Hugh Pickens writes "The Associated Press reports that the companies who own almost half the nation's nuclear reactors are not setting aside enough money to dismantle the reactors, so many plants may sit idle for decades, posing safety and security risks as a result. The shortfalls in funding have been caused by huge losses in the stock market that have devastated the companies' savings and by the soaring costs of decommissioning. Owners of 19 nuclear plants have won approval to idle their reactors for as long as 60 years, presumably enough time to allow investments to recover and eventually pay for dismantling the plants and removing radioactive material. But mothballing nuclear reactors or shutting them down inadequately presents the risk that radioactive waste could leak from abandoned plants into ground water or be released into the air, and spent nuclear fuel rods could be stolen by terrorists. The NRC has contacted 18 nuclear power plants to clarify how the companies will address the recent economic downturn's effects on funds to decommission reactors in the future, but some analysts worry the utility companies that own nuclear plants might not even exist in six decades."
With all due respect to the parent, the non-government-owned companies who build submarines, aircraft carriers and other nuclear powered vessels are not government owned or run. They are 100% non-government-owned free market capitalistic companies. They play by the rules that govern what it takes to get a government contract in the free market. They have built credibility in their field. And they only bid on projects that their non-government-employed board of directors deem that they can turn into a profit
We were touring the research reactor.
The topic came up of how many students
were majoring in Nuclear Engineering (or maybe
it was just a specialization; not sure if it
was actually a major). It was noted that
there was exactly ONE student. Some people
thought it was a strange major, since no plants
were being built. Somebody else gave their $0.02
that the guy would be very much in demand--experts
would be needed to dismantle plants.
He could be working for any number of companies that operate power reactors. Or for any number of places that operate research reactors. Or for any number of consultants and analysts on the maintenance/modification of those reactors. Or for the companies that design, build, or do research on the design and construction, of those reactors. ("None being built in the US" != "none being built anywhere".)
Then there is the DoE, in it's regulatory or research branches. NASA does reactor research as well. (And other branches are involved too... The EPA for just one example.)
Then there's the biggie... The Navy's nuclear power program. Between the sub base, the naval shipyard, and the supporting contractors, there's probably a thousand or more within a few miles of me.
The demand isn't large, but there's a lot more to the field than decommissioning existing reactors.
Why is this treated any different then a gas station?
Gas stations have to put a certain amount in escrow to allow for digging up the storage vessels and decontaminating. Why don't nuclear reactors have to set aside the money before they're even allowed to build?
Nuclear power plants are
required by the NRC to put
aside funds for their decommissioning
during operations.
Companies work with federal
and state regulators to ensure
enough money is set aside.
These funds are not under the
direct control of the companies
and cannot be used for purposes
other than decommissioning.
It then lists the types of decomissioning funds in page 3.
I assume the issue here is they put the money into an external sinking fund invested in a trust fund. Then the m
Gas stations have to put a certain amount in escrow to allow for digging up the storage vessels and decontaminating. Why don't nuclear reactors have to set aside the money before they're even allowed to build?
Probably because back when they built 'em, decommissioning wasn't an issue.
Hey, we got these huge savings that can help us when we need it. Let's put it into the stock market. Because that one is known for its century-long stability. And the value of our stocks will hold perfectly stable, even in the worst times.
Protip: USE SOME FREAKING REAL GOODS! Gold, silver, countries, or things that go *up* in bad times. (Like bank manager incomes!)
Looks like the nuclear industry looked at the big bank "too big to fail" strategy and liked it. Why bother cleaning up the mess when they can just let the taxpayers pay for the clean-up.
Looks like the nuclear industry looked at the big bank "too big to fail" strategy and liked it. Why bother cleaning up the mess when they can just let the taxpayers pay for the clean-up.
A temporary dip in the stock market, and you're talking like this is the subprime/default credit swap debacle. These decommissioning funds have been around longer than you have been, and being invested in the stock market, they took the same hit everyone else did. Fortunately they're in it for the long haul, not the next 'go
As the article says, nuclear power plants keep dedicated funds for decomissioning those plants. These funds are in the stock market.
The stock market took a beating.
Greenpeace and other anti-nuke wackos found an opportunity to say idiotic things like: It's like a sitting time bomb. The notion that you can just walk away from these sites and everything will be hunky-dory is just not true."
Speaking as someone who works at a nuclear power plant, uh, yeah, for various definitions of 'walk away', you can do just that.
If by walk away you mean: 1) Defuel the reactor, offload all fuel into the spent fuel pool. 2) Drain all primary systems of water and process it (A daily occurance at any plant anyway) 3) Maintain enough staffing to secure the facility and watch the THREE relatively small pumps and TWO heat exchangers required to keep the fuel safe until it can be safely stored in a dry cask. 4) Store the dry casks on site until Yucca opens, or they can be re-processed.
(While they will be guarded, these dry casks are not a significant security risk. Terrorists aren't running around with the heavy rigging equipment required to handle these casks, and they most certainly will never control any facility for the hours required to get any nuclear material.)
That's the nuclear definition of 'walk away.' We take our jobs much more seriously than Greenpeace clowns take anything. They're a professional agitation group who currently only exists to generate enough attention to collect enough funds to continue to exist.
You might have to keep some fans running in contaminated areas until they're cleaned up, but compared to actually operating a nuclear power plant, the safe long term shutdown of a plant requires minimal resources.
I love this part too: Last week, British officials reported on a 2007 leak in a cooling tank at the decommissioned Sizewell-A nuclear plant. If the leak had not been promptly discovered, officials said, nuclear fuel rods could have caught fire and sent airborne radioactive waste along the English coast, harming plant operators or the public.
The job of the people there is to promptly discover these sorts of things. There are loud alarms available to help them with just that. It's not a lucky happenstance that the leak was promptly discovered.
What else? Sixteen more are being reviewed, and the commission expects to receive 21 more applications in the next several years. To date, the NRC hasn't turned down any license extensions.
In case anyone was wondering, the reason the NRC hasn't turned down any license extension applications is two fold: 1) The standards the plants have to meet are published, and not a secret. 2) The NRC bills maybe $250 a man-hour for the thousands of hours required to review these applications.
No utility is going to pay the NRC millions of dollars to review their application unless they're sure they meet the published NRC standards.
and one more: Plant operators appear to benefit from NRC rules that don't require them to set aside money to store old nuclear fuel...
because nuclear power plants pay ongoing fees to the federal government to dispose of spent nuclear fuel. $25 billion dollars have been paid so far pursuant to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 [cbo.gov] and the federal government only has the Yucca Mountain debacle to show for it.
What is the 60 year cost of maintaining these operations at a typical decommissioned site? I mean salaries, taxes, expendables, equipment maintenance, amortization, and renewal, land use, security, utilities, insurance, finance costs, etc.
That's a fair question. I'm not a finance guy but I'll answer to the best of my ability.
Finance cost: 0. Everthing should be paid for. Capital costs required to maintain or even replace three pumps, two heat exchangers, and the associated piping should be minimal.
Land use & taxes: ~$100,000 (guess) Whatever property taxes are. Varies from zero to millions for an active nuclear power plant. The facility would not generate any profits, so property taxes would be the only ones applicable.
