Progress!
 

It's actually happening!

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1341534444

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1341534444

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1341534444

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1341534444

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1341534444

umm, wat

Is that construction of a new reactor?

Joe only gets excited like this when something runs on nuclear power. Must be a reactor.

Looks like the reactor out by camp Pendleton.

It's not just the construction of a new reactor, it's the construction of TWO new reactors.

In the US!

Units 3 & 4 at Plant Vogtle in eastern Georgia, to be precise. They were approved earlier this year, and are expected to achieve criticality around 2016 or 2017, which isn't all that long when you think about it. The anti-human protest groups who want to kill off modern civilization as we know it are doing their best to delay the process and ensure that as many people as possible are killed by fossil-fuel emissions in the mean time.


The plants you refer to near Pendleton are the infamous San Onofre 2 and 3. I live just to the south of that site, and drive past The Tits frequently. Those units are also PWRs, but of a fairly old design (they're conceptually similar to Vogtle units 1 & 2.) The new Vogtle reactors are Westinghouse AP1000s, which built around some really nifty concepts. In particular, a Fukushima-style disaster would have virtually no effect on them- the AP1000 is designed to be able to cool itself without any electrical or diesel power for 72 hours based entirely on gravity and convection.

So, what happens when the super-meteor collides with the Earth and knocks off a chunk big enough to form a second moon? What happens to gravity and convenction then, smart guy? Surely you must realize that a bit of radiation (not as much as the sun in PHX or a chest X-Ray, of course) is far more dangerous than a collision with a super-meteor. After all, look at how many people were killed at Fukushima. Why, I could count them on one hand if all my fingers were cut off. That's proof, isn't it? Nuclear power is far more dangerous than Earthquakes and Tsunamis.

:vash:

Can't believe they're building a power plant that won't have any fatalities. What are the lawyers going to do? There's a lot more money in death than there is in regulatory procedure.

Hopefully the chunk includes Miami. That would solve a lot of problems.

To be fair, there were two prompt fatalities at the Fukushima-Daiichi facility. Two plant workers were trapped in the basement when the wave hit, and drowned. And on a more serious note, it's reasonable to expect that dozens, and perhaps up to several hundred Japanese civilians may eventually die of radiation-related injuries traceable to Fuku. That number may ultimately grow to as many as one-twentieth the number of people killed every single year in the US alone as a result of disease induced by particulate emissions from fossil-fuel plants.


But all hyperbole aside, this is just unbelievably exciting. There has not been a new plant licensed in the US since 1978, at which time I was still in diapers. 34 years! In all that time, we've been locked in a losing battle against nature and the laws of physics, being led by the blind down a path towards the pre-industrial era. Well fuсk you, hippies! We as a nation have finally seen the light!

And the AP1000 design, in particular, is quite innovative not just from a technological standpoint but from a regulatory one as well. Unlike every existing reactor system in the US, it has been granted a design certification by the NRC, meaning that additional AP1000s can now be cranked out one identical to the next, without requiring costly and time-consuming design approval for every single unit. (Yeah, it sounds ludicrous, but up 'till now, pretty much every nuke plant in the US has always been a custom job.) Henry Ford figured out the assembly-line concept nearly a hundred years ago, and we've finally embraced that idea for the future of energy production.

Combined Construction & Operating License filings have been made for twelve additional reactors in the US, all in the Alabama / Florida / Georgia / South Carolina area. Highly logical, given the enormous baseload requirements of these states and their traditional dependence on coal and oil for both base and peak-load generation.


I'm just deliriously giddy. I can barely believe that this is actually happening for real!


https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1341552935

It is great news. I live near Comanche Peak. They wanted to expand, but seem to have given up after Fuku. There is also a water problem since we're pretty arid here. Actually, this is one area where wind and solar almost work!

My pathetic attempt at satire aside, I would argue that the two Fuku workers were killed by the Tsunami and not as a consequence of nuclear power.

