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----------------------------- 2225 - Nuclear Energy
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- When we first came to Santa Rosa, CA. in 1970 I went to visit Bodega Head, which is a peninsula into the Pacific just 30 miles from our home. The visit gets to see just a giant hole in the ground where the nuclear reactor was going to be built. Greenpeace and other environmental organizations stopped its construction.
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- Today we are using geothermal geysers in Santa Rosa to support our electrical grid. So, what happened to nuclear energy?
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- There are 104 nuclear power plants in the U.S. providing about 12% of our electrical power production. ( See Footnote 1) We also have over 600 coal fired electrical power plants providing 32% of our domestic power production and 36% of the carbon dioxide emissions. CO2 is the primary greenhouse gas responsible for climate change on the globe.
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-The oldest operating reactors, Nine Mile Point Unit 1 and Oyster Creek, began commercial operation in December 1969. The newest reactor to enter service, Watts Bar Unit 2, came online in 2016, the first reactor to come online since 1996 when the Watts Bar Unit 1 came online. Twenty shut down power reactors at 18 sites are being decommissioned.
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-Although six nuclear reactors have been shut down since 2013, total nuclear electricity generation capacity at the end of 2017 was about the same as total capacity in 2003, when the United States had 104 operating reactors. Power plant modifications to increase capacity at nuclear power plants have made it possible for the entire operating nuclear reactor fleet to maintain a relatively consistent total electricity generation capacity.
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- Nuclear energy is the only large scale, cost effective energy source that will reduce greenhouse emissions. Wind and Solar will help, but they can not supply the huge baseload of power needed. Coal, nuclear, or hydroelectric are left. Natural gas will be too expensive. Hydroelectric is at capacity and can not be expanded. Nuclear becomes the only viable option to substitute for coal. Unless coal can be made to burn clean, cost effectively. At least that was the thinking in the 1970’s
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- In 1979 Jane Fonda and Jack Lemmon came out with the movie “China Syndrome”. The same year the Three Mile Island disaster occurred and the U.S. swore off nuclear. The facts escaped everyone in their paranoia.
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- Nobody even noticed that Three Mile Island plant was actually a success story. The concrete containment structure did what it was supposed to do in case of an accident. Radiation was prevented from getting into the atmosphere. The reactor itself was crippled but no deaths or even injuries resulted. Forget the facts, fear has prevented many new nuclear power plants from being built since that time.
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- 31% natural gas and 16% domestic, plus 47% imported oil power our electrical plants, that adds up to 94% of electric power production being dependent on oil and gas.
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- China has figured it out. They are on course to build 30 new nuclear power plants in the 15 years. Building 2 plants a year at $3,000,000,000 each is no small feat. China has already built 9 different nuclear plants, all from different technologies, stealing technology and know-how from every nation in the world that had nuclear. Now they have assimilated the best of everyone’s ideas and have some of their own.
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- The Chinese have developed a pebble bed reactor. It uses fuel pebbles the size of tennis balls that are uranium wrapped in graphite which has a higher melting point. It is impossible to have a meltdown because if the Uranium gets too hot the graphite melts and stops the nuclear reaction. Their design is also more efficient in requiring less Uranium.
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- Nuclear power plants are actually cheap to run, but they are very expensive to build. A 2,000,000,000 watt plant costs $3,000,000,000 to build, all up front costs. Safety is key. And, China has a prefect record in safely running their nuclear reactors.
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- Of course, China lacks civil society safeguards, a free press, whistleblower protection, human rights laws, and other safety laws we have in this country. If something did go wrong we probably would not find out about it. They still have to dispose of 1,000 tons of radioactive waste each year. It would not be unlike China to put their waste in Tibet or poor northwest China where the politically powerless reside.
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- The nuclear accident at Chernobyl, Russia, was the world’s worst to date, releasing 100,000,000 Curies of radioactive material into the environment. The accident at Three Mile Island released only 15 Curies. (See footnote 2)
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- Other accidental radiation releases occurred in Fermi I Reactor near Detroit, NRX Reactor in Chalk River, Canada, the Windscale Reactor in England and the SL-1 Reactor in Idaho Falls. So, accidents do happen. The key is to have 100% containment of radioactivity to keep the problems inside the reactor until repair and clean-ups can occur.
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- Accidents are one thing, what to do with radioactive waste ( spent fuel) is another, and possibility of building a nuclear bomb is still another.
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- Still another is the technology of breeder reactors. These reactors can breed Plutonium 239 which is a man-made radioactive fuel not found in nature. Fission breaks up heavier elements and creates many different isotopes, many of them are radioactive. Neutrons from the fission chain reaction can enrich Uranium 238 creating Plutonium 239 which is another ideal nuclear fuel.
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- Breeder Reactors can create more radioactive fuel than they consume in the power plant. Plutonium can be separated easily from the spent fuel in a chemical process and used as power plant fuel or be diverted to nuclear weapon production. France has the largest Super-Phenix Breeder Reactor on the Caspian Sea that produces electricity as well as desalinization.
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- Still another technology for nuclear power is fusion. The same process that is used in our Sun, fusing lighter elements into heavier ones. Hydrogen fused into Helium. Whenever fusion or fission reactions occur a little bit of mass is converted directly into radiation energy.
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- This is were the power comes from (E=mc^2). The difficulty with fusion reactions is that the temperature has to be so high for the fusion to occur there is no way to contain the fusion material. Any container would melt before the fusion reaction happened. (This is where the “China Syndrome” movie got its theme. A runaway nuclear reactor would melt its way through the Earth all the way to China.) The sun can handle he heat, no problem, even sending some our way.
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- Engineers are using magnetic fields to confine hot plasma fusion material to overcome this containment problem. The Tokamak design in Princeton is the most famous. Another technique is to use a small pellet of deuterium-tritium in inertial confinement that fuses in so short a time as not to touch the walls of a container.
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- Still another is laser fusion using lasers aimed at a pellet of fuel from 3 directions to provide containment. This technique is being developed by the Lawrence Livermore Labs. Up to now, fusion power production has been out of reach. The research goes on but engineers have yet to develop a commercial solution.
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- There is much more to learn about nuclear power production. Even Greenpeace has learned enough to become a supporter. Engineers and politicians need to learn a lot more before becoming the masters of this powerful technology. Fear, denial, ignorance, avoidance are all the wrong paths to take. Smarter people learn how to learn.
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- C apacity retirements and derating of some reactors will result in less total nuclear electricity generation capacity than in 2017 and in every year through 2050.
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- Footnotes:
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----------------------------Quadrillion BTU ------------- 1970 ----------- 2017
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- (1) - ------- Coal 22.69 ---------------------------- 32% ----------- 30%
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-------------- Gas 21.81 ---------------------------- 31% ----------- 32%
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- ------------- Oil 11.53 ------------------------------- 16% ----------- ?
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- ------------- Nuclear 8.23 --------------------------- 12% ----------- 20%
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- ------------ Wind, solar, hydro 6.12 ----------------- 8.7% --------- 18%
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- ---------------- Total 70.37 ------------------------ 100% ----- 4 billion megawatt hours
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- ----------- 33 quadrillion BTU is imported foreign oil
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- (2) Curie is the amount of radioactivity of 1 gram of Radium. It is defined as 3.7 *10^10 radioactive disintegrations per second.
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- January 2, 2019 640
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-------------------------- Saturday, January 5, 2019 --------------------------
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