Brown's Ferry Unit 1 Reactor Reaches Full Power After Refurbishing.

The Brown's Ferry Unit 1 reactor, which has been shut for almost 2 decades and was recently refurbished has come back on line at full power.

http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/event-status/reactor-status/2007/20070616ps.html#r2

The reactor has a full power output of 1155 MWe.

http://www.tva.gov/power/nuclear/bfn_U1_fact_sheet.pdf

It represents the first substantial connection of a nuclear reactor to the grid in 11 years.

To get an idea of the scale of this thing, one might compare it to the solar electrical output of the entire United States.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/epmxlfile1_1_a.xls

Solar electricity output for the last twelve month (rolling) production figures is in units of energy 519 thousand megawatt-hours or 0.0019 exajoules. Dividing this figure by the number of seconds in a year to get <em>continuous average</em> power, we see that all of the solar installations in the United States are the equivalent of a 59 MWe continuous plant. Thus the Brown's Ferry 1 reactor will produce about 20 times as much energy as all of the solar electricity facilities in the United States combined.

This to only 15 times as much depending on the success of Governor Hydrogen Hummer's brazillion solar roofs bill.

will actually begin. I think I heard that the reactor will be on line in 2013.

If they do go ahead, engineering work will most likely start in August.

whether or not to go forward depending on the price submitted for the completion of the plant.

:kick:

considering the half-life I'm not sure we have the moral right to use it until we do have a plan for disposal.

suited up here.

The main difference between so called "nuclear waste" and dangerous fossil fuel wastes are these:

So called "nuclear waste" has been successfully contained on the grounds where it is generated. Many technologies to reuse it exist hand have been demonstrated on a laboratory, pilot and industrial scales.

Dangerous fossil fuel waste is released indiscriminately into the environment. No successful technology exists to contain it even though people love to theorize about such schemes.

So called "nuclear waste" contains valuable materials and is largely recyclable.

Dangerous fossil fuel waste is diffuse useless toxic garbage.

So called "nuclear waste" has killed zero people over 50 years of use.

Fossil fuel waste kills continuously on a scale of millions of people.

And now for the really, really, really BIG difference: The public imagination is fixated on so called "nuclear waste" even though it is harmless. The public couldn't give a rat's ass about dangerous fossil fuel waste.

Oh, yeah, dangerous fossil fuel waste has no half-life. It's permanent and will last forever.

so it will be hard to advance the search for a more better suited energy source, is my biggest concern actually. I think it would be a better alternative to coal but not for forever. Can you imagine the amount of nuclear waste we would have today if we were getting the majority of our electrical energy from nuclear for all these years.

For the record I am one of the protesters to the blackfox nuclear power plant planned for near here way back when so I'm not a johny come lately on this. My concern then as now is what the heck do we do with the waste. sorry if I sound like a broken record. but what do we do with the waste????? please answer me that

encasing it in concrete is not the answer nor is encasing it in steel or jettisoning it into space or burying it at sea. DU shells

This is a mathematical relationship that governs systems in which things are created and decay in proportion to the amount of material contained.

The solutions of the Bateman equations (which are differential equations) clearly show that so called "nuclear waste" cannot accumulate indefinately. On the contrary, used nuclear fuel can only - depending on the half-life of the nucleon in question and the power out put - to a defined maximum.

For a few nuclides, like Tc-99, Cs-135, and I-129, equilibria is not really a factor, but compared to billions and billions and billions (27 billion each year now) of dangerous fossil fuel waste released each year, these things essentially don't matter. It is easy to show that they are very unlikely to injure anyone ever and that they are, in fact, safer than the natural uranium ores from which they are prepared. After 50 years we have accumulated about 80 MT of Tc-99, for instance, and the stuff is probably as valuable as hell.

By the way, people often eat Tc-99 on the advice of their doctors. It is an important medical imagining tool (actually as its nuclear isomer Tc-99m).

Many radioactive fission products, things like Cerium-144, Barium-140, are essentially decaying as fast as they form. (Since the bateman equation solutions in first order approximations are aysmptotic there is a slight increase year to year in say, Barium-140, but it is unlikely that the new material represents a visible quantity.) It is an important matter in nuclear engineering to understand some of these equilibria, like that associated with Xe-135 for instance.

The claim that so called "nuclear waste" can accumulate indefinitely is one of the most ill informed bits of public misunderstanding that there is.

The case that waste is a problem only for nuclear energy is a subject I deride as "nuclear exceptionalism." Nuclear energy is the only form of exajoule scale energy for which the so called waste problem is trivial. The public impression to the contrary is arbitrary and is a reflection of why the public may well deserve what it is going to get. Dangerous fossil fuel waste threatens all of humanity and indeed all living things. Used nuclear fuel does not.

