traxiii
Mustang is my middle name
They all have containment structures, unlike Chernobyl, but that has nothing to do with what is being designed out there now. Nuclear is the answer. New techniques and technologies are being developed and deployed, unfortunately, mostly by other countries, not the United States. If we took half the money we have given faux-green, solar and wind in subsidies, and spent it on research and deployment of new nuclear technologies, we would be well on our way to a truly clean energy source. These include reactors that use spent fuel from older tech. reactors for fuel, and are safe and stable. Check out the writing of former anti-nuke activist Michael Shellenberger and his group Environmental Progress. Read up on Thorium, Molten Salt reactors and more. The answer to the power problem is there, it just needs funding, but the "greenies" and the establishment would rather take away our choices and give our money to their cronies.There's no reason to assume diesel fuel supply would be interrupted in a grid blackout, but if you want to consider it, sure. The plant I worked at had somewhere around a quarter of a million gallons of diesel stored onsite, in underground tanks. We had enough to run every diesel generator on site for weeks at full loading. Our backup pumper truck could get water up to the fuel pool for weeks with the amount of fuel we had for it, especially considering you wouldn't need to run it constantly to keep water levels high enough.
I'm not sure what our makeup rate was, and I haven't worked there in a few years now, but it wasn't much. All we had to deal with was evaporation. I doubt anyone turned the pumps off just to see what would happen, that sort of thing can get you in trouble with the NRC.
I'm not sure what you included this graph for, it's not particularly illuminating. Yes, spent nuclear fuel generates waste heat for some time after it's pulled from a reactor. It is low enough within a couple of years that the fuel no longer needs any form of active cooling, and it can be removed from the pool, placed in dry cask storage, and left on a concrete pad until, as you put it earlier, the heat death of the universe. A good rule of thumb for decay heat is that for fuel that was just in a reactor, or still is in the event of a shutdown, is the decay heat in the fuel will be about 10% of the full power of the reactor. So if you have a 1000MW reactor and shut it down the fuel will continue to put out about 100MW of heat.
As a final note I find it hard to believe you've researched anything about nuclear power when you say something to the effect of "all the plants going critical at the same time, and no way to stop it". All criticality means in a reactor is that the power level is exactly stable, or more accurately that the neutron population inside the reactor is not increasing or decreasing. When the reactor is shutdown it's dropped to a really low level and is decreasing slowly but steadily, and is called 'subcritical'. When the neutron population is increasing, like when you change power levels in the operating reactor, the reactor is supercritical, and this is only bad when it's not intended or controlled. Chernobyl blew up because they went extremely supercritical and the reactor changed power extremely quickly and to far too high of a level, causing a steam explosion in their core.
Every U.S. reactor is capable of being shutdown, and therefore subcritical just by inserting all of their control rods. There's no feasible situation where a U.S. reactor can go critical and have no way of stopping it from a grid power loss.
In the mean time there is well over 50 years worth of oil and 100 years worth of natural gas in known reserves, and more found every year, with only a fraction of the earth being explored. We have plenty of time to develop these technologies if we spend money on the right things.
Sponsored
Last edited: