You are partially correct, I listed the rank of a top submarine officer incorrectly, but not his position, I'm not in the Navy. He was Executive Officer of the first nuclear sub, but only First Lieutenant of the diesel. EDIT: He "qualified for command" of the nuclear sub...probably why I thought "commander" but properly should have said "was in command". Shortly after being assigned to lead the nuclear sub trials, after helping design and build it, he led the American shut down of the Chalk River reactor, lest you continue to insinuate he was an 'armchair warrior' that never held command.
(record below)

◾17? DEC 1948 - 01 FEB 1951 -- Duty aboard USS Pomfret (SS-391) Billets Held: Communications Officer, Electronics Officer, Sonar Officer, Gunnery Officer, First Lieutenant, Electrical Officer, Supply Officer Qualifications: 4 Feb 1950 Qualified in Submarine


◾05 JUNE 1949 -- Promoted to Lieutenant (j.g.)


◾01 FEB 1951 - 10 NOV 1951 -- Duty with Shipbuilding and Naval Inspector of Ordnance, Groton, CT as prospective Engineering Officer of the USS K-1 during precommissioning fitting out of the submarine.


◾10 NOV 1951 - 16 OCT 1952 -- Duty aboard USS K-1(SSK-1) Billets Held: Executive Officer, Engineering Officer, Operations Officer, Gunnery Officer, Electronics Repair Officer Qualifications: Qualified for Command of Submarine Remarks: Submarine was new construction, first vessel of its class


◾01 JUNE 1952 -- Promoted to Lieutenant


◾16 OCT 1952 - 08 OCT 1953 -- Duty with US Atomic Energy Commission (Division of Reactor Development, Schenectady Operations Office) From 3 NOV 1952 to 1 MAR 1953 he served on temporary duty with Naval Reactors Branch, US Atomic Energy Commission, Washington, D.C. "assisting in the design and development of nuclear propulsion plants for naval vessels." From 1 MAR 1953 to 8 OCT 1953 he was under instruction to become an engineering officer for a nuclear power plant. He also assisted in setting up on-the-job training for the enlisted men being instructed in nuclear propulsion for the USS Seawolf (SSN575).


On December 12, 1952, an accident with the experimental NRX reactor at Atomic Energy of Canada's Chalk River Laboratories caused a partial meltdown. The resulting explosion caused millions of liters of radioactive water to flood the reactor building's basement, and the reactor's core was no longer usable.[7] Carter was ordered to Chalk River, joining other American and Canadian service personnel. He was the officer in charge of the U.S. team assisting in the shutdown of the Chalk River Nuclear Reactor.[8] The painstaking process required each team member, including Carter, to don protective gear, and be lowered individually into the reactor to disassemble it for minutes at a time. During and after his presidency, Carter indicated that his experience at Chalk River shaped his views on nuclear power and nuclear weapons, including his decision not to pursue completion of the neutron bomb.[9]

''Teabagger wannabes"-your tired, scripted labels son, an insipid bag of programmed newspeak designed for one simple purpose: To keep you and the minions like yourself as ineffectual and powerless as possible in order to continue feeding human fuel to the power plant as dutiful, helpless Energizer bunnies.

Surely, one of the best sources of news in the US if not the world.

Robert Downey Jr. has some of the best strategy advice, for libertarians and everyone else: (to paraphrase) "Agree, smile, and do whatever the fuck you were going to do anyway."

According to the American Road and Transport Builders Association, the upfront costs of current construction are pretty significant already:

"Construct a new 2-lane undivided road – about $2-$3 million per mile in rural areas, about $3-5 million in urban areas.

Mill and resurface a 4-lane road – about $1.25 million per mile.

Expand an Interstate Highway from 4 lanes to 6 lanes – about $4 million per mile."

So really you'd have to look at the replacement costs of a technology like this rather than just assigning all those initial costs to the category of boondoggle.

But this really points to a larger issue that makes this question very hard to quantify and is actually addressed by the Solar Roadways people:

"For an accurate cost comparison between current systems and the Solar Roadways system, you'd have to combine the costs of current roads (including snow removal, line repainting, pothole repair, etc.), power plants (and the coal or nuclear material to run them), and power and data delivery systems (power poles and relay stations) to be comparable with the Solar Roadway system, which provides all three. So the comparison is more like an apple to a fruit basket."

One further interesting note from their website is that the numbers they used for electricity generation of the solar roadway system came out of their testing. In Northern Idaho. In the dead of winter. In other words, the worst possible conditions for solar panel systems.

That's true for a post industrial POV.
When machines already exist, and you just need energy to get things moving.

