I will say, you are full of hate. I am comfortable with my level of competence, having retired from nuclear engineering. Even though I doubt you would let on, I would love to know just how advanced your career has been. It is hard for me to believe that your level of hate can translate into a career I would envision as contributing to the betterment of society.

Despite your use of invective to disparage others with whom you disagree, note that the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, both past (Fatou Bensouda, author of the Bensouda Report) and present (Karim Asad Ahmad Khan), are devout Muslims. There is an obvious predisposition for a finding of guilt for all actions of Israel.

You would do yourself a favor if you responded to the arguments made rather than using Ad Hominem attacks.

I am no expert on this, but I believe information is now popularly considered to be a fundamental quantity. So then the scientific community must devise a foundation for saying how information could evolve as did life. Early in the TFA is the wording "...propose a time-asymmetric law that states that the functional information of a system will increase over time..." and that they "...propose a "law of increasing functional information"... to account for it.

I agree that this is all "mystic pseudoscience." For instance, at the Big Bang, there immediately was an entire set of complex physical laws that governed the behavior of everything from atoms to galaxies. That did not evolve. It was immediately there along with all the matter and energy. So the idea that complex, sophisticated mathematics could describe these laws from the very beginning makes me think their proposal is quite a reach into fantasy.

Thanks for the information, Rei. Your knowledge is much deeper than mine. My knowledge comes from working with power plant instrumentation rather than the thermal properties of the heat sources.

For your statement, "the issue that our low-temperature power generation cycles don't get as close to the theoretical Carnot maximum as higher-temperature cycles." Is that due to the the machinery we have being less efficient at recovering the energy available?

I was mesmerized by the Iceland volcano at Litli Hrútur earlier in the year. The geology there is amazing!

Agreed. 140C is very cool when using it to turn a steam turbine, as the linked article suggests. We can only use steam down to about 75C before we have to condense it back to water. So the 140C - 75C = 65C temperature differential is minimal. My question would be whether the source can maintain a constant 48MWt loss (all thermal plants are approximately 1/3 efficient, so we need to extract the 48MWt to maintain the 16MWe). Is the hot water pool's linkage to the heat in the mantle sufficient to restore the 48MWt loss, or will the hot water pool cool? My assumption is that they must have some way to confirm a continuous loss of this magnitude, even though the linked article did not say it.

The EIA is predicting a 1% growth per year through 2050 in electrical demand. So there is no need to increase the capacity of transmission lines 40% except to accommodate a lot more wind and solar generation. Increasing the load on the existing infrastructure means reducing the standard engineering safety margins. I imagine some here will remember the 8/14/2003 blackout in the Northeastern U.S. and Canada. The initiating event was an overgrown tree, which caused a cascading effect throughout the Northeast. So my question for the people behind this project is; have you analyzed the effects of cascading failures when running the transmission system with almost no margin?

This post is close to the mark. This part is absolutely correct "If it is designed, built, and run by competent people." Nuclear power demands respect at all times.

I would qualify the second part of the statement, "who aren't being cheap." The U.S. is (mostly) built on the free market principle, so getting things done while making a profit is at the core of who we are. The laws surrounding power markets have been skewed so that wind and solar generators can bid their power for free, as they make money from production credits. That puts a tremendous burden on other generation types to be as low cost as possible. Nuclear still needs to be run safely with this huge disadvantage. I've seen it done well (I've long been part of making sure the rules are not bent during plant modifications) and I've seen it done while "being cheap," reference the Davis-Besse head incident. But the people I've worked with understand that nuclear is unique and have always put safety first.

The last part about Japan having a strong regulator is off the mark. Unlike the USNRC, the Japanese regulator was also bound by law to promote nuclear. This led to poor decision making. In the US, the NRC is only tasked with safety. And they have gone overboard at times. It is a can be a struggle to get the NRC on board with regulations that are both safe and cost effective. In any case, the Japanese regulatory authority was not equivalent to the USNRC, which was problematic for oversight of their plants.

