuels and create less high level transuranic waste than a MOX fuel. Some of these designs burn off the long-lived transuranic waste products faster than they are created by the reactor, so they don't build up the nastiness that remains dangerous for tens of thousands of years. At the end of life, the waste produced in these types of reactors is WAY less long-lived (though still very lethal to be near immediately after shutdown, to be clear) and only needs safe containment for 300 years until it's tolerable to be near, as opposed to tens of thousands of years for current high level waste. Some of these designs transuranic burn rate is high enough to open up the possibility that we can take existing high level waste and toss it into the reactor where it will be transmuted into those much shorter lived radionuclides, helping to answer the question of what to do with existing waste. Imagine if we were to build one of these new generation reactors that burns up transuranics right next to every existing first or second generation reactor and their spent fuel pools. Then, over time, you take the spent fuel and integrate it into the fuel stream and let the new reactor make that really nasty high level stuff much less of a challenge for the future.

There are technical and engineering hurdles to overcome with a lot of these newer concepts, to be sure, and not all of them may turn out to be feasible. In this political climate, though, few are going further than the conceptual level because there's no incentive for operators to spend the money to iron out the technical details if they'll never be allowed to license one of these new reactors. Further, there are proliferation concerns with some of these designs because they are, in effect, breeder reactors. For instance, the fissile element in a Liquid Fueled Thorium Reactor (LFTR) is Uranium-233. However, the fuel is thorium. You use a little bit of existing U-233 to kickstart the reactor, but then the once the reactor is operating, it continuously transmutes thorium to U-233 and makes its own fissile material from its fuel. So you fuel it with much more readily available thorium (it's as common as lead) which doesn't need the massive enrichment that uranium does to be used as fuel. The problem is the fact that you're making the fissile isotope U-233 in situ during operation from your widely available plain old thorium fuel. The importance of this is that U-233 is one of the uranium isotopes that can be used to make a bomb. If you were so inclined, you could design your reactor to generate more U-233 than it needs for its own operation and isolate the excess U-233 for "other purposes". Unlike enriching natural uranium to make a bomb, which requires extremely difficult isotopic separation, this U-233 can be easily chemically separated from the rest of the material and it's all ready to go.

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Absolutely. I 100% agree with this. Also I’m a retired nuclear electrician.

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Miketheseventh, same. Did most of my time as a SPU and on Nimitz in the 90's.

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Spent fuel is an issue, but not nearly as big as people make it out to be.

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If the dumb arse politicians and Congress didn't get in the way of Yucca Mountain. This was one of the things that I didn't agree with Trump about. We need a national nuclear waste repository. This site would have been safe and met the needs for the US for hundreds of years. It is my sincere hope that we get funding for this project and it is completed. Out current status quo of storing spent nuclear material on site at about 70+ sites around the US usually above ground.

Most of the opposition to Yucca is from just pure stupidity and people not understanding nuclear power. You get sensationalized crap like Chernobyl and everyone thinks Nuclear is the boogie man.

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Would you be willing to invest in building a plant that cost more to build, than can be made in the plants entire life span before it has to be encapsulated forever?

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if it just saves 1 tree. CLIMATE CRISISSSSSSSSSSSSSS