The environmentalists already thought of that.
If you're dead and worried about the carbon emissions created from your cremation, relax. The Swedish town of Halmstad has a solution...
http://cleantechnica.com/2009/01/05/dead-people-will-provide-heat-to-crematorium-facilities/
Nice try, Greenpeace clown. In fact, dozens of reactors, including in France, use reprocessed spent fuel.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf29.html
Your source, which you incorrectly cite, only says they are not burning reprocessed uranium - which is trivially true because spent U is too depleted for reactor fuel (except HWRs). But reprocessed plutonium is very concentrated in fissile isotopes, and hence is viable fuel (as MOX fuel - downblended with U).
Since nuclear can reach well over a thousand degrees, it's Carnot Limit is quite a bit higher than almost anything else.
Actually, most nuclear reactors are only around 300 C - somewhat cooler, and with lower efficiency, than fossil fuel burners. The limitation is the constraint that the water coolant doubles as the neutron moderator - so they must run below the boiling point of water (which is pressurized, so it's rather higher than 100 C, but still low).
Reactors can at far higher temperatures, but in alternative designs - not the water-cooled ones.
I'm not sure how much this helps, but that Progress bid has a cost breakdown in this application (somewhere in the last 5 pages):
http://www.psc.state.fl.us/library/filings/07/09467-07/09467-07.pdf
TMI had heavy water
No, actually TMI uses light water, like most reactors.
(see http://englishrussia.com/?p=2198 [englishrussia.com] for an abandoned Soviet nuclear lighthouse)
This is inaccurate - the Soviet lighthouses did not contain nuclear reactors (would be ridiculous), but rather radioisotope sources. Basically, a clump of very radioactive material that spontaneously heats up and is used for generating electricity - the point being, it stays that way for decades, without intervention. So, very convenient for remote navigation beacons. But also pretty stupid: they got abandoned in the USSR's collapse and they're getting vandalized for scrap metal. Obviously a huge hazard - wish I could find the article I read.
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered
Clean, as in: do you know how much greenhouse gases are emitted when getting uranium/plutonium out of the ground and processed to be able to use it in a nuclear reactor?
I do. See for example the IPCC 4th assessment report, working group 3, chapter 4 "Energy Supply". In particular 4.3.2 pp. 269-270 "Nuclear Power", and also the summary graph Figure 4.19 on page 283, which compares the lifecycle CO2 emissions per unit energy of different primary sources.
In short, considering the entire energy cycle, nuclear power has comparable CO2 emissions to wind, hydro, and solar power, and actually appears rather cleaner than the latter two.
This isn't surprising at all, when you consider the extreme energy density of nuclear fission. Annual uranium mining is on the scale of merely tens of thousands of tons / year, contrasted for instance with coal which is billions of tons - a tiny fraction. The scale is ridiculously small, and correspondingly so are the environmental impacts.
This all comes with a non-obvious disclaimer, that these lifecycle CO2 emissions are only valid in the present context, that most electricity and all transportation are still fossil-fuel powered. Nuclear only emits CO2 at all because there is not enough of it yet, and so the steel mills are powered by coal, and the transport trucks by oil. When we transition to clean energy and electric vehicles or clean synfuels, NONE of the clean energy sources will have ANY lifecycle CO2 emissions at all, and the debate will be moot. (Well, there are two exceptions - inputs of concrete, whose manufacture necessarily emits CO2, in the reduction of CaCO3 -> CaO + CO2, and with hydropower (see the same IPCC chapter, 4.3.3.1, p. 273-4), which emits the GHG methane from anaerobic decomposition of plant matter that is flooded when reservoirs are filled.))
Oh one more thing - plutonium isn't extracted from the ground, it is synthetic, created by nuclear transmutation. One neutron capture U-238 + n -> U-239, followed by two spontaneous beta-decays (neutron turns to proton, emits electron and antineutrino), U-239 -> Np-239 -> Pu-239.
but do you have any figures linked to a real plant that can actually be named so that people know you are not pulling a fast one?
Sheesh, I already said - there are a bunch of them IN THE MIT STUDY. Here, the document under "update on the cost of nuclear power". Page 45. Table 3A & 3B, "Overnight Costs for Actual Builds". There are 11. This is the BASIS for the MIT estimates. E.g. there is Shika #2, an ABWR completed in 2006 at total project cost of 370 billion Yen = $3.9 billion US at current exchange rates. With PPP adjustment it came out to $2,280/kW.
1. Don't reference Other Countries nuclear programs. This is the United States,
My $4/W figure was the estimate for new United States reactors, according to the interdisciplinary MIT study The Future of Nuclear Power (the 2009 update).
Referring again to the MIT study, they explain in detail what goes into their cost models (the 2003 full report, appendix 5). It encompasses EVERYTHING - the entire plant (steam turbines and all), the operating costs over 40 years of operation, 40 years' worth of fuel, the decomissioning costs after those 40 years, the waste disposal cost under the current 0.1 c/kWh DoE fee, etc. The TOTAL cash flow is estimated at $4.5 billion (nominal) during the construction phase - see the supplemental paper Update on the Cost of Nuclear Power, table 6A (this doesn't include the financing costs - go down to 6C).
