Atomic Insights

Atomic energy technology, politics, and perceptions from a nuclear energy insider who served as a US nuclear submarine engineer officer

Plant Vogtle expansion is big news

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It’s time to help people outside of Georgia and South Carolina understand exactly what kind of infrastructure development they are missing.

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  1. “It’s time to help people outside of Georgia and South Carolina understand exactly what kind of infrastructure development they are missing.”

    And the people within Georgia and South Carolina can’t build the pressure vessel for the reactor either so whats your point again?

    • @starvinglion

      Have you ever looked at the images of reactor plants? There is a good collection available at http://econtent.unm.edu/cdm/search/collection/nuceng

      Please try to find the pressure vessel in a few of these drawings. It is a tiny portion of the plant; there are a lot of great jobs associated with building and operating nuclear power plants that have absolutely nothing to do with manufacturing pressure vessels.

      • The construction jobs, and even the O&M jobs, great though they are, pale in comparison to the jobs created by having that much clean, green, inexpensive energy in the region. Nuclear power isn’t about “nuclear jobs” it’s about JOB jobs, EVERYWHERE jobs, lots and lots and lots of jobs.

        And the South is rising again.

    • Me too. Er, only in my state, well, and yours too.

      Austin, Tx passed on a chance to take part in a two reactor expansion of the South Texas Nuclear Project back in 2009. For a while Austin Energy had a copy of the consultant’s report on their website (might still be there). Basically, the consultants said that it seemed very likely that the STNP expansion would produce electricity at the expected cost of $.08/KWHr., but there was some small risk of the cost going as high as $.12/KWHr. Therefore they recommended against it. Okay, given the makeup of the City Council and the back-door handshakes in hiring consultants, that conclusion was no surprise, but the analysis before the conclusion seemed reasonably honest.

      The thing is, that since then, every “green” source of electricity to which Austin has subscribed, be it wind, the idiotic solar farm they’re building, or the insane wood burning facility, every one of them has a higher per KWHr price than the worst case for the STNP expansion. So how does that make any sense at all?

      It’s similar to the reasoning that causes people to build coal plants because nuclear “might” have a big accident. Instead we’ll build this thing which is an ongoing disaster when it is operating as designed.

      Sigh. Sorry for the vent. The stupidity of the Austin City Council and my powerlessness to do anything meaningful about it is frustrating. I keep voting against them, but it doesn’t help. Of course, some years, the alternatives are anti-flouride tinfoil-hat wearers, so really, what a mess.

    • You can start by taking in the intensely-radioactive waste from the other places! Soon, you can have your own radioactive areas and your own waste to leave for our offspring to deal with,since we have found no way to do it ourselves..

      Yes, I am familiar with nukes, having tested the Safety Relief Systems for those GE Mark I BWR’s.

      • @George

        Do you honestly believe that testing relief valves 40 years ago makes you a nuclear expert?

        I would be happy to have a used nuclear fuel facility in my backyard. It would be great if it came with the $780 million per year that US nuclear plant operators have been paying for the service since 1982.

      • Of course not. I do not pretend to be one, but while we were testing those, Three Mile Island melted down, which we understood the very first day, even as Met Ed was still lying to the public.

        My later service as Senior Engineer in Technical Services for Pacific Gas & Electric did not allay my concerns about the efficacy and economy and safety of nuclear technologies.

        Perhaps if we found a way to deal with the terribly nasty stuff we created, I would feel better, but using multi-million-degree Neutrons to boil water is not appropriate.

      • I forgot to thank you for this forum and your professional reply.

        It is important we understand the reasons for our different opinions. Mine is that the smartest, hardest-working folk took the hard classes to save us with a dream of abundant energy, only to see it has become a nightmare instead.

        Thanks again, for your discussion.

  3. “It’s time to help people outside of Georgia and South Carolina understand exactly what kind of infrastructure development they are missing.”

    Starvington, it looks like you agreed. If so, you are right on. As the upbeat video said, this project produces good jobs and clean energy. I think you may see more Our president said nothing about nuke plants last night, but read between the lines:

    “Taken together, our energy policy is creating jobs and leading to a cleaner, safer planet. Over the past eight years, the United States has reduced our total carbon pollution more than any other nation on Earth. But we have to act with more urgency – because a changing climate is already harming western communities struggling with drought, and coastal cities dealing with floods. That’s why I directed my administration to work with states, utilities, and others to set new standards on the amount of carbon pollution our power plants are allowed to dump into the air. The shift to a cleaner energy economy won’t happen overnight, and it will require tough choices along the way. But the debate is settled. Climate change is a fact. And when our children’s children look us in the eye and ask if we did all we could to leave them a safer, more stable world, with new sources of energy, I want us to be able to say yes, we did.”

    He came pretty close to using the “N” word. (“N” – nuke)

  4. The companies building and designing these assets need to do more of this. There are a lot of half-supportive, undecided, and oppose for oppositions sake (not the true opposer’s) that would lap this up and be overall supportive of the technology.

    The anti-nuclear power lobby hasn’t seen what the Nuclear Industry can do with PR.

    • @Daniel

      Don’t hold your breath. The main losers if the loan guarantee is finalized will be Wall St bankers, since the loan guarantee is actually a misnomer. If the guarantee is closed, the money will come directly from the US Treasury and interest will be paid to the Treasury – at a rate that is quite a bit higher than the T-bill rate the Treasury pays on borrowed money.

      The article you pointed to said that Southern Co had completed all of the required paper, but that the terms and conditions had not yet been finalized. In other words, little or no progress has been made.

  6. “If the guarantee is closed, the money will come directly from the US Treasury and interest will be paid to the Treasury – at a rate that is quite a bit higher than the T-bill rate the Treasury pays on borrowed money.”

    I wonder why they did that. It seems as though the T-bill rate would have been good enough. The money would simply have been a pass through from the ratepayers of the utility company to the taxpayers (or Chinese) who own the T-Bills. I could envision a small handling fee, but that shouldn’t amount to squat.

    The loan to utility companies to build new clean baseload capacity seems like a win all around. The local government gets a big new facility to help pay for local services like schools, the Feds get a guaranteed safe payer of their loan, the taxpayers who buy T-Bills have their safe investment, the ratepayers get a stable clean power source, the green folks get a big asset to stop global warming, some will get good paying jobs and Rod gets something positive to write about.

  7. Can we just send the high-level waste to Rod, then?

    How can we use a technology we have not learned to control and has such draconian liability, . . and all to BOIL WATER!?!??

    • @George

      Don’t demean the activity of boiling water. Our industrial society was built by steam engines. Even today, we are burning about 7 billion tons of coal and about the same quantity of natural gas each year to “just boil water.” It would be much better to fission a couple hundred thousand tons per year of uranium.

      If we recycled the material, we would only need a couple thousand tons per year to supply all of the world’s electric power demands.