Nuclear Power for Galena? (environment, attorney, health)

[maxwell26690]

thanks for all the posts people. what appears to be the main problem is Galena relys on hundreds of thousands of diesel being shipped up the yukon river in its 3-4 ice free months. At present Galena pays close to 30 cents per kilowatt hour for its electricity but a new reactor would reduce thgis 2 between 8 and 13 cents.

personally i cant see why anybody would be against the idea, especially Galena residents. However, the yukon river inter-tribal watershed council are the projects main opposers and have threatened to kill the project which could spell the end for the town of Galena.

in response to the comments on a melt down Toshiba have assured Galena that the chances of that happening are extremely slim.

Also, another possible problem with the reactor is the reactor uses liquid sodium instead of water to cool the reactor. This is because this generates steam of up 2 500 celcius which is used as energy as well.

keep posting!
Stuart

[Marty Van Diest]

Check this out. Nanosolar.com

They are claiming to be able to ship solar panels now. These are the lowest cost solar panels on the market and they believe they will be able ship them for less than $1 per watt. That would make them very efficient for sunny areas and even useful for Alaska.

I do know two different people currently using solar in Alaska. It's no good in mid-winter, but they tell me that from Feb-Oct they get usable power from their current technology which is not even close the efficiency of the new stuff.

[rotorhead]

Getting a FREE nuclear reactor is the best thing that could happen to that little berg. The model of power plant under consideration is one that is as close to maintenance free and idiot proof as it's possible to be, and will be completely encapsulated in an underground silo. The whole thing is hauled in as a unit, and hauled out as a unit once it's spent in ten years or so. Compared to the risks of hauling and burning literally millions of gallons of diesel fuel, it's a no brainer as far as risk to the environment goes.

As far as nuclear "waste" goes, keep in mind that our current generation of nuclear reactors use less than five percent of the potential energy available from each pound of uranium. We have deliberately crippled our ability to extract a more reasonable percentage of the energy potential in the name of nuclear non-proliferation, it's basically a political decision. At some point in the not-so-distant future, all that "spent" fuel sitting around is gonna be reprocessed and used again in "fast breeder" reactors, which extract far more usable energy while literally transmuting uranium to plutonium, which can then itself be used as fuel. Even the "depleted uranium" which we currently use as military anti-tank ammunition has an enormous amount of energy potential, provided that it's used in the right kind of nuclear reactor.

Regardless of what all the sky-is-falling nuclear nimbys would have you think, there really isn't such a thing as nuclear waste. It's all just potential fuel for a future generation of reactor.

[User 2]

Originally Posted by rotorhead

......there really isn't such a thing as nuclear waste. It's all just potential fuel for a future generation of reactor.

True, there is usable fuel in reprocessing 'spent' fuel rods,

...but to say there's no such thing as nuclear waste?

Even if you use all the U235 producing energy in a nuclear generation plant, what's left is not all plutonium or usable fuel, that is not all you have left.


Recycling the spent fuel means you dissolve the spent fuel pellets, which leaves you with the remaining uranium, plutonium and other fission products.

True, the uranium and plutonium can be re-used as fuel, but each step also leaves those other radioactive fissionable materials which have no 'use'.

That waste, although more concentrated, is still not anything that man has found a way to safely store.

Besides that waste, Hanford has literally tons of material that cannot ever be used as fuel, the waste generated from nuclear weapons production is not like spent fuel that can be 'reprocessed'.

Just the radioactive waste around Chernobyl will pose a problem forever.

Everything within the 'Zone of Alienation', (a 30 kilometer radius), is contaminated, huge construction cranes, bridges, buildings; everything is essentially nuclear waste. After the last 'cap' they tried to put over the site failed, they are now trying to figure out how to construct one huge sarcophagus in hopes of containing the worst of the worst.

....and everything sent in to work there has to stay, adding to the waste.

Chernobyl had a steam explosion, such could happen at other plants today.

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico is a 'landfill' for what's classified as low and midlevel waste, our only such depository.

Don't let the classification fool you, it will still be eons before it degrades.