Well, if they hadn't had nuclear power they wouldn't have been in that basement now, would they? So it's a consequence of nuclear power.

/sarcasm

About ------' time! Nuclear is the most reasonable option for now and our immediate future.

The Commanche Peak application is still active- they simply revised the timeline. The schedule had to be pushed back because the US-APWR reactors that they're planning to install have not received Design Certification yet, and they want to wait for that so that they can use the CCOL process.

The US-APWR is a modification of an existing Mitsubishi design. It has a very high rated output (1.7 GWe per core), but is not quite as advanced as the AP-1000 design in terms of safety. It does feature considerable safety and redundancy improvements over the Gen II designs which compromise the majority of presently-operating reactors, though it's not capable of the completely autonomous, passive shutdown mode which the AP-1000 supports. It still requires some active controls to achieve a full shutdown, although the design of the accumulators means that it can survive brief losses of control and power without risk of damage even in the event of a "large break" accident (eg, the rupture of a main water line)- it's sort of like an Accusump, but on a rather larger scale.

The pressure vessel itself is also quite intelligently designed. Mostly just simple stuff (no penetrating connections below the level of the fuel rods, for instance), but it's the sort of thing that's been overlooked in the past.


Amusingly, you can Like the reactor on Facebook: US-APWR | Facebook

I believe two new reactors were approve here in AL for Brown's Ferry. I think we need significantly more nuclear power. If you're afraid of nuclear power, then you're a ----- ------!

But . . . being in a basement, by itself, isn't fatal. ;)

I sincerely hope this is the beginning of a positive trend in energy production/development. It's astounding just how much misinformation and fear-mongering has surrounded what is the nation's (world's) best hope for clean and long(er) term energy needs. Any time nuclear power comes up the casual conversation with my coworkers I find those that will logically debate its merits are few and far between. It's like trying to convince Christian zealots that the Earth is more than 6,000 years old. When I explain that there have been no new reactors in this country for over 30 years and that there has been in fact some level of technological progress in that time I can occasionally get a surprised "Oh."

Reading this actually brightened my day a bit. Thanks for the post, Joe.

Now if I could just put fuel in my car without selling everything I ------- own....

I guess I don't drive enough to be impacted by fuel costs. I set aside $240/mo for gas (I DD a 5 spd V8 Dakota ~ 15mpg) and always seem to come in under budget. But, like I said, I probably only drive 800 miles a month.

If you were unaware, Joe has a solution to this problem already. Have you seen his battery assisted bicycle?

Random thought:

Gasoline contains the equivalent of around 36.6 kwh / gal of total potential energy.

I'm averaging around 17 watt-hours per mile on the e-bike.

My bike gets the equivalent of 2,153 miles per gallon.

Suck it, Prius owners.

(For that matter, suck it Leaf owners, too.)

Total gasoline consumption this week: zero gallons actual, 4.38 ounces equivalent.

Holy crap, great news!!! Just in time for graduation :D

Now this is what I call a step forward towards addressing the energy crisis

318 powered Jeep, 13mpg
1.8L Protege, 25mpg
Distance from home to office: 10.7 miles, 8.8 of which are Interstate.
Time to work: 18 minutes from Key on to 8th floor elevator.

You can't do that on a bicycle, electric or not. I live in a city where public transportation basically doesn't exist and isn't possible to implement. You can't walk two blocks and hop on a train headed downtown and there is no practical method to local grocery or convenience stores. Two miles in any direction of my neighborhood is still neighborhoods, businesses few and far between.

My liberal friends would criticize and blame me for my own fuel consumption and financial hardships because I refuse to buy some fagggoty piece of crap electric car. Why should I have to take out a loan to buy such a piece of crap when both of the vehicles I daily drive are MINE, paid for in CASH?? The government thinks they can control any other free market business, yet they REFUSE to help with skyrocketing energy costs. There are some people in this country, hell, I know people in this city who 1. Can't afford to buy a "fuel efficient" vehicle, 2. Such a thing wouldn't be sufficient for their transpiration needs.

