Secretary Chu Says U.S. Administration Remains Committed to Nuclear Power

That last paragraph is whats up. Bring to light things that aren't pretty and need to be dealt with.

Hopefully we will get larger emergency batteries, and an upgraded containment system.

Those attacking Nuclear power root their argument in ideology and emotion rather then logic and practicality. You always hear emotionally charged statements like "we won't have safe water to drink" and "total catastrophy" without metrics to put it in proportion.

I am imagining now our energy situation mirroring that of France - where almost all our energy needs are met by nuclear.....

Coal plants dissapear and along with it mountain top removal (we destroy entire mountain ranges yet get hung up on Yucca mtn in the nuclear debate), carbon sequestration, smog and and carbon emmisions fall by the wayside... Electric production capacity would increase providing the infrastructure to support the coming future of electric vehicles.... The billions sent to the middle east would begin to dry up along with our conflicts of interest there and financial support of unstable nations....

Nuclear materials (uranium, plutonium, thorium) are abundant inside the US which would be a huge economic boost - keeping money and jobs spend on energy HERE..... Hard line leftists and environmentalist do nothing but maintain the status quo.... How do they expect us to meet our growing energy needs??? they scream at coal and clean coal, hydro, nuclear - even at wind power for migrating birds and hydo for local river ecology..... but by giving no reasonable solution, they only keep things as they are.... They claim all kinds of environmental and safety issues with nuclear - clearly hyper-inflating reality.... Are there problems with nuclear? Sure...... but they PALE in comparison to other sources of energy production.............

Remember, an average sized nuclear plant operates for about 40 years and in that time generates no carbon emmisions, only water vapor, and results (for the life of the plant) in high level nuclear waste the size of a small house - add to that an annual energy production of 1 million homes.

The damage in these ancient reactors was caused by payoffs to regulatory officials to allow the owner to save a buck or two putting the backup generators in the basement not by the quake.

Hopefully NRC inspectors will not allow this sort of outrage to occur.

Before the owners/executives and compliant officials get jailed and hopefully executed for the homicide and treason their corrupt practices caused, the shareholders deserve to lose their entire investment for their complicity in this outrage.

The modern nuke is thousands of times less likely to have the kind of accident this ancient reactor suffered.

Meanwhile China has announced a large scale development project on the Molten Salt Reactor which promises to deliver clean and green zero pollution nuke power enough to power the world for hundreds of years using only existing nuclear waste from highly efficient dirt cheap factory produced units 1 cent a kwh.

The utterly stupid brainless attorneys that run the US government will not spend a dime on the technology which is 100% likely to save the world if developed. That technology was invented, tested and and perfected in the US in the seventies. We even flew it around on an airplane.

Chu unfortunately is too passive to get anything done on this file.

Great! Let's build the next $50 billion dollar nuke plant in between the White House and the Pentagon and make sure we keep a Republican in as president and Republicans in the majority of the other two branches of government for about 40 years and when there is a melt down, we can get rid of two problems at the same time.

"Sethdayal" the molten salt reactor is a good idea. America was going to build one in Nevada. They were going to use solar panels to create electricity during the day and the left over electricity to melt the salt; they were going to run water through tubes to create steam that would hit turbines to create the electricity at night. The solar panels they were going to use would have generated as much electricity as a nuke plant would, but since it was such a great idea...America will not build it. Using the spent nuclear waste we have in storage is an excellent idea. Brovo for China, but America is no longer as smart as China and that molten salt reactor will never be built.

One kind of molten salt reactor (MSR) that sethdayal mentioned is LFTR (Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor). The LFTR reactor is the one they developed for airplanes in the 70s. There are some interesting, informative YouTube videos describing how LFTRs work, their numerous benefits, and why we don't use them today (which mostly boils down to weapons and government contract money).

Here's a link to the LFTR video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWUeBSoEnRk

If the government-environmentalist alliance had not shut down construction of new nuclear plants for the past 30 years, those old GE plants could have been replaced with passively safe generation 3 or 4 plants by now. The modern designs are extremely safe, but politicians seem to believe that every nuke plant is a bomb waiting to go off.

The Japanese have nothing to worry about Washington is littered with radioctive particles and other toxic wastes By Hanford and were still here!!! Sure the Columbia river will give you cancer but no one lives forever.

