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U.S. greenhouse emissions fell in 2017 as coal plants shut
Greenhouse gases emissions from the largest U.S. industrial plants fell 2.7 percent in 2017, the Trump administration said, as coal plants shut and as that industry competes with cheap natural gas and solar and wind power that emit less pollution.
The drop was steeper than in 2016 when emissions fell 2 percent, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said.
EPA acting administrator Andrew Wheeler said the data proves that federal regulations are not necessary to drive carbon dioxide reductions.
[...] While Wheeler gave the administration credit for the reductions, which mainly came from the power sector, the numbers also underscore that the administration has not been able to stop the rapid pace of coal plant shutdowns.
[...] Natural gas releases far less carbon dioxide when burned than coal and a domestic abundance of gas has driven a wave of closures of coal plants. In 2017 utilities shut or converted from coal-to-gas nearly 9,000 megawatts (MW) of coal plants.
[...] The trend of U.S. coal plant shutdowns is expected to pick up this year, with power companies expecting to shut 14,000 MW of coal plants in calendar year 2018.
(Score: 2) by iamjacksusername on Thursday October 18 2018, @05:26PM (15 children)
They could be replaced by traditional fission reactors within 5-7 years of construction approval and the US would be out in front in-terms of per-capita and total greenhouse gas emissions without tortured subsidy programs and endless debate. But the body politic chooses to ignore that because reasons.
(Score: 4, Informative) by requerdanos on Thursday October 18 2018, @05:43PM (13 children)
FTFY; YVW.
Molten salt reactors, despite apparently being "really hard to do", have a failure mode of *shrug* molten salt drains into holding tank causing automatic shutdown. That, plus, they could bring about that "greenhouse gas reduction" just as easily, make me wonder what the "reasons" are for the paucity of investment and exploration into their use.
(Score: 4, Touché) by insanumingenium on Thursday October 18 2018, @06:29PM (11 children)
Because *everyone* agrees that nuclear waste is an issue. Even without a risk of a meltdown, fission plants are difficult and dangerous to build and run, and there are zero good solutions for disposing of the waste. Fission has its place, but suggesting that it is a direct replacement for coal, or that you don't understand why it isn't more widely adopted, is silly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 18 2018, @06:53PM (2 children)
Nuclear waste = future nuclear fuel. Cant believe people are getting paid to store this stuff.
(Score: 2) by Webweasel on Friday October 19 2018, @08:15AM (1 child)
Wow you mean all those contaminated bricks, lumps of carbon, clothing etc will magically become fuel? Wow nuclear power is awesome!
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 19 2018, @01:35PM
Anything that can heat up some water is fuel.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday October 18 2018, @06:57PM
Tell that to the French.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by requerdanos on Thursday October 18 2018, @07:49PM (5 children)
With traditional water-cooled fission reactors that use solid fuel, the fresh solid fuel rods work pretty well, until a tiny percentage of their fuel is used up, and they crack all to pieces, and have to be changed. That cracked all to pieces stuff in the "spent" fuel rods [scientificamerican.com] contains waste that will be deadly for hundreds of years, some for thousands of years, some for tens of thousands of years, and some for hundreds of thousands of years.
The current popular reactor designs, besides being designed to melt down in the event of failure, approach this problem with a *shrug* and a *not my problem* response.
So, water-cooled solid fuel methodology, to sum up:
- Designed so that failure inexorably leads to meltdown unless specific measures are taken.
- Designed to produce deadly fission products with half-lives longer than human history.
In stark contrast, consider the molten salt reactor designs [extremetech.com] that not only have the failure mode of "calmly, safely, and instantly shutdown and cool off" but that consume their fuel as a molten liquid. In this case, the dangerous, many-years-half-life fission products can be chemically separated out and kept in the reactor fuel loop until they are broken down by fission into the a-few-years-half-life fission products.
So, molten-salt fuel methodology, to sum up:
- Designed so that failure inexorably leads to safe shutdown and cooldown unless specific measures are taken.
- Designed to consume long-half-life fission products so as to not produce long-lasting waste.
I would argue that that constitutes "good solutions for disposing of the waste" if ever there was one. There's not even anything to argue about here; I genuinely am scratching my head wondering how I can be the only one seeing these differences.
(Score: 2) by Bobs on Thursday October 18 2018, @08:49PM
Sure sounds good.