Irony:

My e-bike thread turned into a debate about nuclear power.

My nuclear power thread turned into a debate about e-bikes.




Honestly, this sounds a lot like where I live. Very little in the way of public transit, tons of freeway commuting, and no "downtown" area per se.

I'm not familiar with Overland Park, KS from a first-hand perspective, but judging from a quick Google Maps search, it does seem to have a great number of roads which are not Interstate highways, though I can certainly appreciate the inconvenience posed by the limited number of river crossings available if you are commuting towards the north.

So apart from the fact that it would take longer than 18 minutes, I can't imagine why you couldn't do this on a bike.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not judging you. I'm a car guy. I love owning cars, modifying cars, and driving cars. I sometimes drive purely for the enjoyment value, with no specific purpose or destination. I have no problem with your decision to drive a vehicle which you own outright for your daily commute, regardless of the monetary costs or the political, social and environmental harm caused by that choice. You have the right to own and drive a military-derived truck outfitted with a Chrysler V8 engine which gets 13 MPG to and from the office every single day, and I fully support this.

I once told my colleague that my ~300hp V8 BMW used less gas then her Prius.

But of course, my commute (when I don't bicycle), is 3.5 miles and hers is 15 miles!


Joe, do you know what the prognosis is for plants using Thorium?

It was 110 degrees here today, that has a LOT to do with it.. ;)

Google Bicycle directions says it would take me roughly 55 - 70 minutes by bicycle. Think another issue I'd have is security while I was working. Doubt my company would let me keep the bike in my office..

Yikes. From the house in Grandview I just bought, 2 hours each way..

How many miles on a road travelable by bike? If you can get their in a car door to door in 18 minutes, I can't see how a bike would be 50 minutes more, unless that's all at freeway speeds.

My current commute is as much highway as I can do, 19 miles, and 31 minutes.

A bicycle route is 16.7 miles, and if you can average 15-20 mph like joe said, that's only 57 minutes.

Sorry, I'm bored at work.

Says 10.8 miles on bicycle using side streets. Oddly, it's a very similar direct route to my highway drive, which is 10.7 miles, 8.8 of which are Interstate. Basically I drive a few blocks to a main street, about a mile and a half to I-35. Once I'm on 35 it's highway until I hit Broadway then it's about 7 blocks total. Have to go east a few lights to a north street, cross I-70, five blocks to a west street, two blocks, back south, and I'm in the garage..

Actually, this doesn't surprise me too much since they're tied together. Not just because electric, but due to the potential increased demand for power of e-transportation. Which brings up another issue...can our powergrid actually handle a significant increase in demand from, oh, say, 10% of daily commuters switching to plug-in vehicles?

A thought regarding pedaling to work. How many of you have shower/changing rooms/lockers at work? I break into a sweat just looking at my bike.

With the weather we've had outside I break into a sweat looking at the thermometer in my 60 degree house..

This is something I would actually consider if I had access to changing / shower facilities at the office. Except for the fact that I'd have to get up about now (3am) to get ready for work...

Ironically, you may have been even more correct than she realized, depending on y'alls driving habits.

It's a bit of a ludicrous example, but a couple of years ago Top Gear did an economy test in which they put both a Prius and BMW M3 onto the test track and ran ten laps. The Prius was driven in typical fashion as though it were being used to set a laptime, while the M3 was driven behind it at precisely the same speed- matching the Prius' performance exactly without overtaking it. The Prius returned 14.3 US MPG, while the M3 delivered 16.1 MPG.

Silly, I admit.

I honestly have no idea.

Both the US and Germany experimented with conventional Thorium reactors in the 60s and 70s, using a mix of Thorium and either U233 or U235 as the neutron source. They worked, but we seemed to lose interest, and they've all since been shut down. We apparently preferred to stick with the tried-and-true designs. It's a justifiable position, given that we've gotten pretty good and building and maintaining designs like the PWR and BWR.