Utilities: less than $325,000 / year (Assuming 1,000 hp in total pump power, based on the required pumps installed in my plant. In reality, much smaller pumps would be required to cool just the fuel, and would be installed as the first-year savings would pay for them entirely.)
Staffing: ~$1.6 million per year. (assuming 3 technicians at all times, 5 crews required for 24 hr coverage, $80,000 a year salary, + 1/3 for benefits & taxes.)
Security: ~$1.6 million per year. (more people would be required than staffing, but Security guards are paid less than technicians, and the required number would vary with the plant layout. I'm assuming the high security area would be relatively small compared to the area required for an operating plant.)
Equipment replacement & expendables: ~$100,000 a year, average, high side guess.
Insurance: $250,000 a year, Wild-ass guess. Everything is so over-built, and the insurance companies visit us frequently to evaluate their risk, so I doubt it would be much more than that.
That adds up to about $4 million. As per the nuclear industry standard, I've probably vastly overestimated everything.
If you use a time value of money calculation ending 60 years out, given a 6% rate of return (from the article), assume $0 value at the end, paid quarterly, then about $64 million dollars should do the job. (calculator here. [zenwealth.com] )
That doesn't account for inflation, but since i've probably guessed high on everything I'm not going to feel too bad about that.
Further, after two decades, all your fuel can go into dry cask storage, changing your yearly utility cost down to maybe $10,000 a year for lights and air conditioning.
This would also reduce the staffing required on site even further. Purchasing the canisters and the concrete bunkers to store them in will be expensive, but let's assume that the savings on utilities and personel for the remaining 40 years will cover this as well.
So, there's a rough answer for you: A $64 million dollar fund should be sufficient to maintain a nuclear power plant safely shut down for 60 years.
Now if you want to wipe the power plant from the site completely, that will cost you hundreds of millions of dollars, and the article talks about that. Simply shutting it down and maintaining the fuel safely won't cost nearly as much.
Always remember: Nuclear energy generation is the cleanest and least polluting energy source, so this is a non-issue! Ask anyone here on Slashdot, they'll be more than happy to enlighten you. For example, just put the entire site into a breeder reactor and voila!. Not only is it cleaned up and recycled but it generates even more clean nuclear fuel to generate even more energy! Lather, rinse, repeat! Forever!
Having grown in in Richland, WA, attended Richland High School (home of the Bombers), and worked in the nuclear fuel production industry, I find it alarming that so many people are hilariously ignorant about nuclear power. As a child I actually got to tour the Columbia Generating Station and put my hand in the secondary loop water as it fell down the cooling tower. Nuclear power generation is far safer than any of you have been lead to believe.
For those that choose to use the Hanford nuclear reservation as a point of argument against nuclear waste, well, you're half right. Almost all of the unfathomably dangerous substances located there are from nuclear WEAPON production.
For the energy needs of the current and future world, our two forseeable tools are nuclear power and hydro-electric. Nobody likes nuclear because of NIMBY syndrome. Nobody likes hydro-electric because it makes entire ecosystems disappear. Yeah, Eastern Washington has one of the largest dams in the nation as well. Coal, natural gas, and oil are only kept alive because economic powers far greater than you or I want to exhaust the supplies before they start splitting atoms.
"During the past two years, estimates of dismantling costs have soared by more than $4.6 billion because rising energy and labor costs, while the investment funds that are supposed to pay for shutting plants down have lost $4.4 billion in the battered stock market."
Labor costs have risen in the last two years? Really? I thought we were in a recession with nearly 10% unemployment? Energy costs? Oil is now back down to 2005 levels. Natural gas hasn't been this cheap since 2002. If those are really their excuses, they should be jumping on the opportunity to decommission NOW, before prices go back up!
And as to them losing money in the stock market - boo hoo. They could have put the funds into inflation protected treasury notes, but they wanted the extra profits to reduce how much they had to pay out. They gambled, they lost, they should have to pay up. If they can't - we have bankruptcy laws just for them (which we should have immediately applied to the banking mess too). Or they could take out a nice fat loan - interest rates are pretty low, I hear.
I'd love to say I can't believe they're getting away with this - but given recent history of forgiving the villains and putting the burden on the taxpayers and individual investors, I just can't muster disbelief any more.
In a world where they tells us that is ok and not true
Of course; one should never let the truth stand in the way of their agenda...
Let me guess, if we trace back all the ownsers of said company, somewhere in that spaghetti of companies there is a company that has spend big time on this US president or the former US president. This just ain't happening without some very powerfull people getting paid in powerfull cash.
Now this is probably true, but it applies to so many areas, I really can't fault nuclear power for the actions of a few companies.
With the current administration and its very obvious ties to the environmentalist and alternative energy lobbies, I am very surprised it took 6 months for scare mongering about nuclear power plants to begin. Nuclear power has already proven to be the safest means of producing large quantities of energy, even if you include the most EXTREME and exaggerated outcomes of all nuclear catastrophes combined (lets even throw in Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Of course, you'd have to include all the people who die in th
Trains aren't profitable either, but those aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
Sometimes the government subsidizes private business for the greater public good (although most of the time they subsidize business due to "campaign contributions").
And many times those contributions end up failing for the general public. To use your example, the government decided it would be smart to just give away land left and right to whoever made railroads, this lead to a bunch of people becoming filthy rich, buying competitors and ending up with a huge monopoly.
Really, the only reason trains aren't really going anywhere is because they are out of the traffic and can be used like buses (subways, light rail, etc) and the fact the infrastructure is already built and doesn't require a ton of work.
btw the statement quoted above is a lie. You are a liar, antirelic. Including the catastrophes in the accounting is precisely what nuclear proponents don't do (didn't you get the memo?) because of the obvious. Luckily for you and them, as it turns out, human life doesn't really have much value if its not yours.
You're a liar, Mr. AC, or just an ignorant retard, because you apparently have no clue how many people die mining coal [typepad.com]. Not so many per year in a country like the U.S. (compared to how many in modern times for nuclear), but still thousands per year in China, which is how things were not that long ago even in the 1st World. Have more people died mining coal than have died as a result of nuclear power, even counting those killed intentionally by atomic bombs? Yes.
But yes, those human lives don't have much value since you had no clue they existed.
If you only count accidents, then the total deaths from nuclear power is less than a single year of coal mining in China, or just a few years of mining in the U.S. in the period when the nuclear disasters occurred. In the year Three Mile Island occured, the second worst accident ever, more people died mining in the U.S. than died from the incident. Yes that includes long-term health effects, which coal mining isn't very good for either if you didn't know.
It's not the greatest comparison ever, since ultimately what matters is modern safety standards in the country in question (the U.S. in this case). It is a true comparison though. And you'd still be very hard-pressed and hard-tarded to suggest that nuclear power is more dangerous than coal power today.
I dont normally replied to anon but you make my point for me.
"human life doesnt really have much value if its not yours." The war cry of the communist/socialist/environmentalist elitist. Rail against everything. Decry every solution as "inhumane", all the while proposing fantasy ideas that have no merit or foundation in reason. I add in the catastrophes to make a "clear" point. I grew up in the coal mining regions of the USA. Care to take a shot at the statistics on "Black Lung" alone?
Between 1987 and 1996, 14,489 people died from "Black Lung". Care to guess how many people, world wide who died from Nuclear power during that same time period? Since 1990, more than 20,000 people have died from black lung. http://www.courier-journal.com/cjextra/blacklung/index.html [courier-journal.com]
Counting bodies isn't as abstract as counting parts per million of carbon in the air, or closely guarded computer models predicting weather patterns... Its fairly simple.
