(8 min)Ī visit to San Onofre, a retired beachside nuclear power plant near San Diego, California, where nuclear waste is stored on-site.

88,000 Tons of Radioactive Waste - And Nowhere to Put It.Shows the process of taking used fuel from spent fuel pools located inside the Diablo Canyon Power Plant's fuel handling building and transporting the used fuel to the on-site dry storage facility. Spent Fuel Storage at Diablo Canyon Power Plant.(14 min)ĭescribes how nuclear power works and weighs the pros and cons of nuclear power.Īn excellent introductory overview of uranium and nuclear energy. Include selections from the Optional and Useful list based on your interests and available time. We strongly encourage you to review the Essential videos and readings below before watching our lecture on Nuclear Fission. We assign videos and readings to our Stanford students as pre-work for each lecture to help contextualize the lecture content.

Negative public perceptions of nuclear power, particularly after major nuclear accidents (Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima).Nuclear fuel (and waste byproducts) must be secured and safely transported.NIMBY* - community opposition to siting nuclear power plants and waste repositories.Decommissioning of nuclear power plants can take 50+ years and is expensive.US nuclear power plants are old and require upgrades and new licensing.Nuclear power plants take a long time to plan, permit, and build, particularly in the United States.Extremely expensive to build and insure relative to other sources of electricity.Rigid baseload on the grid and not flexible for integration of renewables or load following.Risk of nuclear proliferation and the spread of nuclear weapons capabilities to more countries, with geopolitical consequences.Produces radioactive waste that must be safely stored for hundreds of thousands of years.High-risk (extreme consequence x low probability) accidents.In the U.S, the nuclear industry is the only energy industry which has its own governmental agency (the Nuclear Regulatory Commission - NRC), and nuclear-related activities account for ~70% of the U.S. was born in response to the horror of the destruction from the bombs dropped on Japan at the end of WWII. The commercial nuclear industry in the U.S. The roots of nuclear fission power come from defense. New technologies known as small modular reactors (SMRs) are being developed in the hopes of offering cheaper and safer alternatives to traditional fission reactors. Due to the complexity of containing the nuclear reaction and the need for redundant safety systems, capital and operating costs tend to be high and there are long lead times for planning and construction.

The risk of accidents is low, but the consequences of a nuclear power plant accident have the potential to be extremely severe. Nuclear power plants have been operating commercially since the 1950s and tend to be large-scale (1-2 GW). There are currently no proven long-term solutions for storage of this radioactive waste. The byproducts of nuclear fission are highly radioactive and must be secured away from people for hundreds of thousands of years. Most nuclear power plants today are fueled by enriched uranium 235 to produce non-renewable, carbon-free, 24/7 electricity. That heat is used to boil water, make steam, turn a turbine and generator, and produce electricity. Nuclear fission is the process of splitting a large atom into two smaller atoms and releasing a LOT of heat.

Tools to Manage and Sustain Energy Systems.

The Grid: Electricity Transmission, Industry, and Markets.

Drilling, Completing, and Producing from Oil and Natural Gas Wells.

Nuclear energy fission process