Yes, the people at the liquefied natural gas exporter would get fired if the country has less reliance on fossil fuels and needed to export more of our surplus.
More energy diversity actually means they’d need more facilities to export and it would make more jobs in this sector.
Current netbacks to the US make Asia a destination of choice for the commissioning cargoes, though unlikely China because of Beijing’s decision Monday to raise tariffs on imports of US LNG to 25% from 10% in retaliation for Washington’s decision to hike duties on imports of Chinese goods.
I also love how he tours this facility after a 15% hike in tariffs on their product and nobody is standing there wanting to deck him for the trade war. It’s just bizarre.
Most nuclear waste is reusable believe it or not for power generation. It’s just that light water reactors aren’t good at it. Fast neutron reactors can consume up to 90%+ (iirc) of all uranium and related materials. The rest would only be radioactive in decades and not centuries. Not saying it’s ideal but if we have the waste and the means to use it I say it’s time to build such reactors for at least the use case of reducing the radioactive waste that we have stockpiled. Along with a ban on further radioactive material mining (excluding that which is needed for medical uses).
That’s not entirely true there’s plenty of waste in any kind of power production or industrial concern. It just happens that wind and solar power have one of the lowest levels. As for the radioactive material, it doesn’t remove the existing waste which can be recycled for power usage with little further work (fast neutron reactors). So I say use nuclear power as needed.
I shouldn’t expect trump to make sense, but the word “hoax” can’t even apply here. It might apply to the Russian collusion thing on a linguistic level. Like theoretically someone could be lying and trying to fool people. But the green new deal is just a proposal… how can a proposal be a hoax? Again expecting trump to make sense is a losing battle. Like how he turned the idea of “fake news” which once meant articles people wrote as satire or to dilliberatley mislead into a term used for news sources critical of him…
The Kalkar breeder reactor never went operational in the first place.
It is now an all-inclusive Family Park with more than 40 rides. All the fries, ice cream and soft drinks you can stuff inside you.
Oh, and Germany doesn’t have their own nuclear weapons.
The Bundeswehr is sort of deputized by the US Army to store a couple of tactical nukes. In the event, they would transport and deploy them under US supervision.
I spent the better part of 1986 guarding one of the depots and training for WW III.
The UK’s reprocessing industry was originally set up to provide plutonium from the Magnox plants for our weapons programme. By the early 1970s, they were being supplemented by the Advanced Gas Reactors (still the most efficient nuclear plants in the World) which used uranium oxide rather than natural uranium and required a new reprocessing plant. This would mean the UK would be able to reprocess the same fuel as used by the rest of the World’s water-moderated, water-cooled reactors. And so the Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant at Sellafield was born.
THORP allowed the UK to sign a whole set of contracts with Germany and Japan to reprocess their spent waste, recover the unburned plutonium and ship the high-level waste back to the original country. And then the problems began… THORP went hugely over budget, kept breaking down, it leaked, the originating countries refused to take their waste back and there was no market for either plutonium fuel or the mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel THORP was producing by the tonne. Throw in some accountancy problems when some plutonium that may or may not have existed ‘went missing’ inside the plant and some quality control falsification, and it was clear THORP was a bust.
THORP finished operations in 2018 and will act as a waste store until around 2070 when the AGR decommissioning process ends. The MOX plant is in the process of being closed after losing its last Japanese order in the wake of the Fukushima disaster.
Ironically, the older Magnox reprocessing plant is still chewing through its spent fuel and won’t close until around 2020.
All in all, it’s hard to tell how much the reprocessing boondoggle has cost the UK; but it will take in excess of £120 billion to decommission the Sellafield site alone. The two fast-breeder reactors at Dounreay in Northern Scotland which were meant to be prototypes of the reactors that would consume Sellafield’s plutonium are going to cost another £3 billion.
Karlsruhe was kiddie stuff.
At least in terms of “let’s breed our own nuclear fuel for lots of reactors”.
Or “let’s make a pile of weapons-grade plutonium”.
Sure, but if I hadn’t mentioned it, I’d have had people piping up to say it was there. I did say it was a test reactor.
To be honest, the idea that the US would at any time have been happy to see Germany go full in on nuclear power with breeder reactors, etc. is just bonkers but hey…
The United States has over 90,000 metric tons of nuclear waste that requires disposal. The U.S. commercial power industry alone has generated more waste (nuclear fuel that is “spent” and is no longer efficient at generating power) than any other country—nearly 80,000 metric tons. This spent nuclear fuel, which can pose serious risks to humans and the environment, is enough to fill a football field about 20 meters deep. The U.S. government’s nuclear weapons program has generated spent nuclear fuel as well as high-level radioactive waste and accounts for most of the rest of the total at about 14,000 metric tons, according to the Department of Energy (DOE). For the most part, this waste is stored where it was generated—at 80 sites in 35 states. The amount of waste is expected to increase to about 140,000 metric tons over the next several decades. However, there is still no disposal site in the United States. After spending decades and billions of dollars to research potential sites for a permanent disposal site, including at the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada that has a license application pending to authorize construction of a nuclear waste repository, the future prospects for permanent disposal remain unclear.
Efficient reactors? Naaah, this is France.
We have old ones, which beg the question of “Who knows how to safely dismantle those things and what do we do with that waste ?”, and have also been working on the EPR (Pressurized Reactor) in Flamanville since 2002, for the first debates.
Construction started in 2007, and it was meant to get its first load of fuel in 2017.
As early as 2008, cracks appeared in what was meant to be the apron of the building, building work stopped for a month.
January 2011, nosy journalists reveal that 1/3 of Bouygues workers are from Eastern Europe, who are made to work 10 to 15 hours a day. Following a report by the Nuclear Safety Authority and a visit by representatives, around a hundred of said workers were sent back to Poland, apparently their “employer” had “forgotten” to declare a few things to the proper administrations.
At the end of 2012, 93.5% of civil engineering and 41.2% of electromecanics are done.
Late January 2014, the reactor’s cistern is installed, first trials announced for 2015.
November 2014, said trials are announced for 2017, some parts were not ready.
April 2015 : anomalies are detected in steel forming the bottom and lid of the cistern. “We can change it, it hasn’t been irradiated yet, the reactor is not running.”
September 2015 : the cost for the plant is estimated at 10.5 billion, 7 more than the initial estimate, work should end by late 2018.
May 2016, a newspaper reveals that someone may have falsified the manufacturing paperwork for nuclear components.
Late June 2017, EDF is allowed to start using the cistern.
July 2018, the official starting date is postponed for one year again, due to disparities in the quality of 33 welds in the main secondary circuit. Cost estimate is raised to 10.9 billion, fuel load postponed to fourth quarter 2019, connection to the main power network for early 2020, second half of 2020 for full power.
January 2019, 8 welds are still awaiting a decision from the Nuclear Safety Authority.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Homer Simpson was put in charge of the reactor once it starts. If it ever does.
Then again, this is France, and we have a special Border which stops radioactive clouds (officially did so in '86), so… other countries may be safe ?
I know, I think we all just brush over that to preserve our sanity. But it just doesn’t make any sense. Like, AOC didn’t actually put forward the Green New Deal?
The US would have been happy if Germany would have bought the technology and the fuel from the US.
But that would have dried up those lovely party donations by Siemens et al.