Of course, what's really interesting is the levelized lifetime cost, per kWh. The MIT study estimates this at 8.4 c/kWhe; I've surveyed a dozen other such levelized cost studies on my blog. Feel free to follow the links and read up on them.
By the way, the NRC fees a very tiny part of costs - currently $4.6 M/year, out of of the MIT estimate of $56 M/year of fixed O&M costs (for a 1 GW plant).
6. Definitely not an engineer. Megawatts are always comparable, they are absolute quantities. A MW produced by a wind farm is the same MW produced by a nuke.
Nameplate capacities are incomparable. They represent peak power generation; but some power plants always operate at full power, and others operate intermittently, hence the energy yields (integral of power * dt) are completely different.
Yes, while wind provides a smaller percentage of it's capacity factor when compared to nuclear, that can be (supposedly) be defeated with large numbers of geographically dispersed wind farms.
No, that's a fallacy. 1 MWe of wind (nameplate capacity), at 30% capacity factor, averages 300 kWe (averaged over long time periods), with an instantaneous range of 0-1000 kWe. Adding together a thousand such (identical, independent) turbines gives you an average of 300 MWe, albeit with lower statistical variance - smaller fluctuations.
You are conflating two separate issues. One, is that the average output of a windfarm is a fraction of its nameplate capacity. Two, is that the output over time has very large variations. See? They are separate problems.
Of which the waste can be dealt with with current technology (pebble bed reactors),
I don't get it - why pebble bed reactors? They don't seem suitable for destroying waste (that is, transmuting and fissioning the transuranics). First off, many PBRs are completely unsuitable for this - because they are uranium-cycle reactors in the thermal spectrum, and are not breeders - they do not destroy TRUs, but in fact create more of them. I guess some PBRs could be breeders - maybe the thorium PBRs, but even then there's a huge problem. PBRs are not designed for a closed fuel cycle - quite the opposite, the extremely-hard ceramic pebbles are designed to be indestructible and inert, not easily amenable to chemical reprocessing (which as a first step, means dissolving or melting the spent fuel elements.)
There are other reactors that are designed for closed fuel cycles, and disposing of nuclear waste. One class is the liquid-metal fast breeder reactors (LMFBR), like the IFR that was developed at Argonne national lab. The IFR was designed around a reprocessing cycle (pyroprocessing): that is why it uses metal fuel, as opposed to the common metal-oxide fuels, which are harder to reprocess because you need to reduce the very stable uranium/plutonium oxides. (Or even worse, the carbide fuel in TRISO pebbles).
Another reactor designed for reprocessing is the molten salt reactor, which has a liquid core (!) of a low-melting point fluoride salt. This is even more amenable to reprocessing - there is no need to break down - and then fabricate again - the solid fuel elements, as there aren't any!
But as far as I know, pebbles beds have no chance as a closed fuel cycle.
Nuclear power plants in the 1500 Megawatt range cost 30-40 Billion dollars just to build.
Nonsense. The new French reactor, 1650 MWe, has a pricetag of $4.8 billion. Recent Japanese and Korean reactors were in the same range - $2-3/W (PPP), as surveyed by MIT CEEPR (under "update on the cost of nuclear power"). The accompanying study (2009) predicts costs for new US reactors to be $4/W. In short, the numbers are consistent. You can look up cost figures, levelized cost studies (here's a start) up and down, and you will find this is true.
Wind Farms in the 1500 Megawatt range cost 300-400 million dollars to build.
Also nonsense. Just take one recent UK wind farm, which came in at £111 M for 60 MWe - $2.07/W, or extrapolating, over $3 billion for 1500 MW. You can survey costs all over the web, and this is typical. Whitelee, Europe's largest onshore farm, cost £300M ($496M) for 322 MWe, $1.54/W. Lynn and Inner Dowsing - UK's largest offshore farm - came in at £300 M ($496 M) for 194 MWe, $2.56/MW. The famous London Array is now at £3B ($4.96 billion) for 1,000 MWe: $4.96/W. (To be fair though, this represents a 200% cost overrun over the original estimates.) (Sorry about the angstrom signs: they are supposed to be British "pound" symbols)
Also, besides the fact that your bogus figures for wind are 10 times cheaper than reality (and for nuclear, 10 times more expensive than reality), your comparison is bogus in yet another away. You comparable incomparable quantities: a megawatt of baseload yields far more energy than a megawatt of wind power - because it yields power continuously, whereas the wind turbines are very frequently down, or generating at fractional capacity. This is represented by the "capacity factor", which is the fraction of the nameplate capacity actually achieved by a power plant - ratio of [average power output]/[power capacity]. And while nuclear power plants, as generally reliable baseload plants, run at 90%+ capacity factor - that is, average 0.90 MWe of generation for each 1 MWe of nameplate capacity - wind farms, becuase of the obvious intermittency of wind, average only 20-30% capacity factors, with some exceptional offshore locations yielding 40%. Those megawatts are completely incomparable: 1 MWe of nuclear yields 2-4 times more energy than 1 MWe of wind power.
"One day I woke up and discovered that I was in love with tripe." -- Tom Anderson