Even the most wacky, statistics skewing websites in existence cannot logically link nuclear power ALONE to being a dangerous source of energy. (http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0131-03.htm . PS: A great article if you need a laugh, it links "power production" and "nuclear weapons production" into the same category, "nuclear energy and weapons programs up to 1989 will account for 65 million deaths". I'm sure 64 million of those are due to coal and gas energy sources.
Anyway. Anonymous snipes backed by "emotion" of wanting to "save the people" is all you can expect from the left. When confronted with logic or even a touch of rational debate, lefties put on their super hero masks and start talking about "the value of life".
Another group of people wanted to do whats best for the people too. They made gulags and had great leaps forward for the progress of man kind!
I'm a "liberal" in a lot of ways -- I am for a small military, public healthcare, strong public education, equal rights for homosexuals, addressing global warming, etc.
I also support nuclear power.
I support all of these things not because I am "ruled by my emotions", but because there are legitimate economic and scientific arguments for them. Not everyone on the left is a kneejerk type.
Wow! Your first link makes the "Breeder Reactor" sound just so wonderful.
Unfortunately you omitted to mention that it still produces a waste that is beyond lethal for 25,000 years.
If you care to bring the facts to bear about nuclear energy, mainly what do we now do with the waste as well as the spent facility when all's said and done with... for the next 25,000 years! The only answer anyone can give, a stupid blank look and shrug, will only indicate complete incompetence and a lack of thinking this one through, so don't bother.
Worse, now the companies that own and operate theses plants are going belly up and walking away from the retired facilities and leaving them for the states, counties and towns to deal with.
Sounds criminal to me. Sure the power was cheep. But the leftovers pose too many new problems that will have to be dealt with for thousands of generations to come. I've never been a fan of nuclear technology. Now my reservations are verified by the incompetence of the corporations, lobbyists, and politicians involved in producing this resulting product.
I remain unconvinced that nuclear technology is worth the trouble, expense, and/or effort. I have a much better idea, lets invest some effort in harnessing the power of the sun and call it a day. Instead of this exercise in stupidity.
We really are not ready for this kind of power as mankind. Once we find a solution for the radioactive waste we will be. Till that time... there is always the sun..
I once tried to write a python script. Instead of doing what I wanted it crashed my computer. I've decided I'm not ready for the power of programming. Once I'm a good programmer, I might try writing code again.
If we give up nuclear power now we're never going to find a solution. With no nuclear reactors there isn't going to be any incentive. And that doesn't get into the definition of a solution. Yucca mountain and breeder reactors are both solutions, they just weren't acceptable solutions to people such as yourself.
Let's us be honest. You say not now but what that means is not ever.
Aside: I'd much rather live next to a nuclear plant than a coal fired one. If solar becomes economically viable that'd be great too.
I don't think a nuclear power plant "crash" would be worth it.
Yeah, right on! Pennsylvania is totally uninhabitable 30 years after the Three Mile Island event!
Seriously, they had a Loss of Coolant Accident with a core meltdown at TMI. That's as bad as it gets with western plants. No one died. No one was hurt. No one was exposed to a harmful level of radiation. It was a billion dollar industrial casualty. The adjacent nuclear unit continues to run with a great safety record.
Three Mile Island exposed deficiencies in training philosophy and human factoring of controls and indications. These lessons have been learned.
It also validated the basic western design philosophy. Multiple fission product barriers, negative temperature coefficient, negative void coefficient.
What's more, the melted fuel barely even scratched the surface of the pressure vessel. The pressure vessel acted as a heat sink, and a puddle of melted fuel is a subcritical configuration so the reaction stopped, and all that was left to deal with was decay heat. It simply was not physically possible for a meltdown in a TMI-style reactor to melt through the pressure vessel (it got almost 13% of the way through the PV), let alone get through the containment structure. There just wasn't enough energy in the system. Things have improved a lot since then, too, which is why we haven't seen any more of these weaksauce "disasters" at light water reactors.
Chernobyl had both a positive temperature coefficient and a positive and very high void coefficient. What these numbers mean is that when the reactor gets hot, it gets hotter, and when the coolant gets hot and begins to boil, the reactor gets hotter still. Modern designs are nothing like Chernobyl, they are designed such that the higher the temperature they reach, the less energy output is produced and thus there is no runaway reaction.
Chernobyl was a stupid design, do you think we would have gotten far if we stopped building bridges after the first one that collapsed?
I've got news for you, buddy: someone has come up with a solution to the waste problem. It's called a liquid fluoride thorium reactor (PDF warning!) [iastate.edu] and it's not being embraced with open arms despite its elegance and practicality. It's a reactor that takes thorium (more abundant than uranium) as fuel, continuously refuels and reprocesses its fuel, and is about 100 times more fuel-efficient than existing nuclear reactors. Here's the really fun part: the waste, of which it produces very little, becomes exponentially less radioactive over time, becoming safe to handle with bare hands in about 300 years -- not hundreds of thousands of years. And it produces medical isotopes continuously, which is a nice bonus. And it's passively safe and self-regulating, so the reactor core itself doesn't really even need human supervision. Prototypes were tested successfully. (There are other reactors with similar advantages, by the way, so we don't necessarily have to use this particular solution. There's more.)
Energy companies won't develop them because of the large financial risk and paranoid regulatory environment and lack of a clear payoff. Governments won't step in because any nuclear reactor is seen as evil by the green fanatics and seen as threatening by the coal companies.
Also thorium reactors didn't get any push during the cold war because you can't produce bomb making materials (plutonium) from them. So it didn't interest the military and at the time the military had a LOT of veto power in CIVILIAN reactor design. This is only now beginning to erode away.
We really are not ready for this kind of power as mankind.
That's irrelevant. The genie is already out of the bottle. Nuclear power is not going away. Even if you ban it in one place, another place will be more than happy to invest in it. Some countries, like France, would be in a lot of trouble if there were a unilateral ban on nuclear power plants and even the U.S., which doesn't have that many plants, would be in dire straits considering nuclear power is an essential part of the grid in several major U.
The last few years alone have shown great strides in truly clean energy production (not to be confused with the often mistaken for clean clean-now-hide-the-dirt-til-later energy production, like nuclear).
You mean like solar? No I guess that's more of a hide-the-mercury-chromium-PVC-silicon tetrachloride-waste-post-production-"now-it's-clean"-hide-the-disposal-of-EOL-panels-til-later kind of clean energy. Or are you talking about those practically-useless-residential-wind turbines? OR maybe the hugely-devastating-to-the-aquatic-ecosystem-hydroelectric-plants?
There are dozens, if not hundreds, of new ways to get to this clean energy... smart people keep mixing it up and it really is quite amazing.
Really? Name one form of "clean" energy. The problem is more like stupid people keep believing marketing BS about what "clean" energy is. There was a time when nuclear actually had a similar vibe as solar does now. Then over time the truth came out about the storage life of the waste and the possible dangers. Now it's become the pariah of clean energy. There are some seriously underplayed issues with solar panel production and disposal. If you think there are no issues with the byproducts from the composites that are used for wind-turbines then you are fooling yourself.
