. . . . .
Well, that didn’t take long…
From the New York Times, of course.
U.S. Nuclear Industry Faces New Uncertainty
WASHINGTON — The fragile bipartisan consensus that nuclear power offers a big piece of the answer to America’s energy and global warming challenges may have evaporated as quickly as confidence in Japan’s crippled nuclear reactors.
Until this weekend, President Obama, mainstream environmental groups and large numbers of Republicans and Democrats in Congress agreed that nuclear power offered a steady energy source and part of the solution to climate change, even as they disagreed on virtually every other aspect of energy policy. Mr. Obama is seeking tens of billions of dollars in government insurance for new nuclear construction, and the nuclear industry in the United States, all but paralyzed for decades after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, was poised for a comeback.
Now, that is all in question as the world watches the unfolding crisis in Japan’s nuclear reactors and the widespread terror it has spawned.
“I think it calls on us here in the U.S., naturally, not to stop building nuclear power plants but to put the brakes on right now until we understand the ramifications of what’s happened in Japan,” Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut and one of the Senate’s leading voices on energy, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
…
“The president believes that meeting our energy needs means relying on a diverse set of energy sources that includes renewables like wind and solar, natural gas, clean coal and nuclear power,” said Clark Stevens, a White House spokesman.
Right.
…
What happened to the radiation that lasts thousands of years? We all know that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed in August 1945 after the explosion of atomic bombs. Here is the progress made by the people of that land during the past 65 years.
The slums? DETROIT – 65 years after HIROSHIMA
The Left is so bleepin’ predictable!
Those nuc-plants took a direct double-whammy from a major earthquake and then a tsunami. The news story is not that the plants are so weak. The real story is that they are so well-built that they have not already totally crumbled and had a catastrophic nuclear event.
But, of course, THAT story would mean that Reagan was right. (gasp! wink)
That is the truth, and remember these plants used a 1971 technology that we stopped. As you said, the plants worked after a 1 in 1000 years earthquake, but the active safety measures lost power because the diesel generators worked till the tsunami.
The new 3rd Generation plants are designed to minimize active safety intervention.. Their safety, in large part are due the design and the physics. They are far safer than the present reactors, and they are containment buildings. Remember, the Three Mile inner containment system was not breached, and the Concrete Dome was not touched. No one was injured.
The next reactors, 4th Generation Fast neutron Reactors are far safer. One of them S-PRISM is cooled by liquid sodium at atmospheric pressure. If there is a loss of coolant, the temperature rises and the fuel elements expands. This increases the distances between the nuclei, and the Chain Reaction can not continue and the reactor turns off. The reactor sits in a bath of liquid sodium which cools the turned off reactor. No mechanical systems are needed.
In the early 1980s, we had ERB 2 which was the prototype reactor. Because of 3 Mile Island, there was an experiment was conducted which turned off the coolant system. ERB 2 turned itself off without any fanfare. ERB 2 was cancelled prematurely by the Clinton in 1994. We lost 16 years.
S-PRISM can use, after reprocessing, our 70,000 Tons of Nuclear waste. This waste can provide America’s electricity for 2 centuries. Because these reactors “burn’ our wastes, the long lived actinides are destroyed. The waste from these reactors need to be stored for 300 – 500 years as opposed the tens of thousand years required by our present wastes. This technology needs to be on a fast track.