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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (347683)	8/20/2007 6:41:38 PM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575757

Ted, There are 6 nuclear reactors in Slovakia....four at Bohunice and two at Mochovce. The EU required that 2 of the 4 at Bohunice be closed down because they are not upgradeable and apparently, the IAEA concurred. Since Chernobyl, its common knowledge that some Russian nuclear reactors were poorly designed and I suspect that's the reason behind the requirement to close. Meanwhile, the rest of Slovakia's reactors can be upgraded and allowed to continue to run. As I understand it, the US is helping Slovakia do some of the upgrading. Good job looking things up. There is another reactor in Bohunice A1, that started to be built in mid 50s - very old heavy water technology. It had a accident and was shut down (one point lower than Three Mile Island on the scale used). But the other 4 reactors, including 2 that were forced to be shut down are more recent technology have had spotless performance and safety record, apparently the best record of this type of reactor anywhere. They had a plenty of useful life left. So then, how much energy is Slovakia losing by the closing of the two reactors? 440 MW each. At full capacity, with all 4 reactors, the whole plant had capacit of 1,760 MW, now it is going down to half that. Why do you disagree with the closures? It seems to me the EU IS looking to the future and doesn't want another Chernobyl disaster on its hands. There is one word answer why they were forced to be shut down: Austria. Austria was (and probably still is) violently anti-nuclear (funny thing is that I think there was time when Austria was importer of electricity from Slovakia). Anyway, Austria wanted the whole plant shut down, and I guess the best they could get was a "compromise" - to shut down the older of the 2 of the 4, even though they were very similar. Each reactor generated about 10% of country's needs for electricity, so closure of 2 is going to be a loss of about 20%. This closure made Slovakia an energy importer, and of course the lost capacity has to be replaced by greenhouse gas emiting capacity. As you know, admitting a new country to EU has to be by unanimous decision, and Austria resorted to this sort of blackmail. Slovakia knew about the required closures in 1999, entered the EU in 2004 and must do the closings by 2008. That's seems like adequate time to find replacements for the energy that will be lost with the closures......but then what do I know.....I am only a liberal. Well, these things (nuclear reactors are not exactly cheap. When you are forced to shut down some reactors prematurely, before they are fully paid for, to actually spend money to shut them down (well some of it came from EU), than it is so much harder to pay for replacement. But they are planning on building more. I think they may have started soliciting some proposal. But the real problem is that when you lose such a large percentage of "clean" power, and are replace it with greenhouse gas generating power, and on top of it, EU cuts the cap of CO2 output, it is kind of a vicious cycle for a country that has had pretty fast economic growth, and wants to continue to have high economic growth to catch u with the west. Joe