One thing most people don't know. After Fukushima, plants in the US got together to address the problem of how to ensure plants can be cooled even if an unknown and unforeseen event should occur. All U.S. plants have upgraded their design to accept external cooling and electrical sources, and they fund two sites (one in Phoenix, one in Memphis) that have multiple sets of backup cooling and electrical equipment that can connect to any plant. They have pre-arranged with FedEx to be able to get this equipment to any plant in the U.S. that needs it in an emergency. The plans are extensive, and include heavy lift helicopter companies, National Guard, and state police to ensure the process works. Each plant (or multiple plants if they are geographically close) has also purchased their own set of external electrical and cooling equipment with detailed plans to employ it if needed. These sets of equipment are kept in bunkers, with equipment that can move downed trees or other debris out of the way to get to the external connections.

So I would argue that the U.S. has responded appropriately and in a technically adequate manner to the Fukushima meltdowns.

Hey! Another person on /. that knows nuclear! This is a tough crowd here. Too many people with no knowledge, but absolutely certain of their anti-nuclear beliefs.

This is a real shame, because the French also did a lot of things right. Their CO2 emissions due to electricity production are always a fraction of Germany's. At the moment they are producing around 1/8 the CO2 of Germany. The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration bungled the MOX Fuel project so badly at the Savannah River Site that they finally just had to give up. It was our one attempt to move toward fuel reprocessing, and we based the design on processes from both the French MELOX and La Hague plants.

I think France's biggest problem right now is the EPR design. They went towards massive redundancy rather than passive safety. I think that was a bad move.

---And the reason we still use a sub design for civilian power is a desire to avoid the NRC's regulations.---

This is so true. Note that General Electric's BWRX 300 uses the same fundamentals as the already approved ESBWR, and Westinghouse is designing an AP 300, which relies on the already approved AP600 design. The requirements for a completely new design are cost prohibitive, while the safety analyses for the ESBWR and AP600 have already been done.

To state this briefly, you don't know what you're talking about. If you were a competent engineer who had worked on extremely large first-of-a-kind projects, you would know that. In fact there are all sorts of reasons for the overruns, not the least of which was that Westinghouse went bankrupt in 2017. As sfcat indicated, the regulations changed, and there were regulations that made no sense, like requiring an insulation breakdown voltage test on fiber optic cables. The design also had its issues, such as with the reactor cooling pumps. And the workforce that had built nuclear plants initially have retired. So there were problems all around. But back to my initial statement, huge first-of-a-kind projects are hard, and rarely come off on time and on budget regardless of the upfront engineering and planning,

In my opinion, the U.S. is losing its ability/desire to bring hard projects to life. We're not the only first world country to have this problem, but it is distressing to me to see we have lost our will.

<quote>so whose funding footing the decommission, dismantle and clean up because factor that in no profit.</quote>

The short answer is that all nuclear plants are required to plan for decommissioning per 10CFR50.33. If you want to know how the NRC reviews each licensee's plan, read "Standard Review Plan on Power Reactor Licensee Financial Qualifications and Decommissioning Funding Assurance," SR1577 r1.

Babcock Ranch is a nice place, but it is also over 20 miles from the Gulf. So hurricane impacts are much less. A community like Babcock Ranch but close to the Gulf would have fared much worse, as the solar panels would not have survived. We were without power for 4 days, and we are about a thousand feet from the Myakka river in Port Charlotte.

Know how we can tell you richly deserve the "Coward" label? When you use ad hominem attacks rather than addressing his views. And no, I would not want to see Trump in the Whitehouse.

Thank you for the good references, the NERC document especially. Personally, view the NERC document as analysis, and NREL document as a research paper that includes hopeful sounding verbiage such as "very simple simulations."

The NERC document is pure gold. I am going to keep a copy of this for future reference. Thanks again!