India, which is sitting on a huge pile of thorium, has expressed some interest. They've got one 300MWe AHWR fast-breeder under construction at present, with five more planned. Makes sense, given their experience with the CANDU design.


In all of these designs, however, uranium is still used. Thorium, by itself, cannot sustain a reaction.


One of the most innovate reactor concepts which I have read about lately actually takes advantage of this fact. It's called a sub-critical reactor, and uses a fuel load comprised entirely of material (such as thorium) which, by itself, would be incapable of sustained fission. Instead, the reactor requires an external source of kick-start energy, which usually consists of a large accelerator which is used to shoot a stream of protons at the thorium, causing them to release neutrons and thus achieve criticality.

The most interesting feature of this system is that it is absolutely, 100% incapable of either a power excursion or accidental re-criticality.

A power excursion is what caused the Chernobyl explosion. In any self-sustaining reactor, there is a theoretical possibility that the reactor power may increase all by itself. In water-moderated reactors, this cannot happen unless the control rods are accidentally withdrawn, which has actually happened three times; once in 1961 at the SL-1 experimental reactor in Idaho (a plug actually shot out the top of the reactor and impaled a dude from groin to shoulder, pinning him to the ceiling- the only fatal reactor accident in the history US nuclear power),
once in 1968 aboard the Soviet submarine K-140 while the sub was in a yard for maintenance and the engineers hooked up the rod drive backwards, and again in 1985 aboard Soviet submarine K-314 as it, too, was undergoing yard maintenance and some retard pulled the lid off the reactor vessel with the rods still attached. (The Soviets had a long history of blowing up their own submarines. It's not pretty.)


At any rate, the reason that a rod-position excursion can't happen in a subcritical, accelerator-driven reactor is that there are no control rods in the first place. Power is modulated by varying the intensity of the accelerator beam. More beam energy = more proton bombardment.

So, what's typically the first thing that happens in any really serious nuclear accident? The power goes out. (In fact, this was the initiating event at both Fuku and Chernobyl.) If there's one thing a particle accelerator can't do without power, it's accelerate particles. So then the power goes out, the beam goes dark. Immediately. No active systems, no pressure accumulators, no waiting for rods to fall into place under the force of gravity. The sucker just turns OFF.


Same goes for Fuku-style accidents. One of the big concerns after the meltdowns occurred was re-criticality. In other words, once the fuel had melted and fallen to the bottom of the vessel, everyone was freaking out that it might spontaneously start up again. Absolutely, 100% impossible in a thorium-only system. No beam, no fission, regardless of what shape the fuel is in.


There are some downsides. Reactors of this design typically don't operate in water- they require either sodium or lead as their coolant. Molten metal sounds kind of scary, though it has the advantage of being able to operate at atmospheric pressure. The bummer is that if you ever let the lead cool down too much, you are now the proud owner of a gigantic, reactor-shaped block of solid lead. Sodium is a tad more forgiving in this regard, although pure sodium makes the word "flammable" seem inadequate. Remember the demonstration where your high school chemistry teacher dropped a tiny little chunk of sodium into a bowl of water? Multiply that by several million.

It can support a lot more than that, with a caveat.

The demand for electrical power is not a constant- it tends to follow a curve throughout the day.

There there is very little demand late at night and early in the morning. As people wake up and start taking showers and brewing coffee, the demand starts to rise. Demand peaks in the late afternoon when everyone comes home, cranks down the AC and starts playing videogames, and then it declines sharply as folks start going to bed.

As an example, here is today's (9 Jul 2012) power demand curve for the entire state of California:

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1341875068
https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1341875068

To illustrate how uniform this phenomenon is, here is today's data for Ontario, Canada:

Attachment 239907

(Wow- the whole of Ontario uses less power than we Californians. We're #1)


Now, a bit of background on how power generation is managed:

There are essentially two classes of power generation, excluding the "unreliable" sources such as wind and solar:

Baseload plants are the heavy-iron of the industry. These are the "big" plants with outputs rated in Gigawatts, which have a high fixed cost, but also a high availability and a low marginal cost. (eg: they cost a lot to build, but very little to run.) Nuke plants, coal plants, hydro plants, stuff like that. These plants typically run 24 hours a day at full output, and are not typically throttled down except for maintenance.