Its only a matter of time, and time calculated in decades (not the nuclear standard of calculating time in millennia), before one, or my guess, many new clean energy alternatives become not only viable but very profitable. Nuclear energy is just too expensive (when you add up the cost of the R&D, the educations required, and especially 4000-40000 years of waste storage, and last, not least, the whatif disasters like a chernobyl-scale (not chernobyl-like) disaster).
So you predict that magic pixie dust power generation is only decades away? Cool!
Seriously though, I'm not against solar, nuclear, wind, or even fossil fuel energy production. As far as I can tell, all forms of energy production cause some sort of harmful waste or environmental issue in one way or another. Perhaps geothermal being the one with the least problems, however it's not terribly practical other than in Iceland and a few other areas. I think a better approach is to try to maximize the efficiency and lower the toxic byproducts of what is possible while we work on something better and start to get away from the non-renewables. But that's just what I think.
"There are no solutions, only trade-offs." - Thomas Sowell
Nothing is perfectly safe; everything involves risk and negative outcomes. There are plenty of negative consequences of using pure solar energy, not the least of which is the impact of manufacturing the tools to harness it.
"It has less change of a meltdown, but if that meltdown occurs, and it will, it's no difference from chernobyle, except this one wil be bigger"
Evidence? Support? Simply saying something is true doesn't make it so.
It has less polution, but the polution is still radioactive.
I have shocking news for you: Your granite counter top is radioactive! OH NOES.
It has less change of a meltdown, but if that meltdown occurs, and it will, it's no difference from chernobyle, except this one wil be bigger.
Yeah. Because it's not like the Chernobyl disaster had anything to do with the design of the reactor (ignoring that even with that horrible design it took ridiculous amounts of human stupidity to make it happen since I'm assuming that's what you're assuming will always happen). It's not like you can design a reactor so that it can't meltdown, or can't meltdown in such a way that it explodes and blows its containment. It's not like the next and only other major nuclear accident was far smaller than Chernobyl. And it's not like we learned anything from that with regards to reactor design... For example self-regulating designs where the reactor getting too hot means the reaction will slow down. Nope, that doesn't exist.
No, no matter what, meltdowns are inevitable, and will be bigger than previous ones, because... why, again?
We really are not ready for this kind of power as mankind. Once we find a solution for the radioactive waste we will be.
Solution: Re-use it until it is no longer useful as a radioactive fuel of any kind, meaning it is no longer particularly radioactive and thus not a particular danger. Then stick it in the ground without having to worry about security or stability since it's neither useful nor particularly dangerous. Yes the half-life will be really long, but half-life is inversely proportional to radioactivity which is entirely the point.
So, I guess we're ready! Bring on the nuclear reactors!
Till that time... there is always the sun.
Yeah we're a long way from producing all our energy from the sun (directly anyway). I'm all for more of it, including solar-powered microwave satellites. Oh but wait, surely there's no way to design one such that it doesn't fry people on the ground in a swatch of destruction!
Still a shame someone flagged me as flamebait instead of discussing our different views. Cause flamebait i Was not.
Indeed that was an unfair mod, and they were almost certainly using it as a surrogate for "-1, uninformed paranoia" which doesn't exist for good reason.
The biggest problem with the reactor at Chernobyl is that the design did not include a concrete vault capable of containing the clouds of debris ejected from the event site.
Yeah, exactly. With the simple expedience of a concrete dome, the Chernobyl disaster would have been substantially smaller, like Three Mile Island was, where nobody died in the immediate aftermath. Three Mile Island, which was the worst-case failure scenario -- coolant failure and all control rods locked out of the core. So the core got too hot and melted and fell into the graphite bed beneath, slowing the reaction and ending the threat. Combined with the containment shell, very little contamination was released into the environment. It was a disaster to be sure, but a small one in the grand scheme of industrial accidents. It was a design that took failure into a account and thus minimized the impact. And designs have only gotten better since then.
Honestly, people act like they still think nuclear reactors can blow up like atom bombs. "Oh my god, humanity is not ready for this power!" Yeah, nuclear weapons maybe we weren't ready for, I think fission reactors to light up our homes are within our acceptable risk level given every other human endeavor ever.
The problems with Chernobyl go way past that. Here are a few:
1. Positive void coefficient of reactivity. Once bubbles started forming in the reactor coolant, it sped up the reaction, causing a positive feedback loop. This is, of course, not the case with light water reactors.
2. The SCRAM rods actually sped up the reaction because of their graphite tips. There's a pretty crazy design defect.
3. It was physically possible for those morons to disable the safety systems.
Compare this with a truly modern design like China's HTR-DB modular pebble bed reactors, and the difference is striking. The HTR-DB has a strong negative temperature coefficient of reactivity, so all the feedback loops are very negative. They can actually shut off the cooling systems and the reactor will simply shut off because it's not able to sustain a reaction without active cooling. Overheating inherently kills the reaction. Nice, isn't it?
I've worked as an Operator at a US Power Reactor ( North Anna Power Station in Virginia ) a long time ago. It is a Westinghouse pressurized water reactor and it's a completely different design than Chernobyl. The containment dome is of sufficient volume to maintain integrity during a complete meltdown. It's one of the biggest expenses. ( A description of the construction can be found in the license application [nrc.gov] in section 2.4.1 page 2-97 ).
The Unit 1 and Unit 2 Containments are Seismic Class I structures that house the reactor and other Nuclear Steam Supply System (NSSS) components for the respective unit. Each Containment consists of a reinforced concrete cylinder with a hemispherical dome and a flat, 10-foot-thick reinforced concrete mat foundation. A waterproof membrane is located below the Containment's structural mat and extends up the Containment wall to ground level.
In fact, it's such a large expense that this particular design keeps the interior of the containment dome at about 9 psia to allow for the expansion of Reactor Coolant during a meltdown in a smaller volume. Meaning a smaller containment dome. It also has the advantage that if there are any leaks, it leaks in, not out. If an accident did happen, the containment dome would probably been sealed and filled with concrete.
So why have nuclear plants? Why all the expense?
When I worked at that plant. Dominion Power ( Then Virginia Power ) had 4 reactors and about 17 coal fired plants and I think 2 natural gas plants. Those 4 reactors could at times supply about 40% of the power for the company's power grid covering almost all of Virginia and the northern part of North Carolina. This was usually at night when energy consumption dropped.
The coal plants also didn't operate at 100% all the time. They altered their power output increasing output during peak demand during the day and late evening and decreasing output as demand dropped during late night and early morning.
I hope you have noticed like I have that the standard operating procedure of the coal fired plants closely mirror what you would expect to see from a solar & battery power plant.
Also, I know how much coal ash is produced in a single day from a coal fired plant. I also know, for the nuclear plant I worked at, only one third of the fuel rods were replaced every 18 months. So, given the choice of fields covered in tons of low level waste or only a few tons of concentrated nastiness, I'd opt for the later because it is far easier to maintain stricter and safer control of it.
OMG breeder reactor! Yes, yes of course! Breeder reactors make nuclear waste a GOOD THING by using it for fuel, and producing LESS but MORE DEADLY waste! And when the breeder reactor's owners don't have the money to clean it up after its usefulness has run its course, well... lemmie read that wiki again... yes! yes of course! MORE breeder reactors will fix even that!
