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Can Nuclear Power Take The Heat?

nuke-hotCan Nuclear Power Take The Heat?  The New Republic  -Bradford Plumer 7 July 09 Via Climate Progress, the London Times reports that France’s nuclear fleet is once again running into water and heat trouble during the summer……………………….These summer shutdowns are becoming more and more common, and don’t bode well for the future, given that temperatures in Europe have been creeping up faster than the global average, according to a recent European Environmental Agency report, and will almost certainly keep climbing as the world warms. Some countries, like France, Germany, and Spain, have responded to this problem in the past by overriding their own environmental laws and allowing plants to dump hotter water into the rivers—the downside is that this can cause considerable damage to river life.

Nor is this just Europe’s problem: In 2006, Exelon had to cut the power at a nuclear plant in Illinois when the Mississippi River got too warm to be used as cooling water. According to the recent NOAA synthesis report on climate-change impacts in the United States, one of the things we can expect to see across the country in the coming decades is a much greater frequency of hotter-than-90°F (32°C) days—precisely the point at which France’s plants keep running into trouble. Meanwhile, as the AP reported last year, if droughts become more frequent, that could mean additional trouble for nearly one-quarter of the nation’s nuclear plants.

Can Nuclear Power Take The Heat? – Environment and Energy

July 8, 2009 Posted by | 2 WORLD, business and costs, environment | , , , , | Leave a comment

Reprocessing is no solution

Reprocessing is no solution

Rutland Herald July 7, 2009 “………………The Bush administration began the new push for a Global Nuclear Energy Partnership. In 1979 a United States naval nuclear engineer and president, Jimmy Carter, ended this dangerous program.Reprocessing spent nuclear fuel was supposed to be one alternative to lots and lots of mining forever and forever. The biggest experiment in reprocessing was at Sellafield in Britain. In 2005, after decades of contamination and leaks and general spewing of horrible matter into the ocean, air, and land around the reprocessing plant, Sellafield was shut down because a bigger-than-usual leak of fuel dissolved in nitric acid —some tens of thousands of gallons — was discovered. It contained enough plutonium to make about 20 nuclear bombs.A nuclear dump site just six miles from the famous Champagne vineyards in France is leaking radioactive waste into the groundwater. According to the French nuclear safety authority, the “wall of a storage cell fissured” while concrete was being added to a recent layer of nuclear waste.It showed levels of radioactivity leaking from another dump site run by the same company in Normandy — at up to 90 times above European safety limits.That waste has seeped into underground water used by farmers, with contamination spreading into the countryside and threatening dairy production. The Champagne site will receive a total of 4,000 terabequerels of tritium — more than three times the amount of tritiumwaste as the dump site in Normandy.
Reprocessing is not a new idea. In fact, more than $40 billion has been spent globally on reprocessing technologies that have never become commercially successful. A 1996 report by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that the costs of reprocessing and transmutation of irradiated fuel from waste produced by existing U.S. reactors alone easily could be more than $100 billion, in the addition to the cost of a geologic repository.

Reprocessing is no solution: Rutland Herald Online

July 8, 2009 Posted by | USA, wastes | , , , , | Leave a comment