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Yes, dear, that’s a Nuclear Power Reactor They’re Building Next Door
Better drag your leisure suits, bell bottoms, and Bee Gee’s records out the attic. The seventies are about to make a comeback.
The nuclear industry, which has been comatose since the accident at Three Mile Island in 1979, is gearing up for one of the greatest comebacks of all time. There is absolutely no way we can deal with our impending energy crunch without a huge expansion of our nuclear capacity, which sits at a lowly 20% of our total power generation. France has already achieved 85%, followed by Sweden at 60% and Belgium at 54%, and the last time I checked, none of these Europeans were glowing in the dark.
Unless you’re an underpaid nuclear engineer toiling sway in total obscurity at some university, you are probably unaware how far the technology has moved ahead in the last 30 years. Generations I and II produced the aging “joint use” behemoths we now see on coasts and rivers, which generated both electricity and atomic weapons, but could potentially melt down if someone forgot to flip a switch. Think Chernobyl. Generation III has spent decades trapped on the drawing board.
There are over 100 Generation IV designs, and many are certain to get built. The most popular is known as a “pebble reactor,” which relies on a new form of fuel embedded in graphite tennis balls cooled with helium that is just hot enough to generate electricity, but too weak to allow a disaster. Also known as a Very High Temperature Reactor (VHTR), these plants operate hot enough to enable a 50% increase in thermal efficiencies. The built in safety of the design let’s you eliminate many redundant backup systems, cutting costs. No surprise that the only operating prototype is in China. Low grade waste can be stored on site, not shipped to Nevada or France. Other feasible designs include using thorium fuels, fast neutron reactors, and liquid lead, sodium, or salt cooling variants. Beam me up, Scotty! Plants are also about to get a lot smaller too.
Speeding the resurrection of this once dead industry is some cheerleading from none other than the same demonizing, apocalyptic environmentalists that shut the industry down in the seventies (remember Jane Fonda in The China Syndrome?) That is helping shorten the permitting process from 15 years to four by confining new construction to existing facilities instead of green fields. Nuclear generates no carbon dioxide, an important consideration if we’re all about to suffocate on the stuff. Each new nuclear plant will take one or two of our 400 coal fired pants offline. Do you think they noticed that there has not been one nuclear death in the US since the sixties, while tens of thousands died globally in coal mining disasters or from the black lung that follows. And I’m not even counting millions of respiratory illnesses brought on by ubiquitous air pollution. That’s why at least 30 new reactors are expected to start construction in the US over the next five years, and over 100 in China.
There is a great equity play here, and I would use any substantial dip in the market to scale in. The Market Vectors Nuclear Energy ETF (NLR), which at one point was up an impressive 78% from its March low to $25, is the easiest way in. You can also buy its largest components, like Cameco (CCJ) (click here for their website at http://www.cameco.com/investors/ ), the world’s largest uranium producer, which has seen its stock clock a nice double this year. And while you’re at it, you might start practicing your “hustle” once again.
For more iconoclastic and out of consensus analysis, please visit www.madhedgefundtrader.com .
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I believe France stores it's waste in country using a process called "vitrification" whereby the waste is crystallized/solidified into a solid mass and safely stored underground. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meuse/Haute_Marne_Underground_Research_Laboratory
Thank you for the link. However, that article seems to indicate they study storing waste there, but does not say any waste is stored there.
However, they do apparently store some waste in Siberia. Is that in France?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/oct/13/edf-nuclear-waste-france-russia
This morning a solar fusion furnace of immense size breaks the horizon (unless you are living north of 66 degrees) and sets in the evening - we are living in a radioactive universe but are still here , I think we can sustain some low level radioactive waste for some time.
Tell it to these people:
Air polluted by material from the Hanford site traveled throughout Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and even into Canada. Further contamination filtered into the food chain via contaminated fields where milk cows grazed; hazardous fallout was ingested by communities who consumed the radioactive food and drank the milk. Another source of contaminated food came from Columbia River fish; their impact was disproportionately felt by Native American communities who depended on the river for their customary diets. The estimate of those exposed to radioactive contamination due to living downwind of Hanford or ingesting food or water that flowed downstream is as high as 2 million.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders
Ok 2 million people were exposed to radiation - what were the fatalties
People are exposed to risk everyday ,it is part of life but you need to quantify the risk before you make a rational decision
Drinking radioactive milk is not everyday risk, part of life. It's a byproduct of nuclear plants that may be two states away about which people were never warned. Pretty hard to quantify risks you don't know about, eh?
Now drink your strontium 90.
Hanford is a mess. Interestingly, it is a government-run mess, so right off there's a lesson there. Point two, it predates environmental controls of any sort and is a government dumping ground for byproducts of government reactors and weapons / research. Comparing Hanford to a modern power station and saying "SEE!" is just plain silly; but I think you already knew that.
I thought I was going easy on the nuke power gang because I didn't bring up Three Mile Island, but maybe not.
The bottom line is that we have (at least) three major disasters with nuclear power in the last thirty years. That is not a good safety record for an industry that can poison hundreds of miles of land.