The energetic concerns of bygone eras were :
Whale oil, and later kerosene. For lighting. (note: back then, a day's work would only buy minutes of light)
Firewood, and later coal. For heating.
Manpower was the only energy user when it came to food production.

Early machines such as the combine were horse drawn, and did not need an energy architecture in place. (ignoring "food" as an energy)

Later machines used steam power, and hence could piggy back on the already existing wood/coal energy architecture (in turn stimulating it to grow larger).

Once the machinery industry was established, and the revenue generation was in place, it was possible to invest in improvements and alternative energies - ultimately leading up to oil burning machinery being common.

In any case, historically, industrialization drove the energy industry. (As it should, why have an industry to produce a product (energy) that isn't needed?)
And industrialization depended on a conducive society. A place where an inventor could own his invention, and could sell it, allowing things that were no more than ideas or garage trinkets to transition into products - which in turn place demand on other resources such as [forms of] energy.

In the past, there was nothing, so everything was build from the ground up. Industries grew out of nothing, they weren't established up front.
Modern times are different, where you have investment capital from entities who's entire existence revolves around investing, and you can front the establishment of an industry in the calculated hope of future demand.
(Granted, lords/aristocrats had a hand in industrial investment. Just not the kind or scale that you can see today.)

What you say applies a bit later, when industrialization was already well under way. Like when Thomas Edison used investment capital to fund power plants and an electrical network, in order to power the first [practical, but not 'first'] light bulb in New York.

-scheherazade

The December update highlighted an issue that has been driving me insane for years now, an issue that makes me want to punch my fellow citizens right in the kisser for not looking beyond the facade.

His illustration of the price you pay for a t-shirt can be applied, without alteration, to our energy sector in Germany. The old, centralised infrastructure, primarily coal/gas/nuclear power plants, were subsidized heavily over the years, both directly through interest-free public loans and the privatisation of the energy grid as well as through indirect means, such as tax/insurance exemptions, R&D financing. Hell, the clean-up at Sellafield in the UK alone is expected to cost just shy of £100B. All this outsourcing of costs made it possible to keep the price of energy comparably cheap.

Meanwhile, all the subsidies for renewable energy are added on top of the energy price for consumers. No smoke screens, no outsourcing, no legacy costs. You get the price tag on your energy bill. A decent level of transparency, at last. But now people get pissed at the high prices of energy and demand a stop to the renewable energy program, which ironically pushed prices to a record low on the energy exchange. On-shore wind and solar are now cheaper than heavily subsidized coal and gas. My home town in the middle of nowhere generates wind power at 0.08€ per kwh, all year long, with minimal operating costs. Even solar works splendidly, despite the abysmal central European weather.

I think I might just try his Walmart explanation on some people, it's much easier to understand.

So cheers again for pointing out this wonderful series of lectures.

Reactors don't produce weapons grade plutonium? Then where is weapons grade plutonium made? I think you'll find that it's made in exactly the same reactors as there is no real distinction between a reactor used for power generation and weapons generation other than in name.

"Uranium ore contains only about 0.7% of the fissile isotope U235. In order to be suitable for use as a nuclear fuel for generating electricity it must be processed (by separation) to contain about 3% of U235 (this form is called Low Enriched Uranium - LEU). Weapons grade uranium has to be enriched to 90% of U235 (Highly Enriched Uranium or HEU), which can be done using the same enrichment equipment. There are about 38 working enrichment facilities in 16 countries"
http://www.cnduk.org/get-involved/parliamentary/item/579-the-links-between-nuclear-power-and-nuclear-weapons

The point is that continuation of current tech makes it a lot more economical to produce weapons tech, whether that be weapons grade plutonium or depleted uranium (DU). Reactors can cost upwards of ten billion dollars to build, why would a weapons manufacturer want to pay for one of those out of their own pocket when they can have the taxpayer's pay for nuclear power plants that can produce what they need?

"Every known route to bombs involves either nuclear power or materials and technology which are available, which exist in commerce, as a direct and essential consequence of nuclear power"
- Dr. Amory Lovins (from NEIS)

In terms of renewables:, the 'new' renewables only account for about 3% of total energy use, so if that's what he meant then he's not far off. Stats from IEA, however, state that wind has had an average growth rate of 25% over the past five years, while solar has averaged an annual growth rate of over 50% in the same period. So their impact is increasing fairly rapidly. So I'm not sure why he's so pessimistic about them when the IEA is not.

Have environmental groups specifically spoken out against the type of nuclear reactors he is talking about? Which ones?