Things like discarded materials from weapons plants, the dismantled machines used to make weapons, thousands and thousands of barrels of cutting oil saturated with uranium and plutonium. It's supposed to be able to handle 156,000 barrels, and barrels are how most waste arrives there. The rest is shrink-wrapped on pallets, hot metal parts, pipe, conduit, rubber, plastic cellulose, wiring, even all the shoes, gloves and clothing that is contaminated from various sites.

All this radioactive waste is buried in a cavern, the exhaust shafts radiate plutonium 239, and no one knows how all these materials will react when they start to mix as they eventually will. The 'scientists' say there's going to be enough 'headspace' for the buildup of hydrogen and methane, but as radioactive materials decay, they add heat.

Volatile radioactive stew is being mixed in vast caverns, no one knows if the lid can be kept on.

The US has currrently 'stored' all it's spent fuel rods in water at various sites around the country, it's in water to keep it cool, it's much more radioactive than before it was used for generating, (a million times more radioactive) Expose any of that to air and radioactive fire would be the result. A fire like that puts all the radioactive smoke into the atmosphere.

The world has 441 functioning nuclear power plants, they produce 13,000 tons of high level nuclear 'waste' each year.

Read up on what happened at Three Mile Island, at Trojan, (where I worked); read up on Palos Verdes, Hanford, Rocky Flats, WIPP and Chernobyl.

Read up on spent uranium munitions, read about what happens to tanks hit with such munitions, how getting rid of that instantly radioactive waste is accomplished. (...it's not.)

To say there is no such thing as nuclear waste is simply incredibly incredulous.
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[Xa'at]

Originally Posted by rotorhead

The model of power plant under consideration is one that is as close to maintenance free and idiot proof as it's possible to be.

Hmm, it's possible you "mis"underestimate the idiocy of the average person!

As far as nuclear waste, I agree that much of it can eventually be used in the fast breeder plants, but at this point those don't really exist. Something about creating dangerous materials under the assumption that we will eventually be able to use them bothers me, a lot.
Large scale desalinization bugs me too. We're basically taking water out of the ocean, the most populous ecosystem on earth. I'm fairly certain that if the fish found a way to convert our air to something they could use and started to take it, we'd have something to say about it.

[rotorhead]

I was specifically referring to spent reactor fuel in my comment, which is by far the greatest tonnage of nuclear material that we're going to have to deal with some day.

I have family members that have worked at WIPP and I believe that it's by far the best solution for what I'd call the "nuclear trash" problem...all the ancillary junk that's somehow gotten contaminated by extraordinarily small amounts of radioactive material. While it's true that nobody knows exactly what'll happen to all those tyvek booties and oil-soaked floor mats down in the salt caverns a thousand years down the road, geological depositories are a vastly more responsible solution compared to where most of the stuff is stored now...like the tens of thousands of rusty steel barrels that are hidden underneath huge "temporary" tents at Los Alamos that'll probable still be there when our grandkids are old.

Messes like Oak Ridge, Rocky Flats, and Hanford can't be blamed on nuclear power. Put that one squarely on the DOD and it's mad rush into the nuclear weapons game during the Cold War. Almost all of the WIPP garbage is weapons-related, not power related. And as far as Chernyobyl goes, despite it's horrible and virtually eternal effects on the surrounding area it serves as the best possible inspiration for failsafe design and engineering on future nuclear power installations. If it was up to me, all nuclear engineers everywhere in the world would work a mandatory annual cleanup shift there or at Three Mile Island to remind them of exactly what they're working with.

Nobody that has even a passing familiarity with the nuclear fuel cycle believes that our current backlog of "spent" reactor fuel is actually waste. After extracting the uranium and plutonium for further re-use as fuel, only a tiny fraction of the remaining mass presents a long-term storage problem that needs to be dealt with. The half-dozen or so exotic transuranic isotopes with the zilllion-year-long half-lives are what belongs in places like Yucca Flats, not entire casks of spent fuel.

I stand by my assertion that spent reactor fuel is far from a liability, in fact it's an incredibly valuable energy resource that's being grossly mismanaged under current policy.

[Xa'at]

Originally Posted by rotorhead

The half-dozen or so exotic transuranic isotopes with the zilllion-year-long half-lives are what belongs in places like Yucca Flats, not entire casks of spent fuel.