There's enough baseline capacity on the grid to fulfill the entire demand when demand is low. But during the higher-demand periods, the baseload plants aren't enough. That's where "peak demand" plants come into play.

Peakers are typically smaller plants which have either a high marginal cost or are incapable of being run continuously. Gas turbine plants fall into the former category (gas is expensive), while some hydro plants fall into the latter, either because they rely on water which has to be pumped up to a higher elevation during low-demand periods (using baseload energy to do so) or because they drain their reservoir faster than it can be replenished on a continuous basis.


There's not enough grid capacity for everyone to charge up during the day when demand is already high. So, sorry, but those trendy little public charging stations are non-sustainable.

There is, however, enough grid capacity for everyone to charge up at night. And in many areas, electrical power is actually cheaper at night, even for residential service. Any why wouldn't it be? The power is cheaper to make, since it's all coming from the plants that are cheap to run.

So even in the short-term, we have enough installed capacity to support overnight charging of a large number of EVs.

The problem, of course, goes back to the load curve. As more and more EVs start plugging in at night, that load curve is going to flatten out. We will find ourselves in a situation where our baseload capacity is no longer sufficient to supply the base load. This isn't going to cause blackouts or anything, it just means that the peakers will be running more and more, which is especially troublesome in light of the fact that most of them burn natural gas.


So there will be a transitional period in which overnight electrical rates rise, probably towards parity with daytime rates.

This is not a bad thing!

As soon as the load curve flattens, the concept of peak load will start to go away. It will become economically justifiable to build more nukes to supply our increasing base-load requirement, with the consequence that those periods which used to be considered peak hours will become more average. The baseload capacity which we install to cover the increasing overnight demand will also displace the requirement for having as much peak-generating capacity, so the overall trend will be towards less and less use of natural gas, less CO2 and other emissions, and cheaper electricity on the whole.


I can deal with that.




We have no showers at my office. This is why I let the motor do more of the work in the morning, so I can arrive at the office without being drenched in sweat.

In the afternoon, I take over, since I'm headed towards a shower anyway.

This is the sort of thing which really annoys me:

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1341938669
https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1341938669

That was printed in the San Diego Reader, which is one of those magazines that's distributed free, and contains an odd mix of well-written stories of community interest, listings of crappy concerts, and advertisements for medical marijuana.

For those who don't know, the San Onofre plant has been offline since nearly the beginning of the year. A couple of years ago they replaced the steam generators (heat exchangers which take primary water from the core and use it to boil secondary water which will turn the turbines) and as it turns out, Mitsubishi sold us a set of defective boilers.

Well, as an engineer I can attest that sometimes, stuff like that just happens.

But the way this article is written... What planet are these guys living on?

As someone who spent a considerable amount of time in the Air Force working around nuclear weapons, I get very annoyed when people can't understand criticality does not equal super-criticality.

I couldn't agree more about the nuke plant stuff.

However.... why all the hate for natural gas? It's the cleanest burning fossil fuel, prices have dropped a LOT recently, and we have tons of it in the US.

I think it's because the Prius had to waste a lot of energy going sideways on crappy ass MPG tires, and braking for the corners. I suspect that if sticky rubber and a stiffer suspension were put on said Prius, then driven to *make the same laptimes*, it would then beat the M3. lol

Or that a water leak inside the steam generators between the primary loop and the secondary loop will, at worst, cause a shutdown and some short-lived contamination of the turbine hall and condenser, but will neither:

• Release radiation into the atmosphere,
• Deprive the reactor of cooling, or
• Cause anything that could even be remotely construed as a catastrophe.

The fact of the matter is that over the 50 years or so that we've been generating commercial nuclear power, we've had a total of three really major failures. THREE.