I think the more relevant question is why are people proposing to build them, if they are so much better?
Turns out people are working on refining the molten salt reactor tech. Venture capital $ went into a US company in 2015, Federal $ in 2016, and into many places around the world since 2011.
Sounds like many people think Molten Salt is a promising approach. Hope it works out soon.
(Score: 2) by insanumingenium on Thursday October 18 2018, @10:04PM (3 children)
Which is it, are the fission products chemically separated out or are they kept in the reactor fuel loop until they are innocuous? This separation process, is that going to leave us with more dangerous materials from the handling of the fuel flow?
Not all the products of fission are fissile (as far as I have ever heard the reason we go straight for uranium and plutonium is because they are far and away the easiest fuels to get the necessary chain reaction from). This is the crux of the issue, spent fuel is too unstable to be released into nature, but not unstable enough to be attractive as fissile material in its own right. As your primary fuel breaks down, you are going to be changing the makeup of the reactor, and it is either going to increase or decrease the rate of fission versus your start point (my intuition says it will decrease it because if these end products were easily fissile, they would be a more attractive primary fuel). At that point you will need to add more fuel or more salt. Seems to me the fuel loop is having to get bigger every year.
Let's assume that there is never an issue with waste products becoming too large a fraction of the reactor and interfering with either the fission of the fuel or the moderation of the salt. Seems to me this is a very big assumption, but let's take it.
How does the working life of the reactor compare with the half-life of these accumulating waste products? Nuclear waste isn't just spent fuel rods, it has historically been up to and including literally the entire plant, and all the earth near it in some cases.
If the catastrophic scenario is as safe as we all hope, it seems to me like we are still stuck with a huge issue in case of any kind of failure, be it natural or intentional, which beaches the reactor. These by-products still exist and can still be released into the environment.
I am not trying to say that nuclear power isn't an option, or that research into nuclear power is a bad idea. I am actually a huge proponent of nuclear power. But rushing nuclear into production has already caused untold grief. It is also disingenuous of you to pretend that these are solved issues and a mature technology, neither of which is even close to true.
(Score: 3, Informative) by requerdanos on Thursday October 18 2018, @11:19PM (2 children)
You ask almost rhetorically, but there's an answer, and it's "both." Wastes are chemically separated, the waste you want to remove (because it's a helpful medical isotope you're harvesting, or a short-half-life waste that you want out of the fuel) stays out, and the waste you don't want to remove goes back in.
That's true of relatively inefficient solid fuel designs, but in liquid designs you don't need something to be "attractive as a fissile material" for the same reason you don't need super-enriched fuel or any other magic tricks to make the design work.
The fuel is a salt. Salt is not some inert thing added to the fuel. Sure, different salts (uranium salt vs. protactinium salt vs. plutonium salt. vs. etc.) will have different profiles and fission at different rates with respect to free neutrons in the mix. But they still fission, and they break down, and they release energy.
"The salt" is not the moderator. It's the fuel. Molten salt designs often use a body of graphite adjacent to the liquid fuel as moderator, perhaps augmented by beryllium mixed in with the fuel.
By chemical separation, at any given time, without shutting down the reactor, you can remove as much or as little of any component of the fuel. The fuel is always exactly the mix you want it to be. But here's the thing: Several of the molten salt fuel cycles just don't produce more than trace amounts of long-half-life waste; their waste is in the hundreds of years vs. bazillions. Processing "waste" as fuel is a benefit of the molten salt design, but not a requirement.
When Chernobyl blew its top, lots of powdered highly radioactive stuff blew around the world, contaminating it.
Water that's still being pumped over the melted cores of Fukushima Daiichi is soaking up radioactive stuff and spreading it out to sea, contaminating it.
If you took a molten salt reactor and drove a truck through it, or blew it open with dynamite, or some such, and the fuel spilled all around, then the liquid would turn to a solid that would then result in a local clean-up.
Because there's no powder, nothing to form aerosols, there's no powder to blow around the world.
Because it's a fail-safe instead of fail-insanely-stupid design, you don't have to pour water over it for 50 years to "keep it turned off", so you aren't creating a wastewater stream of highly radioactive end results of bad planning. It doesn't have to be next to an easily pollutable body of water for the same reason.
