Setting aside the discussion on waste storage...A Nuclear solution would require completely new plants of new designs. This report seems to focus only on older plants. So what about the Third and Fourth Generation nuclear plants being developed to replace the old?

And "Chernobyl Like Disaster"? Please spare me the scare tactics. Chernobyl was built very differently from most other reactors in use today...and the operators reportedly were deliberately going against existing safety protocols. While there have been problems, and even deaths (e.g. Japan) with conventional nuclear civilian powerplants, Chernobyl was an abberation and now a scare tactic.

This months Popular Mechanics has an article on the nuke tech. And personally I would like to see heat mining: http://tinyurl.com/q7zo2

Yes new designs are much better. This one could even burn the waste we currently have http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor

Others are much better than the 30 year old reactors we have today. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor

Some designs are so efficient that the waste is less radioactive than the ore it started with.

Chernobyl like disasters?

If history is allowed to repeat itself it will.

As to:

deliberately going against safety protocol.

I work in an environment where there are employees who regularly go against safety protocol. We just recently had our yearly safety drill, initiative, discussion. Yet I still see people deliberately going against safety protocol.

Could it happen in the nuclear industry. Yes. Could Chernobyl happen again.

How about we don't focus on that. Solar energy is Wireless Fusion, why not capitalize?

Wind is nice. Both have risks, though don't have the same potent destruction if human laziness realizes itself yet again.

As far as Chernobyl is concerned. It [Chernobyl] was no more then:

Laziness in Construction. Laziness in Operation.
Laziness in Response.
Laziness in Protocols.
Laziness in Safety.

Wow laziness in CORPS anyone?

It always comes down to cost. Will it be competitive with renewables without pubic funding and without taxpayers having to cover the liability insurance premiums and the waste disposal costs amortized over millenia.

If you live in modern society you have to make your trade offs. Until environmental safe and renewable energy can produce the volume of energy we need to live, we'll all just have to live with these risks. It sucks, but that's life.

This article seems designed to turn up the FUD factor on nuclear power. Read the PM articles on new reactor designs.

Sure there are problems with the current crop of reactors, they were designed and built from the 50's to the 70's and need to be replaced or upgraded.

BTW the Chernobyl reactor design was very different from the design of US reactors. Chernobyl used a carbon moderator which can and did catch fire. It also lacked the massive containment building that US reactors have.

Links:

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/chernobyl.html

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/nuclear-faq.html

Nuclear is the most expensive way to boil water, but that aside, we have to consider the RISK and the IMPACT of such ventures.

At what point is the impact of an accident unacceptable with ANY risk?

So at what point do we decide that "yes the risk is extremely minute, but if this is the impact we will take absolutely no risk that this might happen." ?

(eg, nuclear fallout in new york state, land rendered useless for hundreds and hundreds of years)

The way I see it, the possible impact of nuclear on society and the environment will always rule out this type of energy production for me no matter how small I'm told the risk is and no matter how safe the "experts" tell me it is.

We have enough methods of renewable energy and ways to reduce energy use right now to make a difference. Sure solar is expensive right now, so we will need to use a combination of technology and legislation to work towards a solution. Solar will get cheaper as research improves design.

I say we just level the playing field and let the best source of energy win: no subsidies to anyone (including indirect ones), or equal subsidies to everyone, no special insurance coverage, and we "internalize" pollution costs that are currently "externalized".

My guess is that it won't be nuclear or coal..

I may have mentioned this here before, but it is very difficult for the public to have any real perspective on this issue, having no background in this area and no touchstone except The Simpsons. Currently, at http://RadDecision.blogspot.com you'll find an INSIDE look at nuclear energy - the good and the bad. (There's plenty of both.) It's free to readers - who seem to like it, judging from their comments at the homepage. "Rad Decision" is also an enjoyable read - it's a technothriller novel. The author (me) has spent over twenty years in the US nuclear industry.

"I'd like to see Rad Decision widely read." - Stewart Brand, internet pioneer and founder of 'The Whole Earth Catalog'.

AS I have posted here before nuclear is no more expensive than other methods of energy production. The info is out there. Of course you can find them saying either way.

http://www.uic.com.au/nip08.htm
http://www.nucleartourist.com/basics/costs.htm
http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/thyd/ne161/ncabreza/sources.html

Production of solar cells isn't exactly clean either.

The July 25, 2006 accident at the Forsmark nuclear plant in Sweden was a close call - again. Two of the four emergency diesel generators supplying power to the plant failed to start as expected. The emergency cooling system, which functioned normally was fortunately able to meet the reactor's needs. Also, in 2005 radioactive water was found to be leaking from the nuclear waste store at Forsmark.

This is in a country that has a pretty high safety awareness. New plants? New designs? Why not spend that money on developing new, safer energy sources. It can be done, but we are as addicted to nuclear power as we are to oil.

Nit pickey detail -

I'm pretty sure that photograph is NOT a nuclear power station - note the smokestack. That's a coal burner with cooling towers.

Cooling towers are present at many kinds of power stations and nukes don't always have them. Just fyi!

We should continue to research nuclear, but we have a long way to go before it is viable enough to build a Gen IV plant. Even the best Gen III plants (less than 10 years old) have been unreliable, including both the Japanese and French designs. The Japanese plant has run less than 50% capacity since it was built in 1996. Nearly all the French reactors were down during much of last summer due in part to high ambient temperatures.

The Gen IV plants may prove to be much better, but are about 10 years away by most estimates. Design engineering of even an ordinary old technology plant can take 6 to 8 years, and they know the technology inside and out. We need to aggressively research new Gen IV reactors but we really can't really build them at this point.

I don't think massive, centralized plants are the answer, anyway. Small scale distributed systems that contribute power using a variety of different technolgies seems to be where things are going. Not a big, expensive, complex generating plant using an unknown technology with a lot of unknown bugs to sort out.

