I wonder how the conservative hemiblogosphere feels about the fact that France (brief pause for conservative kneejerk booing and hissing) get most of its electricity from nuclear power.

What I'm more interested in is seeing what happens in Germany over the next couple of decades now that they've commited to shutting all the nuclear power plants down (and ratifying Kyoto).

The name "Shoreham" comes to mind. The late, unlamented Long Island Lighting Company was building a nuclear reactor. Very badly.

As was eventually discovered because a bunch of paperwork that someone had decided to destroy was found lying in a field.

Including modified blueprints: the builders had accidentally cut through crucial supporting beams in the reactor building (I don't recall, 20 years on, whether they were on the reactor proper or in the containment vessel).

A sensible person, at this point, screams a bit, maybe has a couple of drinks, yells at the contractor, and tells them to by damn fix it. On their own dime. A reasonable contractor fixes it, and then tries to get LILCO to pay for the fix.

Nope. The LILCO solution was to alter the blueprints so they no longer called for those supporting beams.

Shoreham was, I think, an extreme case, but not completely atypical.

Oh, it didn't help that they were building this plant, with complete disregard for public safety, on a large, highly populated island that would be effectively impossible to evacuate quickly. (All roads off Long Island lead either to its own barrier beaches--not terribly useful in this regard--or through New York City.)

Not to overlook the general dishonesty of the energy industry Westinghouse included in the run up to the Westinghouse Anti-Trust suit against the Energy Cartel as a response to failure by Westinghouse to hedge its fuel requirements contracts with reactor buyers. See e.g. The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear for a reminder that coal mining kills not only miners but minors frex one town lost most of its elementary school children when the school was buried under sliding mine tailings.

Avram,

I think apart from Jonah Goldberg (!), most conservatives realize the French people are a lot less anti-American than the French press, etc. And even the ones who like to tease the French commend their development of nuclear power....

Best,
JF

One reason the French have been successful w.r.t. Nuclear Power has been their standardized reactor program. Transplant an engineer from one EDF plant to another, and she'll know what she is dealing with.

American nukes are a mishmash of one-off designs, and a mixture of pressurized water and boiling water reactors.

Back in my college days, I used to argue with my roommate, a Sierra Club member, about nuclear power. My claim was that it had the potential to be much better for the environment than the alternative (burning fossil fuels). However, when I did some research into it, I found that there were problems with nuclear power that were (at that time) unresolved. Perhaps there are solutions now?

The problems that I saw were: (1) Neutron-induced weakening of building materials. The concrete walls of a nuclear power plant are constantly bombarded by neutrons, a by-product of fission. The effect of these neutrons is to transmute the atoms of the concrete. Eventually, this leads to a weakening of the concrete, limiting the lifespan of a reactor.
(2) Shortage of fuel. While there is plenty of uranium around, only certain rare isotopes are usable by conventional nuclear power plants. If we converted all the world's power generation to nuclear, this isotope would be used up before long. There is a nuclear power plant design that solves this problem, the breeder reactor, but this has another problem: (3) Plutonium. Breeder reactors produce plutonium as a by-product, which is dangerous for two reasons: it is extremely radioactive, and if stolen it can be processed into atomic bombs.

All of this is from memory, off the top of my head, so maybe these aren't real problems, but that's what I remember about the little research I did those many years ago.

The local parliament (I'm over in Europe) just approved plans for a new nuclear reactor. I figure it'll still take a long while to build,though (death by litigation, basicly). New reactors arent that big deal overall,I figure,but as a byproduct the parliament also approved the final location for spent nuclear fuel (I've visited the cave complex, looked secure enough. Around 500 meters down, inside granite bedrock). I think that's something of a first in Europe. How's the Yucca mountain project in US proceeding?
Not that we havent had our nuke scares here, Chernobyl is roughly 1000 miles south from here (And of course we caught some of the fallout.Not much though,but enough to leave,ahem,a lasting imression) and the former Soviet northern fleet is rotting next door,nuclear subs and all.

The British government faces a minor headache round about now; the original generation of Magnox reactors (a variety not found elsewhere in the world) build during the 1950's and 1960's are reaching the end of their design life and need to be decomissioned. The UK gets about 20% of its electricity from nuclear power; this will fall to 10% by 2010, and unless they give BNFL the go-ahead to start building new reactors, this is going to impact the UK's ability to comply with Kyoto by 2015.

BNFL is pushing for permission to build about 12 new reactors ... I suspect they'll get it, if not from the current government then [late] from the next one, when it becomes apparent that we're fresh out of North Sea (and Atlantic) oil.

Responding to Darryl McCullough: neutron damage to structural materials is one of the factors that limits the life of reactors (mostly it makes metals near the core brittle, rather than damaging the concrete of the building) but it's pretty well understood and allowed for in the design. (It's one of the things that made Chernobyl so bad, though; neutron-irradiated graphite accumulates damage in the form of strains in the graphite lattice, and when it burns, the strain is released, making it burn very hot and be very hard to extinguish.)
For a while, mainly in the 60's, it looked like there would be a shortage of uranium for reactors, but (as with lots of resources) when people looked harder, they found more, and there's been a glut of uranium (including the fissionable isotopes) on the world market for a couple of decades.
As for Patrick's original point, I agree wholeheartedly; the incompetence, short-sightedness, and downright dishonesty of industry executives It never ceases to amaze me that the power industry can spend a few billion dollars each on nuclear plants, and then insist on staffing and maintaining them with (metaphorically) high-school dropouts, to save a few hundred K per year.

Jordin summed up the situation very well. It's not a fuel issue or a structural issue, but a managment and corporate greed issue that won't go away. Think Enron glowing blue and you'll understand why society turned so decisively away from nuclear power. I'll put my money on wind, conservation, and photovoltaics before I'll bend over for Westinghouse and GE to stick it to me. Besides, Yucca Mountain is a stupid idea and the hundreds of decommissioned plants around the country are going to cost billions to shutter. Nuclear, it's gone from too cheap to meter to too expensive to shut down in two generations.

Anybody who has questions about nuclear power design and construction or radiological issues is welcome to look over my blog and the archives. I'm an engineer who spent 10 years on the sites.

There's not much room in these comments, but I'm particularly interested in details about the design change Ms. Rosenzweig mentions, Mr. McCullough's concerns about plutonium, and Mr. Kare's concerns about the competence of nuclear power plant operators.

Civil questions are welcome, but if you have nothing better to contribute than the comment by Dave Roberts above, don't bother.

I don't agree that Dave Roberts comments were uncivil. He's against nuclear power, and I'm guardedly for it, but it seems to me far from irrational to distrust monopoly utility companies. Any sensible discussion of nuclear power has got to engage the views Dave Roberts expresses above. They aren't without good reasons.