Is it a good idea to build more nuclear plants?

Paul Tosto December 26, 2011, 5:00 AM Dec 26, 2011

Federal officials recently approved a new nuclear reactor design that could lead to the first U.S. nuclear plant construction in decades.

Today’s Question: Is it a good idea to build more nuclear plants?

About the blogger

Paul Tosto

ptosto@mpr.org

Paul Tosto is an editor for MPR News.

Gary

Yes, it must be part of a balanced solution.

Nukes work when the sun doesn’t shine and when the wind doesn’t blow/

With today’s advanced technology, safety and efficiency are much improved.

Wind and solar make everyone feel good, but they can never be more than a supplement to our power system.

John

Yes, they are the key to fulfilling our long-term energy needs.

Nuclear power produces virtually no emissions, so it satisfies the green lobby in that sense.

Wind and Solar are only capable of producing a fraction of the electricity we need. The Minnesota landscape would have to be blanketed with turbines and solar panels (and their accompanying high tension power lines) to produce even 10-15% of our power.

Nuclear power is by far cheaper than any of the other “clean” options.

Safety concerns are over-blown. Fukishima was hit with a once in ten generations tsunami and it has not released enough radiation to cause one death. That’s an absolute worst case scenario for a modern nuclear plant and it survived without catastrophic failure.

Sid

NO.

Not until a viable option is developed to dispose of nuclear fuel rods and nuclear waste.

The total after-effects of each nuclear disaster aren’t known until years after the event. Details of how Chernobyl changed life are still being gathered.

The idea we need to build huge generating plants needs to be replaced with the possibility of building small, local energy production sites via biomass, wind, solar and more. Not only does this create jobs, provide cleaner, local energy, but it also diminishes the possibility of a large-scale grid failure.

Gary F

http://www.washingtonpost.com/solyndra-politics-infused-obama-energy-programs/2011/12/14/gIQA4HllHP_story.html?hpid=z1
Bob the Engineer

Solar energy is a technology that has been in commercial production for 50 years. It is not much different in maturity from nuclear power. In that time there has been only one major technical innovation introduced into the marketplace – the use of CdTe thin films to replace the old silicon solar panels. This reduced the cost of solar panels at the expense of LOWER efficiency. There is very little potential for improvement in this mature technology, as efficiencies are limited by: 1) the fundamental properties of materials and: 2) the limited availability of the sun.

There is a lot of wishful thinking, however – if only this could be converted directly to electricity.
Rich

My god, people, learn some science.

Yes, the sun provides more than enough energy for our electric needs every day. The problem is it is diffuse. Hydro power is efficient because it can be stored, yes, but more importantly by channeling rain into rivers gravity and geography has concentrated a great deal of potential energy in one place where we can capture it. Millions of years ago, swamps full of organic material died and were converted to petroleum, nicely squeezed into compact and energy dense hydrocarbon molecules stored underground. Thank you ancient food web and geological processes for concentrating that energy. Nuclear power is a dense source, but only after you’ve concentrated the U-235 into fuel rods.

In contrast, while there is an enormous amount of radiative energy from the sun hitting the earth at any moment, the amount hitting each square meter is very small. There is an enormous amount of energy in the wind, but there is a very small amount hitting a given windmill. Directly harvesting wind and solar energy will always be hard because it is too diffuse. Storage is also a problem, but harvesting energy from a diffuse source will always be the hardest problem to overcome. Entropy is the enemy of renewable power, and entropy always wins (2nd law of Thermodynamics).

Having read the comments here, I am once again staggered by the scientific ignorance of some of the most educated people in our society.
Neely

Building new power plants – nuclear, coal or otherwise – is unnecessary. If we made our homes, businesses and government buildings more energy efficient, we wouldn’t need to build anything. ~60% of electricity generated in the US is lost in transmission, and even more lost through inefficient lighting, HVAC and behavior – building more power plants doesn’t do anything to stop that waste.
Rich

Nuclear reactors provide base load power, that is, steady, reliable power with low marginal cost (and high capital cost). Wind and solar provide intermittent power that depends on the weather. If you’re going to base more than 10% of your power in wind and solar you need to build standby power to replace it when the weather doesn’t cooperate. So please, when you campaigners for renewable power speak of your plans to install wind farms and solar farms, please remember to build matching natural gas plants which will sit idle 70% of the time and produce greenhouse gases the other 30%.
John P II

Yo Rich save your canned rants until later in the day, and check to see if anyone made any relevant comments first. The renewable energy campaigners you’re targeting haven’t really checked in yet.
B Obama

Depends on which decision will create more votes to get me reelected. My decision on new nuclear plants will be in the interest of me and only me.
Bob the engineer

The economics of nuclear power continue to be dismal. In contrast notably to wind and solar power, nuclear is the only technology with a negative learning curve: the more reactors are built around the world, the more expensive they become. In addition to the unforeseeable cost of building reactors, running them is so risky that insurance for the expected harm to third parties is not available other than in the form of government guarantees or liability waivers. No insurer would offer adequate cover. And no operator of nuclear plants has yet set aside enough money to cover the legacy cost of a reactor, and the storage of its wastes for centuries into the future.
Another wind bag

Right now there isn’t another better option for long term cost energy production than nuclear power. I agree that a new technology needs to be used to produce power with less emissions and less start up cost, but it doesn’t exist on a large scale yet and

All people hear about is the failures of nuclear technology caused by natural disasters, but they take for granted the energy they use every day from the nuclear reactors that work quite well.
Rich

@JP II, I am a chemical engineer. My comments are both accurate and based on the science of both nuclear and renewable energy.

Although I will give you points for sarcasm. I’m not sure that your snark is actually focused on the question of nuclear energy.
Steve the Cynic

Few topics have been more distorted by ideological demagoguery in the last 40 years than nunclear power. The way liberals rail against it with fear-mongering designed to appeal to uninformed public opinion is eerily similar to the way conservatives rail against the idea of single-payer medical care. Nuclear power is way less dangerous than coal. There’s less mining, and so less danger of mine accidents and less damage to the landscape. All the radiation ever released from all the nuclear power accidents that have ever happened has done less damage to the environment than the soot and sulphur and mercury and greenhouse gases, and even radiation (from radioactive carbon isotopes) that coal plants put out in a year when functioning as designed. But because people are irrationally afraid of radiation, and because ideologues manipuate that fear, it’s easier for protesters to halt construction of one nuclear plant than a hundred coal plants.
Another windbag

Our most effective solution is conservation and efficiency.
Jim B.

Yes.
Sid

Should we build more coal-fired power plants was not the question. If it was, my answer would also be no.

Do we take for granted the energy we are using every minute of every day? For sure. Just check in with us when we have a temporary power failure. We are not happy.

Do we build for the future with health, safety, sustainability in mind or do we build whatever’s cheapest and easiest now, who cares about our kids’ future? Do we rely only on mining of coal, drilling for oil because it’s there and it’s simple and the big money likes to do it? Or do we put forward a myriad of ideas to diversify our power sources and protect our environment? We need to go local for more than our food. We also need to pay attention to what other nations are doing and borrow their successful ideas for both conservation and energy production (their successes, not their failures).