I've been smelling smoke for a long time and this is my friend is smoke

have a good disposal plan, burying it in the desert isn't the answer. I feel the increased use of nuclear will cut down on the research for better energy sources largely due to the pro nuclear people tooting it up to be the next best thing since they invented the wheel and discovered fire and yes I believe there is much to be learned concerning what to or can be used for energy. At this point in time we really don't know what to do with nuclear waste, waste that is very dangerous for many years to come. I realize that coal or oil is not the answer but neither is nuclear. Today we need to use the newest technology to help to clear up what we have while we are researching the alternatives to fosil fuels all the while we as individuals cut back on our demands as much as we can. imho

You are correct that "burying it in the desert" isn't the answer.
Recycling it, reprocessing it, reusing it is the answer but that
is not an answer that you appear to want to hear.

Burning it and distributing it around the globe, poisoning everyone
and devastating the world is the answer that you are content to
accept for fossil fuels. To my knowledge, no-one has proposed doing
the same for nuclear fuels so why pretend that storing the (tiny amount)
of nuclear waste for reprocessing is somehow worse than spreading
vast quantities of toxic radioactive fossil fuel waste around every day?

> Today we need to use the newest technology to help to clear up what
> we have while we are researching the alternatives to fosil fuels all
> the while we as individuals cut back on our demands as much as we can.

I agree.
We should all be conserving as fast as possible.
We should not be wasting power in the suicidal fashion that we do today.
We should not view the ability to waste energy as "good".
We should not ignore more efficient ways of life simply due to politics.
We should be using the newest technology to reprocess nuclear "waste"
even when it isn't the cheapest option. I guarantee that it is safer
than the so-called "sequestration" boondoggles that are the REAL
smoke & mirrors in the energy industry.

"Other" sources cannot provide what we need, in the time-frame required. If you start with a budget of a couple trillion dollars, and a time-frame of 20 years, and run the numbers on how much energy/year you can provide for running the most important parts of our civilization:

1) using nuclear

2) not using nuclear

You find that option-1 provides a lot more energy/year. Not just a little bit. Way more. And it's all base-load power, available for use on windless days and at night, etc.

Conservation does not really address the issue of electricity not being on at night, or when the wind isn't blowing, etc. Ask a resident of Baghdad.

Every year we argue about this, is one less year in our time budget, and also less money, seeing as how our economy continues to degrade. At this point, I don't really expect that to change in time. We're all going to find out exactly how little energy we can get from non-nuclear energy, and we're going to wish like hell we lived in NJ. Or France.

Fission products continually accumulate in operating reactors - they never reach "equilibrium".

The only time they attain "equilibrium" is when the reactor ceases to maintain a self-sustaining chain reaction (during shutdown or when fission poisons quench the reactions).

Don't come here and make statements about physics when you haven't even mastered the difference between energy and power.

The Bateman equation can be found here:

http://www.neutron.kth.se/courses/transmutation/Bateman/Bateman.html

Very clearly there are two portions of the equation that are of opposite sign. When you figure out the difference between peak power and energy - and there is no evidence that you will - maybe you will be able to make a stab at the form of the differential equation and what it means, but I doubt that it will be of any use.

I know the difference between energy and power...and I know green-cheese-moon-flat-earth pseudoscience nonsense when I see it.

Nuclear reactors produce fission products at rates of billions of events per second.

The majority of those products - including 129-I, 90-Sr, 137-Cs and 239-Pu have half-lifes measured in years.

They are produced at far far greater rates than they decay and accumulate *rapidly* in spent fuel.

They do not attain some magical hobbyist equilibrium - period.

Don't think so...

:P

The most amusing thing is that you don't know you are embarrassing yourself.

As a first approximation for most radionuclides the equilibrium situation is best modeled by the secular equilibrium given in equation 20 in the following link:

http://www.eas.asu.edu/~holbert/eee460/RadioactiveDecay.pdf

In the Bateman case the production "decay constants" are related to the fission yields. Over the years I used a form of equation 20 to understand the accumulation of fission products to understand the utility of various examples in different types of systems.

At the end of the day, one needs to keep in mind that nuclear fission removes atoms of uranium and thorium that would be in equilibrium with a large number of radioisotopes. Thus the best way to reduce the radioactivity of the planet would be to use nuclear power.

Equilibrium means that production rates equal decay rates

Example: the half lives of 137Cs and 90Sr are ~30 years.

How many curies of each are produced by a 1000 MW PWR operating at full power in a second, minute, hour, day or year???

(clue: lots)

How much decays away in those time frames???

(clue: not much).

When do production rates equal decay rates????

Never - as long as fission proceeds 137Cs and 90Sr will accumulate in fuel pellets - at no time do they attain "magical" equilibrium.

US inventories of spent fuel fission products will *increase* as long as we continue irradiate nuclear fuel.

Reality trumps hobbyist nonsense every time.

You're doing a great job at embarrassing yourself further.

It would seem that you don't know that uranium and thorium are radioactive and that they are in radioequilibrium with their decay products.