Normally I would not be so blunt but quite frankly you started this one:
a)It is clear you don't understand how the energy produced in a nuclear reactor correlates to the quantity of fission products produced. b)It is clear you have no idea about what properties breeder reactor waste have and how it compares to regular nuclear waste. c)It is clear you don't understand how breeder reactors work or what impact the destruction of the transuranics would have on repository capacity and requirements.
For your ( and other's ) information this is how it works:
Nuclear reactors produce energy by splitting nuclei. If they split relatively safe Uranium or the much more toxic and dangerous alpha emitters ( such as neptunium and plutonium ) does not really matter in energy terms since the energy produced in each fission is about the same. As it happens the elements that make nuclear waste storage problematic are all very heavy transuranics that are alpha emitters since these decay with a halflife of a few thousand years. The problem is that even thousands of years from now they produce enough heat to potentially melt the fuel rods if you don't allow sufficient separation between them. It is this heat that limits how much radioactive waste you can store in a given space.
Thus if instead of splitting uranium you recycle and split these heavy transuranics you only end up with comparatively short lived fission products. It is true that the fission products initially has a higher radioativity than the transuranics, but the amount of fission products you get is exactly the same as if you ahd been splitting uranium. Thus by splitting the troublesome transuranics rather than uranium you end up with the same amount of fission products ( for a given amount of energy ), but you don't get any transuranics. I'll repeat that to make sure you got it:
Regardless of reactor design the quantity of fission products is the same for a given quantity of energy. The energy produced is directly proportional to the number of fissions that occur (and consequentially the amount of fission products in the waste. However, while regular reactors produce long lived transuranics that need to be safely stored for thousands of years, breeders only produce the fission products ( the same quantity as regular reactors would produce for the same energy ) and thus their waste reaches the same levels of radioactivity as uranium-ore within approximately 300 years.
Your assertion that the waste becomes more dangerous after recycled in a breeder reactor presumably refers to the fact that the radioactivity of the fission products is higher than that of the actinides. However as I mentioned above the quantity of fission products is no greater than it would have been for uranium. Also many of the fission products are so radioactive that they very rapidly decay to stable compounds that are not troublesome. Some of them have half-lives of minutes or even seconds, and after just a short period of storage they are less radioactive than what the actinides would have been. More importantly however is that the overall heat generation decreases rapidly and since you keep recycling the uranium you reduce the waste volume by almost a factor of 100. Because of these reductions in heat generation and volume, storing all the waste a power plant would produce within the 300 years it takes for breeder waste to decay is quite feasible to do on-site. Or in other words:
A breeder reactor produces so small quantities of waste that it would take much longer to fill the plant's storage facilities than it would take for the waste to decay to safe
To be more precise, the waste would have a shorter half life. What does that mean? More dangerous in the first year, much less dangerous in the 20th, radiation wise.
Something with a half life of 100 years vs one with a halflife of 10.
Radiation Year 1: 1 vs 10, Year 100:.5 vs.01
I am sick to death of nuclear proponents throwing breeder reactors around like they are the Second Coming or something. At some point it'd be nice if someone just said "hey... we're using too much power... we need to find ways to cut back on that" instead of "full speed ahead! Breeder reactors!"
Conservation GOOD. However, look at some of our proposed conservation efforts - plug-in hybrids and electric cars rather than gasoline engines. Heat pumps vs traditional hydrocarbon fired furnaces.
Good luck with the insurance policy. As AIG shows, what makes anybody think the insurance company will have the money - or even be around - in 60 years to cover the cost of dismantling a reactor?
The only way you can get nuclear power to pan out financially is if you have the government own and run all the reactors on what amounts to a non-profit basis (as in France, with EDF, which is something like 80% government-owned). You can't even get private insurance for the things (and I wouldn't trust private in
Not really, since burying the radioactive "waste" is a huge waste; more than 99% of the energy has yet to be extracted from it. (Which is also why it is so dangerous and long lived.) This "waste" can be burned in fast reactors though, and there is enough to supply them for hundreds of years before any further mining is necessary.
All that needs to be done is build the reactors. General Electric even has a design ready for a commercial reactor, called the S-PRISM. This is modeled after the Integral Fast Reactor, a modern design which addresses all of the concerns about nuclear power.
Capitalism is like any other tool in that in the hands of idiots it can be deadly.
As we found out last year, Capitalism in the hands of very smart people can cause worldwide havoc. So, in summary, Capitalism in the hands of both idiots and very smart people can be deadly. So, why are we using it again?
You are mistaken. They (the people who created the instruments that caused the disaster) sold them on down the line and made a great deal of money. Even the people in the bucket brigade that bought and sold the stuff were smart by any reasonable measure, including those who ended up holding the bad assets at the end. Part of American Capitalism is the glorification of risk taking, and these people took risks. Ultimately, many or most of the big players were bailed out with public money, or with fiat money f
Because a nuclear reactor doesn't last forever. The steel and concrete (and the steel reinforcing structure inside the concrete) absorb a lot of neutrons over the years, and that weakens them. Now, you could replace it all, but that costs as much as (or more than) building a new reactor in a new location and shutting the old one down (especially when you consider the changes in technology over the life of the reactor).
Now, in some cases, it may be possible to build a new reactor on an existing site next to the old one, but that is touchy (lots of heavy construction == lots of shaking of the ground == sometimes cracked walls in nearby structures). That would save on upkeep for the shut-down reactor, as things like the security and technical staff can be shared between facilities.
Even fusion produces neutrons that will limit the life of the reactor (if someone could ever build a net-power-producing one).
I know! (Score:4, Funny)
Why not let the government bail them out? That is what the government does, right?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Reminds me of something at school (Score:5, Interesting)
We were touring the research reactor. The topic came up of how many students were majoring in Nuclear Engineering (or maybe it was just a specialization; not sure if it was actually a major). It was noted that there was exactly ONE student. Some people thought it was a strange major, since no plants were being built. Somebody else gave their $0.02 that the guy would be very much in demand--experts would be needed to dismantle plants.
I wonder what that guy is doing now.
Re:Reminds me of something at school (Score:4, Informative)
He could be working for any number of companies that operate power reactors. Or for any number of places that operate research reactors. Or for any number of consultants and analysts on the maintenance/modification of those reactors. Or for the companies that design, build, or do research on the design and construction, of those reactors. ("None being built in the US" != "none being built anywhere".)
Then there is the DoE, in it's regulatory or research branches. NASA does reactor research as well. (And other branches are involved too... The EPA for just one example.)
Then there's the biggie... The Navy's nuclear power program. Between the sub base, the naval shipyard, and the supporting contractors, there's probably a thousand or more within a few miles of me.
The demand isn't large, but there's a lot more to the field than decommissioning existing reactors.
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Same as gas stations (Score:5, Interesting)
Why is this treated any different then a gas station?
Gas stations have to put a certain amount in escrow to allow for digging up the storage vessels and decontaminating. Why don't nuclear reactors have to set aside the money before they're even allowed to build?
Re:Same as gas stations (Score:5, Informative)
Why don't nuclear reactors have to set aside the money before they're even allowed to build?
They did. They just set aside the money in the stock market.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Nuclear power plants are required by the NRC to put aside funds for their decommissioning during operations. Companies work with federal and state regulators to ensure enough money is set aside. These funds are not under the direct control of the companies and cannot be used for purposes other than decommissioning.
