Nuclear ground-orbit vehicle

[DAT]

Originally Posted by Langy

Not anymore. It's looking very, very likely that we'll start building some new nuclear power plants rather soon. It's one of those Environmentalist/Get Ourselves Off Of Oil initiatives that politicos have been harping out for the past year or so.

Believe construction (site prep at this point) has started on one in Georgia. Another one in MD should start within the year, and there are a couple more in the 18 month window.

[DAT]

Originally Posted by theshadow99

Really this was just one within the US that went critical (three mile island), a few others with issues, and Russia's Chernobyl disaster... Oddly I learned the other day that they don't even teach why the US has stagnated on nuclear energy for the last 30 years, when a 2nd year political science major asked me what I was talking about when I said that nuclear energy had stagnated in the US... Though this is a repeated problem, the Hindenburg ended Blimps for around 70 years. Both are things we've rethought in the last decade, slowly realizing they weren't so bad.

The problem wasn't that TMI Unit 2 'went critical', nuclear fission reactors go critical to operate. The problem was that TMI had a loss of coolant accident and a portion of the core melted. When the fuel in the core melted, the fission products were released into the primary coolant. The radioactive fission products were spread into the containment building and into the secondary coolant. When the plant had to make a controlled vent to lower the containment building, a relatively small amount of radioactive steam was released. A measure of the radiation levels were made at the outlet of the stack and at the edge of the plant site. Due to the distance and air dispertion between the points, the radiation level at the plant site boundary is a thousand time or more less than the radiation levels measured at the stack outlet. When someone made the major goof of reporting the value from the stack as the value from the plant site boundary, a mandatory evacuation was called. By the time someone who knew an evacuation wasn't needed, it was too late.

That was probably more than what you wanted to know about the TMI accident.

[theshadow99]

Originally Posted by DAT

That was probably more than what you wanted to know about the TMI accident.

Actually I knew all that... It just doesn't mean much to most people... So I didn't go into detail. ^^

Still... on the topic of new plants... I'll believe when I see it... I've seen people fight against them my entire life and even recently in my own area... People are dumb and don't care that coal and oil power plants do more damage to them and the environment, they just see nuclear and go 'nuclear = bad'...

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by theshadow99

Still... on the topic of new plants... I'll believe when I see it... I've seen people fight against them my entire life and even recently in my own area... People are dumb and don't care that coal and oil power plants do more damage to them and the environment, they just see nuclear and go 'nuclear = bad'...

People oppose new oil and coal plants too. They want something for nothing, and you can always get a crowd to oppose a cost and demand the benefit anyway, regardless of the cost/benefit ratio.

[theshadow99]

Originally Posted by malloyd

People oppose new oil and coal plants too. They want something for nothing, and you can always get a crowd to oppose a cost and demand the benefit anyway, regardless of the cost/benefit ratio.

Well in my area (as I said earlier) people choose a experimental used tire burning plant (from a startup company) over a nuclear plant (from the power company). Sure some people complained about the used tire burning plant, but nothing was done about it. The Nuclear plant however got to picking sites and then the uproar killed the project...

That's without states like California that would have to repeal anti-nuclear laws. Which has been argued about for 3 years as I remember it... So far without success.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by theshadow99

Well in my area (as I said earlier) people choose a experimental used tire burning plant (from a startup company) over a nuclear plant (from the power company). Sure some people complained about the used tire burning plant, but nothing was done about it. The Nuclear plant however got to picking sites and then the uproar killed the project...

This is largely an issue of jurisdiction size. The tire burning plant doesn't have a large enough protest radius to reach the scale size necessary to swing an election of the body approving it. I have seen a garbage incinerator killed by neighborhood protests, the fools sited it too close to a neighborhood of people rich enough to make contributions to statewide campaigns.