Even setting the safety issue aside, there is no way to deal with the waste. The French, which the pro-nukers hold up as a glowing (yuk,yuk) example dump it wherever they can outside Europe and hope no one notices. Piles of it are rusting and leaking all over parts of the US too.
Your "disaster" at TMI was an economic disaster to be sure. But that was all. And, signficantly, it was a "disaster" at a location in close prox to significant population. What's your other disaster, Chernobyl? I've studied it, have you? There are so many differences between the RBMK1000 and any U.S. plant that only a rube would compare them, so I will assume you weren't going to use it as an example.
Radioactive releases from coal burning (many sources available, but you already knew that): http://tyronecoal.com/radioactive.php
Total fuel-cycle radioactivity exposures for U.S. citizens due to nuclear are estimated to be about 1/3 of those that come from coal-fired release of radioactivity.
What's your plan?
Believe it or not when you burn coal you can release a large amount of radioactive material (depending where you dig it up from)
This on top of the more serious danger of respiratory illness would suggest there is a danger in almost every human activity - on balance I think the French are glad to have finished with coal and have also gained a measure of energy independence which if we all pursued would reduce the pressure in the Pursian Gulf
I live in a area where large amounts of Radon gas is produced from natural decay of the elements under my house and yet I am still in the land of the living
Alpha and Beta are Ok but I draw the line at Gamma ,its not my taste
correction to above I just learned through the magic of the internet (we are all geniuses now) that strontium 90 is a strong Beta emitter ,betas can do a bit of damage when Inside a organism.
I wouldn't expect a non industry source to be entirely accurate, however this statement is too much to overlook:
"Generations I and II produced the aging “joint use” behemoths we now see on coasts and rivers, which generated both electricity and atomic weapons, but could potentially melt down if someone forgot to flip a switch."
The 104 commercial nuclear generating stations do not produce atomic weapons. They only produce elctricity. Weapons grade material in the US is produced by purpose built reactors operated by the DOE & DOD. The "Joint Use" reactors you allude to are used by Russia (RMBK design).
Does the U.S.A. even have a company that makes nuclear reactors anymore? I thought that G.E. sold that unit to the Japanese years ago?
Curtiss-Wright (CW) makes a lot of the components and replacement parts.
Good article.
GE merged its nuclear unit with Hitachi which is the only company that can design built and operate the approved ABWR design nuclear Plant.
Good move GE, that may save your financing unit from going under. (LOL)
If you are reading this GE, why don't you finance your own projects with all the billions of loan guarantees that Obama and your friends in Congress are about to hand out?
BTW: If you promise to build them with union labor, your finance arm will definitely go under.
If you build them with non-Union labor, more than just your finance arm will go under. As if the Government would permit that. Oracle of Ass-hat.
GE's nuclear unit has merged with Hitachi. Hitachi is the only company in the world that can design built and operate ABWR design nukes, using modules to save construction costs.
Good move GE, this may save your financial unit from going under.
If you are reading this GE, why don't you finance your own projects with the billions of loan guarantees that your friends in Congress are about to hand you.
Yes, GE sold alot of technology to Toshiba but I do not know if they gave up manufacturing rights on it. I know Westinghouse Nuclear is owned by Toshiba. Toshiba is the fastest growing turbine supplier to the US right now, and I believe their turbines supply the most MW right now as well.
Yes, GE sold alot of technology to Toshiba. Also, Westinghouse Nuclear is owned by Toshiba. Toshiba is the fastest growing turbine supplier to the US right now, and I believe their turbines supply the most MW right now as well.
This might help:
http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/col/new-reactor-map.html
http://hyperionpowergeneration.com
Note that there are no proposed nuclear power plants west of Utah.
Why stop at using nuclear fission for electricity generation - working nuclear thermal rockets were tested in Nevada during the late sixties but the project was cut by the Nixon administration which put money towards the ill fated Space Shuttle project instead - which was a Bastard design with Quasi Military backing.
The NEVERA rocket programme had a projected double the Specific impulse of the best chemical rockets and also far more thrust then present solar ion propulsion.
It was envisioned that the first flight tests would be on the upper stage of Saturn V rockets and this would have made sustained colonisation and mining of the solar system possible.
"Why don't we solve our little problems and light this candle"
Screw uranium...
We need THORIUM!
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/ff_new_nukes/
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2005/07/68045
http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com/
If the US reactor fleet could be converted to LFTRs overnight, existing thorium reserves would power the US for a thousand years.
Thanks for the heads up dnarby!
(Not every day I learn something new...)
This is the energy technology that can fuel an actual recovery.
We can keep burning oil for some transport, but thorium can be used for shipping, rail, and electric cars.
Eventually the eletricity generated can be used to convert natural gas into syngas, etc.
I feel like that guy in "The Graduate".
Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: THORIUM!
Benjamin: Just how do you mean that, sir?
Mr. McGuire I SAID THORIUM, BITCHES! (Slaps Benjamin) YAAAA!
Uh... I think that was plastic dnarby... as in credit cards!