Well I'm humbled enough to admit that I know as much about nuclear energy production as a primary schoolboy. Extant history of large-scale operations leaves a foul taste for everyone, or should. How many European countries ditched the idea of ever using nuclear energy? How many phaseouts planned?

Out with the old if it's not a potential ELE (extinction level enterprise).

LD just made the scariest prediction considered all morning and begs the question, "Does the planet really need China playing around with tinker-toy nuke power plants considering their track-record for building ginormous engineering disasters?" They may have a 1000-year-plan for empire but their characteristic program of increase as their world economic status grows seems a, 'many trials, many errors' approach.

That their success in economic influence has been accomplished through producing sub-standard plastic bullshit consumer products, sub-standard textiles, etc. with indigenous slave-labor to sell the bullshit to robotic consumers like U.S., Mexico, (insert non-Asian nations here) while cornering the market on raw materials for their machine should be of preeminent concern beyond that of how humans will get the power they need to continue turning the planet into something ugly.

Look at what they accomplished in space just the other day with their launching of that satellite-grabber. Here's another new level of paranoia I can agree with;
"In March 2013, a new law that "prohibits anyone from China setting foot in a NASA building" was passed."(wiki)

China in space
What a frightening concept.

That's interesting... I wasn't aware of that. It seems Nazi policies and distaste for "Jew Science" greatly slowed their nuclear research down, but they were still making fast progress on it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_nuclear_energy_project

"In the late 1930s, Germany might very well have had a 5-year lead on the West in [atomic weaponry]. ... [But] Manhattan did go forward, first and foremost as a counter to the feared German development [of atomic weaponry]." Google Books: How to lose a War.

The following thread isn't a primary source, but it's enough to make me think more research would probably find similar conclusions to the commenters:

Germany was working on nuclear bombs and reactors. German scientists Hahn, Meitner and Stassmann discovered the nuclear chain reaction in uranium in 1939. One reason Albert Einstein wrote FDR lobbying for an all out effort to make an atomic bomb was he got letter from German friends saying we know how to make atomic explosions for Gods sake hurry up. Einstein got through to FDR and we know were this ended up. In Germany they put their best man in charge a theorist named Werner von Heisenberg...

http://www.city-data.com/forum/politics-other-controversies/1062440-will-isreal-attack-nuclear-power-plant-4.html#ixzz2OnfHjt7X

Or the bad guys could hit a bridge, a power plant, a hospital, a TV transmitter or one of literally millions of other targets which don't get 1% of the security that airports and aircraft do. It's frightening, to be honest. If this is our democratic, freedom-loving reaction to aircraft being hit, what would it be like if other targets were hit.

We have, quite quietly, become a society were we need to show our papers to the man and be either groped or ogled. How the fuck did this happen? Sure, it's only getting on to an aircraft now. Will we need it to get into a hospital if one is attacked? What about to get into a school?

Why not save time and check our papers and strip us bare when we leave the house? If you object to this, clearly you must have something to hide.

@GeeSussFreeK

I tried to stay way from issues specific to the use of nuclear technology for a reason. There's very little in your reply that I can respond to, simply for a lack of expertise. So bear with me if I once again attempt to generalize and abstract some points. And I'll try to keep it shorter this time.

You mentioned how construction times and costs are pushed up by the constant evolution of compliance codes. A problem not exclusive to the construction of power plants, but maybe more pronounced in these cases. No matter.

What buggers me, however, is what you can currently observe in real time at the EPR construction sites in Olkiluoto and Flamanville.
For instance, the former is reported to have more than 4000 workers from over 60 nations, involving more than 1500 sub-contractors. It's basically the Tower of Babylon, and the quality of work might be similar as well. Workers say, they were ordered to just pour concrete over inadequate weld seams to get things done in time, just to name an example. They are three years over plan as of now, and it'll be at least 2-3 more before completion.
And Flamanville... here's some of what the French Nuclear Safety Authority had to say about the construction site: "concrete supports look like Swiss cheese", "walls with gaping holes", "brittle spots without a trace of cement".

Again, this is not exclusive to the construction of NPPs. Almost every large scale construction site in Europe these days looks like this, except for whatever the Swiss are doing: kudos to them, wonderful work indeed. But if they mess up the construction of a train station, they don't run a risk of ruining the ground water and irradiating what little living space we have in Europe as it is.

Then you explain the advantages of small scale, modular reactors. Again, no argument from my side on the feasability of this, I have to take your word on it. But looking at how the Russians dispose of their old nuclear reactors (bottom of the Barents Sea) and how Germany disposes of its nuclear waste (dropped down a hole), I don't fancy the idea of having even more reactors around.