Fast breeder?

One word: Monju.

I'm all for alternative energy sources, wind, solar, waves, geothermal, etc. However, I don't think they can produce enough power for our current rate of consumption. Until we do something about that then we have to face ugly things like war in the mideast and nuclear power plants. Nuclear power plants may be a safer alternative than nuclear war over dwindling oil supplies.

I agree on the cooling towers, they have been made a Nuke plant symbol but are used elsewhere. Better to see them than having uncooled water go back in a lake or river causing thermal polution.

They had a great Modern Marvels on energy last night and it fills one with hope for the future without fossel fuels but it's going to take quite a while to get there.

In terms of reliability, nuclear's record speaks for itself. For the last several years, US nuclear's capacity factor has been ~90% or more, the highest of any type of power plant. USC is trying to make something out of nothing.

BTW, during Europe's heat wave, nuclear's overall generation was only reduced by a few percent due to water issues. Meanwhile, Europe's wind farms were generating almost no power at all during the heat wave, just when they were needed most.

Renewables have some (minor) advantages over nuclear, but reliability definitely ain't one of them!

Nuclear's record speaks for itself in terms of safety as well. Whereas fossil fuel plants cause hundreds of thousands of premature deaths annually worldwide, and are the leading single cause of global warming, Western nuclear power has never had any measurable impact on public health over its entire ~40 year history. It also emits no CO2.

The ANNUAL world health toll from fossil fuels is equal to over 10 Chernobyl events. Furthermore, a radiation release anywhere near Chernobyl's magnitude from a Western reactor is not merely extremely unlikely, it is absolutely impossible for a host of fundamental reasons (i.e., differences in reactor design). The much lower potential release (as well as the vastly lower likelihood of release) for Western plants does not rely on human behavior or responsibility, etc.. It's based on fundamental physics, and inherent features of the reactor.

The worst event ever to occur at a Westrern plant was TMI, and there no significant amount of radiation was released, and nobody was killed or even sickened by the event. Meanwhile, coal plants kill ~25,000 people every single year in the US alone. Due to the much smaller potential release, a worst-case accident at a Western (US) plant would not result in radiation levels outside the range of natural background over any significant amount of land area.

The public health and environmental risks of nuclear power are neglibile compared to those of the fossil sources we've been living with all along. Even the maximum possible accident consequences are relative small compared to fossil fuels' (annual) effects.

http://www.ans.org/pi/pros/member/opinion/

Ahem.

And finally....

If we leveled the playing field (no subsidies & all external costs applied), we would wind up with a lot of nuclear and renewables, with some gas to fill in the gaps. Barring some breakthrough that leads to economic sequestration of CO2 and other pollutants, coal would largely disappear.

There have been extensive scientific studies of the external (i.e., indirect, public health and environmental) costs of various energy sources. The latest and most rigorous of these studies was performed by the European Commission, and its results are summarized at:

http://www.externe.info/

The analyses show that coal and oil's external costs tower above all other sources, at ~4-8 cents/kW-hr. Gas is around 1-2 cents, and nuclear is a fraction of a cent. Nuclear's external costs are only a few percent that of coal or oil, and are roughly comparable to renewables.

Applying these external costs would take coal out of the competition (as would any scheme for limiting or reducing CO2 emissions). Nuclear is already cheaper than gas, at todays gas prices, and application of external costs would increase nuclear's margin vs. gas.

This leaves nuclear and renewables. Due to intermittantcy, renewables will be limited to a fraction (~25% at most) total power generation for the forseeable future. Thus, nuclear would be expected to grow substantially under any such "level playing field" policy.

Until the Energy Policy Act of 2005, nuclear's subsidies were much smaller than those of fossil fuels or renewables. With the new policy, they are comparable to wind but still less than solar (on a per kW-hr basis). So why does nuclear need to be subsidized? Because it, like all other sources, can not compete with dirty, conventional coal as long as coal is not required to pay for its massive external costs (and as long as no tangible CO2 policy exists).

So I take the "Ahem" about Mr. Hoph's post is "Look how pro nuclear power you are" or are you pointing us to a resouce with nuclear power information? It's hard to have a good discussion if people aren't clear.

Nuclear plants have their good and bad but I'd rather have them than have more coal plants no matter how "clean" they make them. Better still would be renewables.

To take a step back, people speak of reducing our electrical usage and fossil fuel usage. Both good ideas and I think we can do that in the long run (30+ years, sorry but big changes take time and it took us 100 years to get where we are). The big BUT, many of the plans to replace/reduce fossil fuel used in transportation involve electic cars or plugin hybrids. Sure much of the recharging will be at night duing off-peak electrical usage times but overall demand will go up. One of the big alt. energy souces, solar, doesn't work at night. Yes there will be solutions to store the energy produced during the day for the night but they'll take time to develop.

Neclear energy can help fill the gap as a carbon free source of electricity. I hope we use the type of reactor that produces waste that is only dangerous for 100's of years. Much better that leaving dangerous legacy for tens of thousands of years (think of all the mercury from coal fired plants and that legacy before firing back).
IMHO

If you want nuke, then let them build it in your backyard, and keep the waste there as well. Oh, and your family's future generations should be forced to live there as well.

No takers? I thought it had little or no "externalities".

k, build it my back yard, because the difference between coal and nuclear power is that coal kills plain and simple. The total deaths produced from nuclear power totals to a whopping twenty seven people. Coal, well, according to surveys conducted by Red Cross, the EPA and the LLE, state that coal kill over 30,000 people prematurely annually. Compare that to the LLE risk of living next to a nuclear power plant, .04 people per year. In Fact, if you do the research you learn that McDonald's kills more people a year than nuclear power plants.