I would also say they aren't easy targets at all. Security around even traditional power plants is pretty tight and more so around NPPs. Ofc ourse, that's in the US. I can't speak to other countries in that regard. For all I know, Brandislavistan (made up country) may let anyone walk into any where in their country and do whatever they want...

I don't have time to read that now but, regarding the spent fuel -
Thorium has a lower atomic number than uranium so fewer transuranics are generated (Am, Cm, Pu - the stuff that keeps the spent fuel radioactive for a long time).

In that sense, yes, thorium reactors do produce safer waste.

i'm Dutch and 13 years old, last year i was expected to know what words like yes and no mean, this year it's a bit higher of course but we don't make sentences on school longer then "I walk to school" so in short it's not my fault my English isn't perfect yet... :)
(didn't feel offended though, i just find it so hard to keep it by "Dutch" :))
(the reason i speak it pretty well is that i've been in England a few times (2/3, not sure :)) and just listened well so that's why i'm not sure or i write things right and things like that)
anyway, back to the NPPs; Draugnar; that's exactly my point, no way only the US can have them, and before you know it they're in Mexico where everybody saying they don't want to plant a bomb but just want to have radiated drugs (if you're a terrorist, please don't tell my name to the cops for the great idea of radiated drugs...) and then you do plan a bomb and away goes Mexico...
i did blow it up a bit (do i say that right?) but you get what i mean...

also, notice this could also happen when they build the building right wich is doubtful in Mexico...

But steephie, there are supergovernmental watchdog agencies (like the UN's AEC) that do what needs to be done to keep radioactive material out of the hands of countries ill-equiped to handle the security of it. And even if the civilized world agreed that the risk of terrorists getting ahold of the material was too great, there are plenty of nations developing their own enrichment programs despite hte world's objections to their programs. Additionally, even if we did away with the reactors completely, the material is already out there. You can't put Schrodinger's cat back in the box.

Oh, and don't apologize for your English. As a second language for your age, you do wuite well over all.

"you do wuite well over all"

Better than Draug, that's for sure.

LOL! OK, so my typos got me. the sentiment still applies. I think Steephie does quite well for a 13 year old Dutch citizen.

lol, i think i'm never called "citizen" before...

Nuclear power is horribly inefficient and a big waste of resources. It involves a huge amount of concrete, ore mining and processing of uranium, and the storage of waste requires fossil fuels (not to mention it emits radiation). Waste has to be shipped by truck to places like Yucca mountain away from any water of tectonic activity, and has to go through densely populated areas on the way. Many of our waste facilities are leaking. Waste remains radioactive for thousands of years.

It requires big start up costs, subsidies from the government, in order to produce. And the cost of energy is usually heavily subsidized itself. It is not profitable without government support, which is ironic considering some of the people here who support it. It takes 20 years to build one and 10 years to decommission one, and they only operate really for a few decades without being serious (and by serious I mean catastrophic) safety risks. Some nuclear power plants were constructed and never even operated, at huge expense to the public. The reason why it was opposed was because the only possible "evacuation" plan for the people living there was across the Long Island Expressway.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoreham_Nuclear_Power_Plant

Furthermore, companies were granted limited liability for accidents (which cost billions and billions of dollars) because otherwise they can't afford insurance on their generators. The government also has to pay for disposing waste, the companies don't.

It's just like the banks. The nuke companies get all the benefits and the taxpayer pays all the costs and face all the risk.

@Putin

The Small NPPs (I forget their name) that are currently being designed are much less expensive and take less time to build.

All of your other issues are policy issues. I'm not arguing that they aren't important, but they have nothing to do with the actual technology of NPP and can thus be changed.

Putin, it's more than reasonable to be against nuclear power but I think you may be off base with some of your understanding.

First, about the consumption of resources in a nuclear plant -
Obviously, the ideal is some mythical plant that runs on minute amounts of unobtainium . Unfortunately, we need to face the realities of living in an energy consuming society. The life cycle carbon emission of nuclear plants is comparable to the renewable and way way less than fossil fuel plants. Uranium consumption is an issue but not an insurmountable one. There is plenty of it for the time being as well as alternative fuels like thorium or reprocessed spent fuel. The mining practices of the uranium companies are the most revolting part of the industry. However, bad mining practices are not an intrinsic property of nuclear power and should be dealt with separately.

Regarding spent fuel -
There are many places to store spent fuel. Yucca mountain had many flaws to it but it is not the only option. Storing the fuel is an engineering problem, but not one that is insurmountable. The fuel will stay radioactive for many thousand years. However, if it appropriately disposed, it will not be released. Beyond the engineered barriers, actinides are very immobile so their transport to surface is on a scale of many half-lives. From the Oklo 'reactor', we have evidence of how spent fuel acts under the worst possible conditions (flowing water and no engineered barrier).

