Nuclear Power; First Plant Online in 20 years!

Posted by $ Thoritsu 8 years, 10 months ago to Technology
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Well, except for the TVA part, this is great news. Nuclear power is a great solution, and my favorite question to carbon-warming fanatics.

Ridiculous over-regulation and "religious" hatred

TVA Site
https://www.tva.gov/Newsroom/Watts-Ba...


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  • Posted by $ 8 years, 10 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Exactly right! There are like 83 of these things deployed by the US alone, cruising along for the last 50 years without an accident.
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  • Posted by term2 8 years, 10 months ago
    All I can contribute to this is that if nuclear power can work on submarines , pretty much flawlessly, its only logical it can work in hardened, fixed land-based installations. Just makes sense. Its just a matter of redundancies installed so as to handle situations that will inevitably come up, No one wants a nuclear reactor, or any power plant for that matter, to blow up.
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  • Posted by jimslag 8 years, 10 months ago
    This is good, as a former nuclear electronics technician in the Navy I am happy that there is a renaissanse in the industry. When I got out, the jobs were drying up. Now maybe we can get reliable power. I have worked in utility industry for the last 14 years, mostly control systems and at electrical substations. You need a baseline power source, coal, gas or nuclear, maybe geothermal or hydro based, anyway those sources make sure your lights come on when you flip the switch. Wind is not reliable enough, it does not always blow, even in California. Solar, you need batteries as the sun does not shine at night. My last job was with PNM and it had mostly coal plus about 10% of Palo Verde over in Arizona and a little bit of gas generation. EPA regs came in and demanded we reduce emissions and oh yeah, it is going to cost several hundred million dollars. We put our heads together with the state regulators and came up with another method, EPA said no way. We closed 2 of the 4 plants and they are converting them to gas.
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  • Posted by $ jbrenner 8 years, 10 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Our nuclear engineering specialization is run out of mechanical engineering, but half of the students in it are from chemical engineering like me. I worked in the nuke business before coming to FIT and before reading AS. While I had a fascinating job, I couldn't reconcile my values with one of the two applications I was working on.

    Most of the students I know specializing in nuclear engineering have gone on to Norfolk Naval Shipyards (now under a new name) to build nuclear reactors. A couple have gone on to my old group at the Savannah River Site (When I worked there it was run by Westinghouse before being nationalized months after I left.). At least a couple are now working in Tennessee for Nuclear Fuel Services.
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  • Posted by $ 8 years, 10 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Really. Excellent. Good to know.
    Students in which disciplines, if you recall, and how did they go in (commercial nuc, Navy, NUPOC)?
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  • Posted by $ jbrenner 8 years, 10 months ago
    Thanks for the update, Thoritsu. Several of my past FIT students have gone into the nuclear power business.
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