Sure, local contamination would be a "bad thing", but not in the same class of "bad thing" that just about every currently operating reactor spends its life trying to achieve, stopped only by an incredible flow of coolant that must-absolutely-must continue for the things not to bring about armageddon.
Especially rushing dangerous-by-design reactors into production, then using only that type of design for decades, through catastrophe after catastrophe.
What I claim is that a safe-by-design molten-salt reactor is worth pursuing, and a meltdown-by-design solid fuel reactor probably isn't. Neither design is a case of "solved issues", though both designs are at least proven technology [wikipedia.org], and you're the one saying something is solved, not me.
But, you know, one design will kill everything within 100km if you miss a day watering it, while the other design just turns itself off and waits for further orders if everyone takes the day off and does nothing.
Yet 99% of the effort and almost all the money go towards the meltdown-design and not the fail-safe design. I've heard theories ranging from "the molten salt reactors aren't good at making material for bombs" and "President Nixon had to make a choice and chose the solid fuel designs", but the end result is, we have meltdowns and radiation instead of cheap energy and happiness. Why?
I get that that idea offends you, and you make a lot of noise, but you haven't said anything that changes it. I really want to know--why does the idea of a safe reactor by design bother people so much?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday October 19 2018, @12:00AM
It's a variant of Ludditism. Anything that makes nuclear power safer makes it more likely to be adopted on a wider scale than present. Can't have that. So we end up with stringent opposition to any improvements in nuclear safety (both R&D and actual construction), be it safer reactors, breeder reactors for reprocessing used fuel rods, waste storage, etc. And thus, the present sad state of affairs in the US, where we're for a nuclear accident from ancient reactors and poorly stored fuel rods, to finish off the US nuclear industry.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 19 2018, @03:40AM
Asshole
insanumingenium was calm and rationale asking relevant questions. You really want to poison the well by throwing around ad hominem insults that directly contradict such simple words as "I am not trying to say that nuclear power isn't an option, or that research into nuclear power is a bad idea."
A safe design bothers nobody, and after the various catastrophes we've had so far it seems pretty damn reasonable for people to be cautious. Why attack someone who seems willing to meet you part way?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 18 2018, @08:00PM
That is not true [wikipedia.org]:
(Score: 2) by Spook brat on Friday October 19 2018, @03:00AM
The military has a reason for wanting traditional fission reactors: fuel supply for the Nuclear arsenal. The U.S. Government's refining process for Uranium results in three main products: weapons-grade Uranium (U235), depleted Uranium (U238. AKA DU), and fissile uranium (mix of 97% U238 + 3% U235). Conventional fission reactors are then run in a "breeder" configuration, producing Plutonium (Pu239) for use in fission bombs.
From the perspective of the U.S. Military, molten salt reactors that don't produce DU as a byproduct of fuel production and that don't produce Pu239 as a byproduct of energy production are harmful to military readiness. As a result, you won't see much support for them from the war hawks in Congress (mostly the Republicans these days, but it's bipartisan).
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(Score: 1, Offtopic) by realDonaldTrump on Thursday October 18 2018, @06:21PM
Listen, we need coal. It's very clean now, and you know maybe it's a little too clean. Obama said, do the scrubber. Put on the scrubber. And some of our wonderful coal companies got the scrubber for their plants. Very expensive -- $100 million or even more. I put an end to that. Repealed. And our coal industry is coming back. Much faster than anybody expected. Something a lot of people said would never happen. Believe me, it's happening. Because of me.
We need nuclear too -- much more than we have. The coal and the nuclear are VERY SPECIAL to our national security. Because they go 24/7. And they can keep 90 days of fuel on site. Wind, solar, where do you keep the fuel? I'll tell you, you don't. The sun sets, it's calm weather -- you got no electric. Zero. Gas, not so easy to store. Look what happened in Aliso Canyon. Big leak -- massive. Oil, that's another one that's very easy to leak. Japan -- they kept their oil in tanks. They had an earthquake. Tsunami. And, bye bye tanks. Big mess from that one.
But we need ALL forms of energy, because our economy is growing TREMENDOUSLY. And we have a very high-energy economy -- the best. Remember 2015? Everybody was saying, "oh, it's going to be Clinton vs. Bush." Well, they were half right. It was Clinton (crooked). But Low Energy Jeb lost the primary. And I won. Like I always win. Big league!!!