Transporting radioactive material has no adverse effect on the population it travels through so I do not consider an issue.

Regarding cost -
Yes, this is an issue. Unfortunately, the cheapest solutions are fossil fuel plants. If we want to get away from them, we need other options.

Abg, I'd be interested to know how small NPPs are cheaper. As a rule of thumb, bigger plants are cheaper (hence why they keep getting bigger).

@Yonni - May I ask what you do for a living? Your knowledge is astounding. And I mean that in a positive way. My knowledge of nuclear power is limited to what I can glean from the net and my plutonium and uranium knowledge comes from writing software to analyze data that helped the engineers clean up Fernald back in the early 90s.

Crap, clicked send by accident...

Anyhow, your knowledge is clearly far superior to my own and it sounds like you may be in the field.

I just finished my masters in nuclear engineering (and by just finished, I mean I sent my thesis submission sheets yesterday) and I'll be starting work for a nuclear company in December. So, yeah, my biases show a bit but I chose the industry because I believe it in and not visa versa.

@Yonni

I don't know if they are cheaper per MW, but they are cheaper per plant. This means the initial investment is significantly less, even if you technically don't get as much "bang for your buck"

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf33.html

"I just finished my masters in nuclear engineering"

LOL Well fuck me. OK, I'm sure you know more about it than I : )

"I don't know if they are cheaper per MW, but they are cheaper per plant"
Yeah, that makes sense. Smaller plants have been an idea that's been kicking around for a while I think. Even mobile ones that you can transport to countries after disasters. Their are many great applications for them but they just cost too much per MW for the real players to be interested in.

Agreed

My point was only that they don't *have* to take 2 decades and a government subsidy to build.

Wind power generates billions in private investors and is growing bigger every year, what is nuke getting? Why aren't they getting any private investment? It's easy to operate in a land of hypotheticals, but in the real world nuclear power has been a disaster.

Also, what was your Master's like? Would you say it was more of a technical degree or more of a theoretical degree?

I ask because one of my professors got a PhD in Nuclear Physics and he complained that the field was much too technical. That isn't to say that technical degrees aren't important. Running a Plant is very complicated and requires significant practical knowledge. But, as an academician, I guess he was disappointed that it was too practical and not enough theory to do new work.

Thoughts?

*investment

@Putin

Yes, Wind Power is great and should be heavily invested in.

However, there are 2 big problems that I don't see a solution to:

1) They kill bats by messing up their sonar. With bats already on the decline from that crazy fungus, we really can't afford to lose more of them.

2)Wind cannot produce a constant supply of energy. We need to have a baseline of constant energy at all times. Wind, Solar, etc are great for extra energy, but we still would need traditional plants. That's where NPP come in--to replace coal. Wind and Nuclear solve different energy problems.

@Putin -
Wind is not a viable alternative for producing the massive base-load that your country needs. Not financially or technically. Nuclear and wind are not competitive technologies. Rather, they're complimentary.

@ abg,
It's technical in the sense that I'm running simulations on a computer but it's definitely not an experimental thesis in the real sense. To tell you the truth, I was a little dismayed at how unimportant the thesis felt. It seemed very much like an undergrad or high school assignment where you're just doing it to show that you're capable of doing something. I got the feeling that most of the profs would prefer to spent their time with PhD students, not masters

Wind is going to be 40% of Nebraska's overall energy production, and that's without significant energy storage. http://nepower.org/Wind_Study/final_report.pdf

But anyway that wasn't the point. The point is abg's hypothetical of nuclear power not needing massive government support is just that. The fact is private investors aren't investing in nuclear.

Anyway if we can imagine a world where nuclear power is cheap and low risk, then certainly we can imagine transmission systems that can integrate wind power to make it the base load.

@Putin

Those are very different problems to solve. I'm not a Power Systems Engineer, but the Grid is a very complicated Control System. Managing it even with relatively constant sources of Energy is very, very hard. Managing it with non-constant sources of energy is incredibly hard. Like anything else, it's not impossible, but I don't think it's an easier problem to solve.

I'd encourage someone to double check these numbers, because they seem a bit extreme, but:

The Intensity of a NPP is around 2.5MW/m^2

The Intensity of a Wind Farm is around 344W/m^2

If my back-of-the-envelope calculations are correct, a NPP has an Intensity orders of magnitude larger than a Wind Farm.

Where are we going to put all these wind farms if that's all we use?

If someone could invent a working fusion reactor, nuclear power would get a whole lot cleaner.
@Putin33
If you think radiation leaks are a problem, read this
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/10/visions-now-next#/next