It then lists the types of decomissioning funds in page 3. I assume the issue here is they put the money into an external sinking fund invested in a trust fund. Then the m
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Probably because back when they built 'em, decommissioning wasn't an issue.
Stock markets as savings? (Score:3, Interesting)
What idiot came up with *that* idea?
Hey, we got these huge savings that can help us when we need it. Let's put it into the stock market. Because that one is known for its century-long stability. And the value of our stocks will hold perfectly stable, even in the worst times.
Protip: USE SOME FREAKING REAL GOODS! Gold, silver, countries, or things that go *up* in bad times. (Like bank manager incomes!)
Too Dangerous to Fail (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Looks like the nuclear industry looked at the big bank "too big to fail" strategy and liked it. Why bother cleaning up the mess when they can just let the taxpayers pay for the clean-up.
A temporary dip in the stock market, and you're talking like this is the subprime/default credit swap debacle. These decommissioning funds have been around longer than you have been, and being invested in the stock market, they took the same hit everyone else did. Fortunately they're in it for the long haul, not the next 'go
Yawn. Nothing to see here. Move along. (Score:5, Informative)
As the article says, nuclear power plants keep dedicated funds for decomissioning those plants. These funds are in the stock market.
The stock market took a beating.
Greenpeace and other anti-nuke wackos found an opportunity to say idiotic things like:
It's like a sitting time bomb. The notion that you can just walk away from these sites and everything will be hunky-dory is just not true."
Speaking as someone who works at a nuclear power plant, uh, yeah, for various definitions of 'walk away', you can do just that.
If by walk away you mean:
1) Defuel the reactor, offload all fuel into the spent fuel pool.
2) Drain all primary systems of water and process it (A daily occurance at any plant anyway)
3) Maintain enough staffing to secure the facility and watch the THREE relatively small pumps and TWO heat exchangers required to keep the fuel safe until it can be safely stored in a dry cask.
4) Store the dry casks on site until Yucca opens, or they can be re-processed.
(While they will be guarded, these dry casks are not a significant security risk. Terrorists aren't running around with the heavy rigging equipment required to handle these casks, and they most certainly will never control any facility for the hours required to get any nuclear material.)
That's the nuclear definition of 'walk away.' We take our jobs much more seriously than Greenpeace clowns take anything. They're a professional agitation group who currently only exists to generate enough attention to collect enough funds to continue to exist.
You might have to keep some fans running in contaminated areas until they're cleaned up, but compared to actually operating a nuclear power plant, the safe long term shutdown of a plant requires minimal resources.
I love this part too:
Last week, British officials reported on a 2007 leak in a cooling tank at the decommissioned Sizewell-A nuclear plant. If the leak had not been promptly discovered, officials said, nuclear fuel rods could have caught fire and sent airborne radioactive waste along the English coast, harming plant operators or the public.
The job of the people there is to promptly discover these sorts of things. There are loud alarms available to help them with just that. It's not a lucky happenstance that the leak was promptly discovered.
What else?
Sixteen more are being reviewed, and the commission expects to receive 21 more applications in the next several years. To date, the NRC hasn't turned down any license extensions.
In case anyone was wondering, the reason the NRC hasn't turned down any license extension applications is two fold:
1) The standards the plants have to meet are published, and not a secret.
2) The NRC bills maybe $250 a man-hour for the thousands of hours required to review these applications.
No utility is going to pay the NRC millions of dollars to review their application unless they're sure they meet the published NRC standards.
and one more:
Plant operators appear to benefit from NRC rules that don't require them to set aside money to store old nuclear fuel...
because nuclear power plants pay ongoing fees to the federal government to dispose of spent nuclear fuel. $25 billion dollars have been paid so far pursuant to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 [cbo.gov] and the federal government only has the Yucca Mountain debacle to show for it.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yawn. Nothing to see here. Move along. (Score:5, Informative)
That's a fair question. I'm not a finance guy but I'll answer to the best of my ability.
Finance cost: 0. Everthing should be paid for. Capital costs required to maintain or even replace three pumps, two heat exchangers, and the associated piping should be minimal.
Land use & taxes: ~$100,000 (guess) Whatever property taxes are. Varies from zero to millions for an active nuclear power plant. The facility would not generate any profits, so property taxes would be the only ones applicable.
Utilities: less than $325,000 / year (Assuming 1,000 hp in total pump power, based on the required pumps installed in my plant. In reality, much smaller pumps would be required to cool just the fuel, and would be installed as the first-year savings would pay for them entirely.)
Staffing: ~$1.6 million per year. (assuming 3 technicians at all times, 5 crews required for 24 hr coverage, $80,000 a year salary, + 1/3 for benefits & taxes.)
Security: ~$1.6 million per year. (more people would be required than staffing, but Security guards are paid less than technicians, and the required number would vary with the plant layout. I'm assuming the high security area would be relatively small compared to the area required for an operating plant.)
Equipment replacement & expendables: ~$100,000 a year, average, high side guess.
Insurance: $250,000 a year, Wild-ass guess. Everything is so over-built, and the insurance companies visit us frequently to evaluate their risk, so I doubt it would be much more than that.
That adds up to about $4 million. As per the nuclear industry standard, I've probably vastly overestimated everything.
If you use a time value of money calculation ending 60 years out, given a 6% rate of return (from the article), assume $0 value at the end, paid quarterly, then about $64 million dollars should do the job.
(calculator here. [zenwealth.com] )
That doesn't account for inflation, but since i've probably guessed high on everything I'm not going to feel too bad about that.
Further, after two decades, all your fuel can go into dry cask storage, changing your yearly utility cost down to maybe $10,000 a year for lights and air conditioning.
This would also reduce the staffing required on site even further. Purchasing the canisters and the concrete bunkers to store them in will be expensive, but let's assume that the savings on utilities and personel for the remaining 40 years will cover this as well.
So, there's a rough answer for you: A $64 million dollar fund should be sufficient to maintain a nuclear power plant safely shut down for 60 years.
Now if you want to wipe the power plant from the site completely, that will cost you hundreds of millions of dollars, and the article talks about that. Simply shutting it down and maintaining the fuel safely won't cost nearly as much.
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Re:Yawn. Nothing to see here. Move along. (Score:5, Insightful)
As will also be the case for most of the short lived isotopes in both the spent fuel and the irradiated parts of the structure.
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Hold on Folks! There's no Problem! (Score:4, Informative)
Money-making machine. (Score:4, Interesting)
Hey, I have this machine that boils water for free, and makes money.
If I turn it on.
Which I'm not going to do - instead, I'm determined to dismantle it, but it costs too much to do so. ...
Anyone else not see how fucked up the idea of dismantling nuclear plants is?
From the perspective of a man who glows... (Score:5, Informative)
For those that choose to use the Hanford nuclear reservation as a point of argument against nuclear waste, well, you're half right. Almost all of the unfathomably dangerous substances located there are from nuclear WEAPON production.
For the energy needs of the current and future world, our two forseeable tools are nuclear power and hydro-electric. Nobody likes nuclear because of NIMBY syndrome. Nobody likes hydro-electric because it makes entire ecosystems disappear. Yeah, Eastern Washington has one of the largest dams in the nation as well. Coal, natural gas, and oil are only kept alive because economic powers far greater than you or I want to exhaust the supplies before they start splitting atoms.