One of them caused virtually no damage at all.

One of them was caused by a tidal wave bigger than Pusha's ego, and caused less than one-fifteenth the loss of life as the actual wave itself.

And one occurred in a Soviet reactor that was about as poorly designed as can be imaged, had no containment of any kind, and still caused less than one-third the number of fatalities (including all latent cancers projected out for 30 years) as cars do in the US alone in a single year.

Perspective, bitches. Learn it.


Like I said, it was silly.


No hate. Of all the fossil fuels presently available for commercial power generation, it's the least bad in terms of emissions, and the second least costly.

By the same token, gonorrhea is one of the least bad of the venereal diseases.

Wat?! You mean to say that some random wrong switch thrown on a console to the likes of which I've never seen won't cause some catastrophic event which results in this:

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1341969656

</Sarcasm>


Syphilis is no clapping matter, Joe...

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1342011165

Yes, Natural gas looks like it is indeed the second least expensive fossil fuel.

Im'a throw this graph up here too, just for shits and giggles:
https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1342011165

And it's definitely the cleanest burning fossil fuel:
https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1342011165

Will you make out with me? :makeout:

I'm not sure there's really any hate for natural gas, it's fantastic as a peak load fuel, but American's aren't willing to justify paying the difference in price vs. coal for the reduction in pollution right now.

I'm also still of the opinion that energy costs were/are the sole catalyst for our current economic situation. Government didn't necessarily put us here, they're just doing everything in their power to keep us here.

For what it's worth, one of your graphs uses natural gas at $4.00/mcf. It's trading below $3.00 after bottoming around $2.00 recently. I think $4.00 is not unreasonable as a future expectation, just pointing that out.

Also, there has been a significant switch from coal to natural gas over the past couple of years. EIA data showed a new record in coal-to-gas switching in April of 2012 and natural gas now makes up a higher percentage of power generation than (I believe) it ever has.

I'll try to find the numbers, but it is getting close to parity with coal.

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1342015223

They just hit parity.

They should have one face as upside down frown.

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1342015570

How old is the info?

Also, the posted fuel cost info obviously don't include the amortized capex. I wonder what would happen to wind and solar.

Hard to say what the amortized cost would be- what length of time would you amortize over? At this point, we don't have a large dataset on the expected lifespan of current generation wind turbines and solar-thermal plants.

Even nukes would be hard to quantify, as many of the nuke plants in the US have already received license extensions to operation beyond their original design-basis lifetime, albeit at the cost of significant refurbishment (replacement of vessel heads, steam generators, backup systems, main coolant pumps, etc.)

And do coal plants even have a lifetime? We've got a lot of stations in the US which have been operating since the 1940s and 50s, with no end in sight.


I really loved the "GHG emissions"chart with fooger03 posted:

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1342011165

A while back, someone had noted that my e-bike was not actually 100% emissions-free, even when being charged from San Onofre. Granted. But who knew that our friendly local nuke plant had a lower total greenhouse footprint than an equivalent wind-turbine farm or hydroelectric dam? And, mind you, this data was complied by a bunch of hippies (literally) who call themselves Lotus Live and espouse "positive sustainability". You can bet that they didn't intentionally skew that data in favor of fission.

Suck on that, anti-nuke crowd.

How old is what info? NYMEX spot pricing on US natural gas? My info is "current." It's technically at $2.82 as of 2:23 PM.

EIA spot pricing chart

No, fooger's data that NG is $4/mcf.

As another negative, there was a big article in our local paper today about how much the three active projects in the US are all over budget and how it could impact future builds. I knew the slant that was coming when it opened as "As the first new nuclear plant construction in over a decade..."

I guess technically 34 years is in fact "over a decade".

It's important to consider this in perspective, of course.

What's the significance of 3 or 4 billion dollars spent on something which will last 40 years or more, as compared to the amount of money and lives which will be saved by offsetting the need for fossil-fuel generation over that entire period?

These articles talk about a couple of billion dollars like it's a big deal.