I'm throwing my hat in ring with those that stand against the nuclear detractors.

I agree wholeheartedly that when it comes to guiding the future of our technological development and meeting our growing, evolving energy needs, detractors do little but shoot down ideas without sending up their own targets.

Idealists.

What they fail to realize and refuse to accept is that the technologies we've been using can't sustain us anymore and we need to make a choice:

-Dive head first into some very dangerous tech at the expense of everything around us until we harness it

or

-Fall behind, regress and die from one or many of a myriad of circumstances that could have been avoided or prevented

Don't get me wrong, I think we should learn to live in harmony with nature, but we have to live.

Until our civilization takes to the stars for good, we've gotta use all our knowledge and resources to get there.

We're a wayward asteroid from being gone and we have the power to see them coming.

We're a gargantuan energy source from severing our dependence on nature.

We're a few good leaders from a few good decisions.

We're on the cusp of advancing just a little closer to where our species should be, it's just the old world thinkers that refuse to let the real thinkers open their stride up...

We, generally, do not put nuclear reactors in earthquake zones beneath the tsunami line (Cali has two, I believe).

When the 4th largest earthquake of recorded measurements is followed by a tsunami and exactly one nuclear reactor practically at the center leaks a little, why the chaos?

We intentionally droped two atomic weapons on that country just a few decades ago. Go google.earth those cities now. I think there is a McDonalds now right about where the impact on Hiroshima took place.

Accidents are bad, but rare. Radiation is dangerous and long lasting, but not eternal. Paranoid rantings do not make the industry safer. Investment does.

When the quake hit - the reactors automatically shut down okay. But, the residual heat had to be cooled.

The backup generators started and coolant pumping resumed... until the Tsunami came in and washed them away.

The plant switched to battery backup and coolant pumping was resumed... for 8 hours until the batteries gave out.

Large desiel generators were trucked in and started... but there was NO WHERE FOR THEM TO PLUG into the system.

Pumping could not resume. Heat spiked. water split into 02 and H2. H2 exploded. Heat damaged the core.

I would hardly call the Union of Concerned Scientists "nuclear experts." They're a political organization dedicated to nuclear non-proliferation (read: ending nuclear power) among other goals. Following Rahm Emanuel's advice to never let a good crisis go to waste, the UCS has been using this opportunity to promote their agenda. That's the reason Secretary Chu's much more reasonable remarks contradict the UCS. And don't let the "Scientists" label fool you; it's just a name. There's nothing especially scientific about them. They commission scientific studies just like any other political think tank does that doesn't have "scientists" in its name. The overwhelming majority of UCS members are not scientists. A more appropriate moniker would be the Union of Concerned Alarmists.

If Japan had used LFTRs there would have been no problems. LFTRs have a very simple fail-safe shutdown, all it requires is a loss of power to a cooling fan and gravity. A frozen plug is kept frozen by the cooling fan, and when it melts the liquid flouride drains into catch chamber. This is so simple and safe that the researchers in the late 1960s would turn off the fan when they went home Friday night and restart the reactor Monday morning.

I think our best choice is the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor. LFTRs are a proven technology, research was terminated in 1975. New advances with better heat exchangers and the Brayton cycle turbines make this a highly desirable option. LFTRs can burn our stockpile of radio-active waste from existing nuclear power plants. (Because LFTRs are so efficient it would take over 100 years to do this). LFTRs produce little long term radio active waste, or products suitable for making bombs. The radio-active waste produced has a short half life and requires only 300 years of storage as compared to the uranium waste which has to be stored for 10,000 years. There is also much less radio-active waste, 0.3% for equivalent power from uranium. Thorium is plentiful, there is enough in coal ash and mine tailings to power the world for 100 years, and a million years supply can be dug out of the earth. See:

http://neinuclearnotes.blogspot.com/2008/11/thorium-at-googles-tech-talk.html

and also:

http://energyfromthorium.com/

We should build a factory to build these in a size small enough to ship on trucks (200MW) and an assembly line will bring down costs. These could be set up all over the world (no worries about nuclear proliferation) and first locations should be to replace coal and oil fired electrical generating plants, because there is already power distribution set up at these locations. Pollution from these sources will be terminated.