Big Lies (Score:4, Insightful)
"During the past two years, estimates of dismantling costs have soared by more than $4.6 billion because rising energy and labor costs, while the investment funds that are supposed to pay for shutting plants down have lost $4.4 billion in the battered stock market."
Labor costs have risen in the last two years? Really? I thought we were in a recession with nearly 10% unemployment?
Energy costs? Oil is now back down to 2005 levels. Natural gas hasn't been this cheap since 2002.
If those are really their excuses, they should be jumping on the opportunity to decommission NOW, before prices go back up!
And as to them losing money in the stock market - boo hoo. They could have put the funds into inflation protected treasury notes, but they wanted the extra profits to reduce how much they had to pay out. They gambled, they lost, they should have to pay up. If they can't - we have bankruptcy laws just for them (which we should have immediately applied to the banking mess too). Or they could take out a nice fat loan - interest rates are pretty low, I hear.
I'd love to say I can't believe they're getting away with this - but given recent history of forgiving the villains and putting the burden on the taxpayers and individual investors, I just can't muster disbelief any more.
Told You So (Score:3, Insightful)
That's exactly what I said the other day (and got slammed for) in the "first new nuke plant in US" story that was so widely cheered here.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1310417&cid=28775389 [slashdot.org]
Re:Weird (Score:5, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor [wikipedia.org]
Of course; one should never let the truth stand in the way of their agenda...
Now this is probably true, but it applies to so many areas, I really can't fault nuclear power for the actions of a few companies.
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I'm surprised.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Trains aren't profitable either, but those aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
Sometimes the government subsidizes private business for the greater public good (although most of the time they subsidize business due to "campaign contributions").
Re:I'm surprised.... (Score:4, Informative)
Really, the only reason trains aren't really going anywhere is because they are out of the traffic and can be used like buses (subways, light rail, etc) and the fact the infrastructure is already built and doesn't require a ton of work.
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Re:I'm surprised.... (Score:5, Informative)
btw the statement quoted above is a lie. You are a liar, antirelic. Including the catastrophes in the accounting is precisely what nuclear proponents don't do (didn't you get the memo?) because of the obvious. Luckily for you and them, as it turns out, human life doesn't really have much value if its not yours.
You're a liar, Mr. AC, or just an ignorant retard, because you apparently have no clue how many people die mining coal [typepad.com]. Not so many per year in a country like the U.S. (compared to how many in modern times for nuclear), but still thousands per year in China, which is how things were not that long ago even in the 1st World. Have more people died mining coal than have died as a result of nuclear power, even counting those killed intentionally by atomic bombs? Yes.
But yes, those human lives don't have much value since you had no clue they existed.
If you only count accidents, then the total deaths from nuclear power is less than a single year of coal mining in China, or just a few years of mining in the U.S. in the period when the nuclear disasters occurred. In the year Three Mile Island occured, the second worst accident ever, more people died mining in the U.S. than died from the incident. Yes that includes long-term health effects, which coal mining isn't very good for either if you didn't know.
It's not the greatest comparison ever, since ultimately what matters is modern safety standards in the country in question (the U.S. in this case). It is a true comparison though. And you'd still be very hard-pressed and hard-tarded to suggest that nuclear power is more dangerous than coal power today.
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Re:I'm surprised.... (Score:5, Informative)
I dont normally replied to anon but you make my point for me.
"human life doesnt really have much value if its not yours." The war cry of the communist/socialist/environmentalist elitist. Rail against everything. Decry every solution as "inhumane", all the while proposing fantasy ideas that have no merit or foundation in reason. I add in the catastrophes to make a "clear" point. I grew up in the coal mining regions of the USA. Care to take a shot at the statistics on "Black Lung" alone?
Between 1987 and 1996, 14,489 people died from "Black Lung". Care to guess how many people, world wide who died from Nuclear power during that same time period? Since 1990, more than 20,000 people have died from black lung. http://www.courier-journal.com/cjextra/blacklung/index.html [courier-journal.com]
Counting bodies isn't as abstract as counting parts per million of carbon in the air, or closely guarded computer models predicting weather patterns... Its fairly simple.
Even the most wacky, statistics skewing websites in existence cannot logically link nuclear power ALONE to being a dangerous source of energy. (http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0131-03.htm . PS: A great article if you need a laugh, it links "power production" and "nuclear weapons production" into the same category, "nuclear energy and weapons programs up to 1989 will account for 65 million deaths". I'm sure 64 million of those are due to coal and gas energy sources.
Anyway. Anonymous snipes backed by "emotion" of wanting to "save the people" is all you can expect from the left. When confronted with logic or even a touch of rational debate, lefties put on their super hero masks and start talking about "the value of life".
Another group of people wanted to do whats best for the people too. They made gulags and had great leaps forward for the progress of man kind!
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Re:I'm surprised.... (Score:5, Informative)
Stop railing against liberals.
I'm a "liberal" in a lot of ways -- I am for a small military, public healthcare, strong public education, equal rights for homosexuals, addressing global warming, etc.
I also support nuclear power.
I support all of these things not because I am "ruled by my emotions", but because there are legitimate economic and scientific arguments for them. Not everyone on the left is a kneejerk type.
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Re:Weird (Score:4, Insightful)
Wow! Your first link makes the "Breeder Reactor" sound just so wonderful.
Unfortunately you omitted to mention that it still produces a waste that is beyond lethal for 25,000 years.
If you care to bring the facts to bear about nuclear energy, mainly what do we now do with the waste as well as the spent facility when all's said and done with ... for the next 25,000 years! The only answer anyone can give, a stupid blank look and shrug, will only indicate complete incompetence and a lack of thinking this one through, so don't bother.
Worse, now the companies that own and operate theses plants are going belly up and walking away from the retired facilities and leaving them for the states, counties and towns to deal with.
Sounds criminal to me. Sure the power was cheep. But the leftovers pose too many new problems that will have to be dealt with for thousands of generations to come. I've never been a fan of nuclear technology. Now my reservations are verified by the incompetence of the corporations, lobbyists, and politicians involved in producing this resulting product.
I remain unconvinced that nuclear technology is worth the trouble, expense, and/or effort.
I have a much better idea, lets invest some effort in harnessing the power of the sun and call it a day.
Instead of this exercise in stupidity.
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You don't get better by not doing (Score:5, Insightful)
We really are not ready for this kind of power as mankind. Once we find a solution for the radioactive waste we will be. Till that time... there is always the sun..
I once tried to write a python script. Instead of doing what I wanted it crashed my computer. I've decided I'm not ready for the power of programming. Once I'm a good programmer, I might try writing code again.
If we give up nuclear power now we're never going to find a solution. With no nuclear reactors there isn't going to be any incentive. And that doesn't get into the definition of a solution. Yucca mountain and breeder reactors are both solutions, they just weren't acceptable solutions to people such as yourself.
Let's us be honest. You say not now but what that means is not ever.
Aside: I'd much rather live next to a nuclear plant than a coal fired one. If solar becomes economically viable that'd be great too.
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Re:You don't get better by not doing (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that your computer crashing is an acceptable cost of you learning python. I don't think a nuclear power plant "crash" would be worth it.