I completely agree with you on everything but this little statement here, and even then, it's not a scientific disagreement, but really an ethical one. I simply can't find a way to fit unimaginably dangerous man-made chemicals with any sort of future that I'd want my kids to inhabit. It seems like moving backwards to me.

[Rance]

Can't it be put on a shuttle and sent to the moon? Mars? On a comet passing by? Or deep space?

[User 2]

Originally Posted by rotorhead

. And as far as Chernyobyl goes, despite it's horrible and virtually eternal effects on the surrounding area it serves as the best possible inspiration.....

Our history is rife with 'inspirations'....

...and we have many contaminated sites that can never be habitable ever again.

Three Mile Island and Chernobyl aren't the only 'accident' sites.

There is no fool-proof design, we still have no method to deal with the waste.

We add to WIPP at a rate of 300 tons a year.

Like any other genie that can't be put back in the bottle, ' accidental' releases of deadly radiation that will likely outlast humankind and go on killing for eons is hardly inspiration to up the odds that we will continue to do the same.

We can learn from our mistakes, or we can go on thinking we can conquer anything and everything.

We once thought we could 'control' ultraviolet rays, 60 years later we found how wrong we were.

Chlorofluorocarbons were made from chlorine, and were used everywhere, in refrigeration pumps and 'air-conditioners', we put them in aerosol cans, medicine inhalers, throwaway plastic cups; we even put them in shoes.

We thought we had created an inert, safe substance, a fool-proof 'discovery' that would serve us, it's master.

What we found was that it was true, we created an incredibly inert substance that was very difficult to break down, ...that the substance didn't break down, but where did those 'inert' substances go?


They wandered off Earth and into the upper atmosphere.

Ultraviolet rays proved capable of breaking down those substances, UV broke the CFCs back down into their chlorine form.

A chain reaction was set in motion, and what protects the whole world from becoming blasted with UV radiation began to be eaten by our fool-proof idea.

For more than a generation we had been 'dissolving' that which allowed us to live. We still are dissolving that which allows us to live.

All the world's governments finally called a halt to certain suicide, but no one wanted to go cold turkey.

The replacement material, HCFC, is still an ozone destroying material that is supposed to be 'phased out' over a number of years.

We still have no way to dispose of all the CFCs and HCFCs without the 'indestructible' inert form going straight back up to the stratosphere and eating more ozone.

The best guess now is that the hole over the Antarctic will heal in 40 or 50 years if no more substances are allowed to 'escape'.

Meanwhile, CFCs and HCFCs are still used, millions of tons of it still exist in refrigeration units and there's a thriving black market in the banned substance.

Whether we have already permanently altered our atmosphere is still a question.
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We used to x-ray children's feet just to fit them for shoes. Those 'foolproof' machines used to sit on the floor of shoe shops and we blasted millions of children with more x-rays than we now know was safe. X-rays will never be safe, each time we are irradiated, we increase the likelyhood of creating cancerous cell division.
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Uranium-235 has a 'half life' of 704 million years.

We take that substance, bathe it in chemicals and run it through centrifuges, and we create uranium-238, which has a half life of 4.5 billion years.

In the US alone, there is at least a half million tons of it.

We don't know what to do with it.

We only have to worry about what it will do for another few billion years.

Meanwhile, we're trying to sweep it under the rug and hope no one pulls up the rug later.

Once out of the bottle, ..the genie can't be just put back in.

If there's anything to be learned from our 'accidents' and our mistakes,

...it's the inspiration that we are not infallible, we have the means to destroy ourselves and we ought to wake up to the knowledge that we aren't able to fool-proof our own shortcomings.

What we know, is that just because we can do something,

...it's hardly intelligent to continue to do things we cannot undo.
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[icarian]

R,

ignore works as advertised. thanks--a first in quite a few years of being on forums.

As as far as being on topic...I consider outrageous electricity prices, cost of living, and damage to the environment (via their current means of electricity generation) in Galena and the Yukon areas it surrounds as bad. Hopefully, they do find an alternative if they actually want that electricity generation to continue long term. The same can be said for other remote places...