I have know for many years now, of course, that your understanding of the radioactive decay law is nonexistent.

The differential equation for radioactive decay has a particularly simple form: dN = -Nk dt. It is obvious from the solution to this equation that the more of a particular radioactive isotope one has, the more of it decays. The understanding of this simple fact should intuitively suggest to anyone with a modicum of mathematical sense - and I understand this is not inclusive of present company - that there is a maximum for the accumulation of radiosotopes at constant power.

If one had 100 million tons of Sr-90 - and this is impossible by the way - there is no way in hell that the world's nuclear power plants could manage to produce it at the same rate at which it decays. Thus the supply of Sr-90 would decline.

On some level this is regrettable, since otherwise Sr-90 would be able to provide considerable power. If world energy demand doubled to 1000 exajoules and all of it was addressed by nuclear power, it is easy to show that the maximum power output from Sr-90 would be about 11,000 MW(th).

We're very far from that regrettably.

And keep posting gobbledygook - wouldn't want to disappoint the (ignorant) sycophants...

Uranium and thorium are *not* in "radioequlibrium" with their daughters because all of their daughters have different half-lives and decay at significantly different rates than the parent isotopes.

Apparently you have no idea what the word "radioequilibrium" means.

That's hardly surprising.

Buy an introductory level college physics textbook and see if you can read it.

or physics or isotope geochemistry.

Uranium and thorium *disequilibria* allow oceanographers to infer rates of particulate organic matter flux to the deep ocean.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VB2-4BVRSDR-2&_user=2139839&_coverDate=12%2F31%2F2004&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000054279&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=2139839&md5=38f7ebb33c64c5eb9af4a3b5ff19504c

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/1995/94JC01954.shtml

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0024-3590(198501)30%3A1%3C22%3ADWTCC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-R

FYI - disequilibrium means that U and Th are *not* in "radioequilibrium" in seawater (which covers 71% of the Earth's surface)...

just so you know...

As I said, you have no idea what the word radioequilibrium and as you keep talking we see that you are confused by the distinction between was is really a chemical equilibrium and nuclear equilibrium.

Since you have refused to look into understanding the contents of a physics book - but in spite of the fact that you have declared the mathematical sciences to be "gobbledygook" I will try to obviate what I mean. No doubt you will spectacularly misinterpret it, but really, this is an excellent chance to keep you talking and to keep you revealing how little you understand about the questions before us.

The following account comes from Modern Physics by Elmer E Anderson, Saunders College Publishing 1982 pg 261. I will substitute the letter k for the greek letter lambda used in the original text, which is an undergraduate text.



The bold is mine.

It is obvious, by the way, that a fluid system like seawater has nothing to do with a solid system like used nuclear fuel. Your inability to distinguish between fluid phases and solid phases is probably a measure of why you have such poor understanding of the difference between used nuclear fuel and dangerous fossil fuel waste. The former is a solid of relatively small volume and small mass where the latter is a fluid of huge volume and huge mass.

Keep talking, by all means. Please keep talking.

One must keep up appearances...

Almost everyone who attempts to elevate religion over science behaves in precisely the same way.

I note with savage satisfaction that creationists attempt to twist nuclear science in bizarre and contorted ways.

http://www.christiananswers.net/q-eden/edn-radioactive.html

How much nuclear waste would have made if we had 500 instead of 100 nuclear plants for the last twenty years?

At about 25 tons/yr/plant, we'd have generated 250,000 tons of spent fuel. Total. We'd have avoided producing 16 million tons of carbon dioxide per day for a total of over 100 billion tons of carbon dioxide and numerous other "traces" of many thousands of tons, particulates, mercury, uranium etc, sent into the atmosphere.

I'm interested in why you think the various options you give for waste are automatically no good. Looking at the only nuclear reactors from the distant past (the natural reactors at Oklo), rock appears to be very good at immobilizing fission products, and I'd expect concrete to do just as well.

A far more dangerous and expensive accident than the *billion dollar* Three Mile Island.

Read all about it...

http://www.ccnr.org/browns_ferry.html

and the rising sea levels, and the children who need pulmonary therapy to live anything like a normal life, and the tens of thousands of dead coal miners, and all this other stuff that's clearly due to fossil fuels and their deadly waste WHEN?

Jeebus H. Everloving CHRIST on a pogo stick!!!

The final economic toll of U.S. coal production will probably be a million times greater, and take 10,000 times longer to repair.

And then there are all those people who have died, and who will die, because we continued to build coal plants when we should have been banning them.

:rofl:

Wow. A 2 decade shutdown caused by a friggin' candle. :wow:

the candle fire was in 1975. Browns Ferry 1 didn't shut down until 1985.

I didn't notice that there was no reference to how long it was off-line in the article cited, and I took that posters 25 year assertion as literal. It was only off-line for 1 year following the candle incident.

Thanks for the clarification! :thumbsup: