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Expanding USA Nuclear Power

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Rad Sponge:
Ray,

The link I posted should take you to the entire report. It is available in its entirety.

Nutty-N,

You and I and perhaps the majority of the inhabitants of this board know that modern nuclear power is essentially safer and cleaner than most other forms of electrical generation, however I do not think our government (NRC/DOE) has done an adequate job in educating public opinion. The average beer drinking American hears "nuclear" and I bet TMI and Chernobyl comes to mind first along with images of Homer Simpson. Why? Because the average American is an idiot lemming more concerned with which celeb said what rather than the inherent stability and non-proliferable properties of ceramic fuel. Go figure.

This ignorance traces back to the ultra secretive history of nuclear power, but public acceptance was sacrificed and a miseducated public was victimized by politically motivated eco-tards.

Jumping off my soap box...

bmr176:
Rad Sponge, I couldn't agree with you more.  As an industry we have done a fairly poor job of educating the public.  I am a student at Penn State and am very active with ANS.  Every year we have over 500 high school students vistit our reactor.  this is a very small number on a very large scale, and we are only reaching a very small location in a state that is already (even with the whole TMI thing) fairly open to nuke power.
I heard a statistic that said something like 60% of people feel nuclear power is safe to use but 60% felt their neighbors did not feel the same.
As someone who will be graduating in the next year it is very exiting to hear about companies starting early site permit applications.
I also feel and have had long disussions that a diverse portfolio including nuclear power and alternative sources is the only viable option for our country to take.

RDTroja:

--- Quote from: bmr176 on Jun 28, 2005, 09:39 ---As an industry we have done a fairly poor job of educating the public.
--- End quote ---

One thing to remember about our 'industry' is that if you get down to the root of it, we work in the Electricity Industry, not the Nuclear Industry. There is no real 'Nuclear Industry' except as a subset of Electrial Generation. The utilities that own nuclear plants all own coal and oil plants, too. The 'Nuclear Generating Company' is a very new concept and even then they are usually a subsidary of a larger company that also has a Fossil Generation side. Having said that, and remembering that the best way to make nuclear plants look good is to compare them to the alternatives (mostly fossil) there is no motivation for the utilities to tout their (average) 20% nuclear generation when they would have to degrade their (average) 80% fossil to do so.

Once again it boils down to economics. If you tell people how bad fossil energy is in order to say how great nuclear is, the net result would be increased public scrutiny of fossil and likely a new wave of legislation forcing them to clean up or replace their fossil generators. The utilities don't want that, and who can blame them? There is no profit in educating the public.

bmr176:

--- Quote from: RDTroja on Jun 28, 2005, 12:38 --- There is no profit in educating the public.

--- End quote ---

I guess I never really thought about it like that.  Coming from the navy money was never an issue, and at a campus research reactor part of our budget is geared towards educating.

raymcginnis:
If this idea does take off, it will be interesting to see which way it goes.  The 5 fast reactor proposals from the 1990s will take time for testing and development.  They are all on paper now.  To get a new plant in 5 years or less, it would have to be a LWR, with expedited approvals, as President Bush proposed.

For the new fast reactor proposals, I like the sodium cooled, convection flow design by Atomics International.  No pumps is awesome!  With all of the plug and play designs, if there was valve work to be done, getting around inside would be a P in the A.  It would be much more difficult than getting around in an ice condenser PWR or a small BWR drywell like Oyster Creek.  I suppose it would have to be better than a nuke sub though.

All bidders were proposing high enrichment fuels, similar to nuke subs, so there would be no refueling outages.  There would only be maintenance outages.

Nukeworkers interested in new jobs may not be helped so much.  I think that we should all support it though, even if it does not help our careers.

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