Some people can give away a trillion without thinking anything of it and got nothing in return so yeah, a billion that will actually save lives and money really is nothing in the grand scheme of things.

The chart say 2011 pricing and $4/mcf seems like a reasonable annualized average (without actually having crunched the numbers myself).

Hasn't this number shrunk recently?

You are confusing the hell out of me in this thread, Jason. :confused:

Has what number shrunk recently? The price of natural gas?


Are you intentionally messing with me? :squint:

Not messing, I get the impression teh price of nat gas has shrunk recently from the $4 figure. I'm asking because I'm thinking of doing the same thing you suggested, buy UNG.

Either your reading comprehension [when not reading something from Mises.org or an anarchocapitalist website] is getting worse or you are messing with me. Based on the cat in your signature, I suspect the latter.

Alternative conspiracy theory is that you and Codycord are being intentionally dense to undermine discourse.

Never mind, I mixed up "cost to produce" as in "cost to suck out of the ground", and "price on the market". You just assume I'm purposely being obtuse. :rolleyes:
Short answers is what happens when I reply on my handheld.

I figured it was something out of the ordinary as you generally lack the sort of humor (on this board, that I have seen) that would be involved in "bazinga!-ing" me in such a manner and you are normally not the type to make such simple oversight mistakes (repeatedly). [backhanded compliment]

More progress!

The Washington, D.C., Circuit Court of Appeals has unanimously rejected a petition by the anti-human group "Southern Alliance for Clean Energy" to halt the Vogtle expansion. Construction progresses unimpeded.


BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!

Additionally, the NRC has granted a combined operating license to South Carolina Electric & Gas, authorizing the construction of TWO MORE AP1000 REACTORS, identical to the new Vogtle units, at the V.C. Summer nuclear plant just north of Columbia, SC. (V.C. Summer presently operates a single Westinghouse PWR reactor, rated at 1000 MWe. V.C Summer units 2 and 3 are scheduled to commence operation in 2017 and 2018, respectively.


I can barely wrap my head around the fact that after 35 years, America's nuclear renaissance appears to actually be happening.

At the same time that huge amounts of fossil fuels have become accessible domestically. This combination could have such amazingly positive implications for the future of the USA, I hesitate to consider them all for fear of jinxing it.

So what you're saying is we're the only country in the world not shitting themselves and canning nuclear power because of Fuskushima? My god, we're somehow smarter than the Germans for once...

We need to keep building these things. Everywhere. It's the first step toward the energy independence we all know is coming in a couple hundred years when the oil gets too scarce/expensive.

It will happen if you leave the market alone.

BTW we don't need "energy independence" any more than we need "avocado independence" or "tantalum capacitor independence". Just get the politics out of free trade and leave the market alone.

We are avocado-independent, and at last check we weren't engaging in wars to ensure the uninterrupted flow of tantalum capacitors, nor tracking the retail cost of tantalum capacitors as a barometer of economic health and consumer confidence.


But you're right- we don't need to be 100% energy-independent. We just need to stop running a trade deficit. Energy-independence would be one step towards achieving that goal.


This is so wrong it barely merits a response.

What does "leave the market alone" mean? Stop regulating it? That principle results in corruption, crime and de-facto rule-by-warlord when applied to everyday goings-on (see Syria, Mogadishu, Somalia, Russia in 1918-1919, etc)

Are you familiar with The Prisioner's Dilemna?

Complete and total deregulation of all industry and commerce in the US would result in almost instantaneous and total economic collapse, and for the same reasons.


Also, I consider it thread-crapping when anyone attempts to latch onto any conversation and steer it in the direction of a specific political agenda. In fact, it's more than thread-crapping- it's downright trolling.

I did not intend a sidetrack. It was more of a "there won't be any oil left so we'll need to handle our own energy needs" statement. Globalization is a good thing IMHO.

Anyways, back to the nukes. Has the voting population figured out that if we can run reactors on underwater stealth tubes of freedom safely that we can do it on land safely?