As for prices, I have to raise my hands in surrender once again. Not my area of expertise, my knowledge is limited to whatever analysis hits the mainstream press every now and then. Here's my take on it, regarding just the German market: the development, construction, tax exemption, insurance exemption, fuel transport and waste disposal of the nuclear industry was paid for primarly by taxes. Conservative government estimates were in the neighbourhood of €300B since the sixties, in addition to the costs of waste disposal and plant deconstruction that the companies can't pay for. And that's if nothing happens to any of the plants, no flood, no fire, nothing.

That's not cheap. E.ON and RWE dropped out of the bid on construction permits for new NPPs in GB, simply because it's not profitable. RWE CEO Terium mentioned ~100€/MWh as the minimum base price to make new NPPs profitable, 75.80€/MWh for gas-powered plants. Right now, the base (peak) price is at 46€/MWh (54€/MWh) in Germany. France generates ~75% of its power through NPPs, while Germany is getting plastered with highly subsidized wind turbines and solar panels, yet the market price for energy is lower in Germany.

Yes, the conditions are vastly different in the US, and yes, the next generation of NPPs might be significantly cheaper and safer to construct and run. I'm all for research in these areas. But on the field of commercial energy generation, nuclear energy just doesn't seem to cut it right now.

So let's hop over to safety/dangers. Again, priorities might differ significantly and I can only argue from a central European perspective. As cold-hearted as it may sound, the number of direct casualties is not the issue. Toxicity and radiation is, as far as I'm concerned. All our NPPs are built on rivers and the entire country is rather densely populated. A crashing plane might kill 500 people, but there will be no long term damage, particularly not to the water table. The picture of an experimental waste storage site is disturbing enough as it is, and it wasn't even "by accident" that some of these chambers are now flooded by ground water.

Apologies if I ripped anything out of context. I tried to avoid the technicalities as best as I could in a desperate attempt not to make a fool of myself. Again.

And sorry for not linking any sources in many cases. Most of it was taken from German/Swiss/Austrian/French articles.

Heading back to school for nuclear engineering myself in the next year or so, hopefully to make reactors completely self regulating.

Since no source is mentioned, I assume this to be your comment and therefore applaud and envy you. Most of my passion for a couple of things died somewhere along the way.

Questions, comments or concerns on nuclear or energy in this thread are always welcome (and encouraged!)

Meaningful questions would require a level of knowledge I do not possess, so I'll stick to the layman's reaction: a comment.

Two issues that are not exclusive to the use of nuclear technology make me a strong opponent of nuclear energy in general, aside from technology-specific problems. It's the involvement of people in every stage of the process and centralisation.

Anything run by private entities has to generate a profit. Therefore corners will be cut, regulations will be circumvented. Mistakes will be made, design flaws covered up. The cheapest material will be used by the least paid worker, supervised by a guy on his second job who just wants to go home to his family.

Case in point would be the reactors in Germany, one of the most stricly regulated and controlled markets in the world. Absurd levels of negligence and coverup after coverup have become public over the years, and that's before cost cutting measures became en vogue.

Or take the EPR Olkiluoto 3 in Finland. The reports on the construction process would be hysterically funny if it wasn't a bloody nuclear reactor they're working on.

Google some pictures of "Schachtanlage Asse" to see the reality of "due dilligence" in these matters. If people are involved, bean counters and politicians will run the show, fuck-ups and bad calls are inevitable.

Even if engineers call the shots, they'll overengineer it, they'll make it incompatible with real life conditions. We've seen it time and time again. I could tell you stories about the ICE train, for instance, that'll make your head spin. Incidently, the same company is also involved in the construction of nuclear power plants.

As for centralisation: if energy generation is focused on large scale power plants, it creates monopolies/oligopolies. If a handful corporations, or regionally even just a single corporation, controls the market for something as fundamental as energy, it turns all concepts of a market into a farce. Look at France where EDF basically owns every single plant. Or Germany, where Vattenfall, E.ON, RWE and EnBW control the grid, control the power plants, control the market, control the price, control the politics. It's madness.

Edit: Blimey! This was supposed to be a short comment, yet it turned into another incoherent rant. Sorry.

It partly explains voter apathy on the Dem side. Obama was sent to the White house with a clear mandate (which he ran on), and he largely ignored it or "compromised" it away after he got there. And don't post me a link to that "lookie at what all Obama's done" page. It's horseshit. This election, many Dems are just voting for Obama because he's not Romney.

Also, fusion has been 30 years away for about 40 years now. How about a Manhattan Project-level effort towards that? In the meantime, let's help Japan build their space elevator so we can have a safe method of disposing all the nuclear waste from all the nuclear power plants we are going to need to build until fusion is viable.

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