Just my 2c
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Re:You don't get better by not doing (Score:5, Informative)
I don't think a nuclear power plant "crash" would be worth it.
Yeah, right on! Pennsylvania is totally uninhabitable 30 years after the Three Mile Island event!
Seriously, they had a Loss of Coolant Accident with a core meltdown at TMI. That's as bad as it gets with western plants.
No one died. No one was hurt. No one was exposed to a harmful level of radiation. It was a billion dollar industrial casualty. The adjacent nuclear unit continues to run with a great safety record.
Three Mile Island exposed deficiencies in training philosophy and human factoring of controls and indications. These lessons have been learned.
It also validated the basic western design philosophy. Multiple fission product barriers, negative temperature coefficient, negative void coefficient.
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Re:You don't get better by not doing (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:You don't get better by not doing (Score:4, Insightful)
Chernobyl had both a positive temperature coefficient and a positive and very high void coefficient. What these numbers mean is that when the reactor gets hot, it gets hotter, and when the coolant gets hot and begins to boil, the reactor gets hotter still. Modern designs are nothing like Chernobyl, they are designed such that the higher the temperature they reach, the less energy output is produced and thus there is no runaway reaction.
Chernobyl was a stupid design, do you think we would have gotten far if we stopped building bridges after the first one that collapsed?
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Re:You don't get better by not doing (Score:5, Interesting)
Energy companies won't develop them because of the large financial risk and paranoid regulatory environment and lack of a clear payoff. Governments won't step in because any nuclear reactor is seen as evil by the green fanatics and seen as threatening by the coal companies.
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Re:You don't get better by not doing (Score:4, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That's irrelevant. The genie is already out of the bottle. Nuclear power is not going away. Even if you ban it in one place, another place will be more than happy to invest in it. Some countries, like France, would be in a lot of trouble if there were a unilateral ban on nuclear power plants and even the U.S., which doesn't have that many plants, would be in dire straits considering nuclear power is an essential part of the grid in several major U.
Re:Weird (Score:4, Insightful)
The last few years alone have shown great strides in truly clean energy production (not to be confused with the often mistaken for clean clean-now-hide-the-dirt-til-later energy production, like nuclear).
You mean like solar? No I guess that's more of a hide-the-mercury-chromium-PVC-silicon tetrachloride-waste-post-production-"now-it's-clean"-hide-the-disposal-of-EOL-panels-til-later kind of clean energy. Or are you talking about those practically-useless-residential-wind turbines? OR maybe the hugely-devastating-to-the-aquatic-ecosystem-hydroelectric-plants?
There are dozens, if not hundreds, of new ways to get to this clean energy... smart people keep mixing it up and it really is quite amazing.
Really? Name one form of "clean" energy. The problem is more like stupid people keep believing marketing BS about what "clean" energy is. There was a time when nuclear actually had a similar vibe as solar does now. Then over time the truth came out about the storage life of the waste and the possible dangers. Now it's become the pariah of clean energy. There are some seriously underplayed issues with solar panel production and disposal. If you think there are no issues with the byproducts from the composites that are used for wind-turbines then you are fooling yourself.
Its only a matter of time, and time calculated in decades (not the nuclear standard of calculating time in millennia), before one, or my guess, many new clean energy alternatives become not only viable but very profitable. Nuclear energy is just too expensive (when you add up the cost of the R&D, the educations required, and especially 4000-40000 years of waste storage, and last, not least, the whatif disasters like a chernobyl-scale (not chernobyl-like) disaster).
So you predict that magic pixie dust power generation is only decades away? Cool!
Seriously though, I'm not against solar, nuclear, wind, or even fossil fuel energy production. As far as I can tell, all forms of energy production cause some sort of harmful waste or environmental issue in one way or another. Perhaps geothermal being the one with the least problems, however it's not terribly practical other than in Iceland and a few other areas. I think a better approach is to try to maximize the efficiency and lower the toxic byproducts of what is possible while we work on something better and start to get away from the non-renewables. But that's just what I think.
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Re:Weird (Score:5, Insightful)
"There are no solutions, only trade-offs." - Thomas Sowell
Nothing is perfectly safe; everything involves risk and negative outcomes. There are plenty of negative consequences of using pure solar energy, not the least of which is the impact of manufacturing the tools to harness it.
"It has less change of a meltdown, but if that meltdown occurs, and it will, it's no difference from chernobyle, except this one wil be bigger"
Evidence? Support? Simply saying something is true doesn't make it so.
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Re:Weird (Score:5, Interesting)
It has less polution, but the polution is still radioactive.
I have shocking news for you: Your granite counter top is radioactive! OH NOES.
It has less change of a meltdown, but if that meltdown occurs, and it will, it's no difference from chernobyle, except this one wil be bigger.
Yeah. Because it's not like the Chernobyl disaster had anything to do with the design of the reactor (ignoring that even with that horrible design it took ridiculous amounts of human stupidity to make it happen since I'm assuming that's what you're assuming will always happen). It's not like you can design a reactor so that it can't meltdown, or can't meltdown in such a way that it explodes and blows its containment. It's not like the next and only other major nuclear accident was far smaller than Chernobyl. And it's not like we learned anything from that with regards to reactor design... For example self-regulating designs where the reactor getting too hot means the reaction will slow down. Nope, that doesn't exist.
No, no matter what, meltdowns are inevitable, and will be bigger than previous ones, because... why, again?
We really are not ready for this kind of power as mankind. Once we find a solution for the radioactive waste we will be.
Solution: Re-use it until it is no longer useful as a radioactive fuel of any kind, meaning it is no longer particularly radioactive and thus not a particular danger. Then stick it in the ground without having to worry about security or stability since it's neither useful nor particularly dangerous. Yes the half-life will be really long, but half-life is inversely proportional to radioactivity which is entirely the point.
So, I guess we're ready! Bring on the nuclear reactors!
Till that time... there is always the sun.
Yeah we're a long way from producing all our energy from the sun (directly anyway). I'm all for more of it, including solar-powered microwave satellites. Oh but wait, surely there's no way to design one such that it doesn't fry people on the ground in a swatch of destruction!
Still a shame someone flagged me as flamebait instead of discussing our different views. Cause flamebait i Was not.
Indeed that was an unfair mod, and they were almost certainly using it as a surrogate for "-1, uninformed paranoia" which doesn't exist for good reason.
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Re:Weird (Score:4, Insightful)
The biggest problem with the reactor at Chernobyl is that the design did not include a concrete vault capable of containing the clouds of debris ejected from the event site.
Yeah, exactly. With the simple expedience of a concrete dome, the Chernobyl disaster would have been substantially smaller, like Three Mile Island was, where nobody died in the immediate aftermath. Three Mile Island, which was the worst-case failure scenario -- coolant failure and all control rods locked out of the core. So the core got too hot and melted and fell into the graphite bed beneath, slowing the reaction and ending the threat. Combined with the containment shell, very little contamination was released into the environment. It was a disaster to be sure, but a small one in the grand scheme of industrial accidents. It was a design that took failure into a account and thus minimized the impact. And designs have only gotten better since then.
Honestly, people act like they still think nuclear reactors can blow up like atom bombs. "Oh my god, humanity is not ready for this power!" Yeah, nuclear weapons maybe we weren't ready for, I think fission reactors to light up our homes are within our acceptable risk level given every other human endeavor ever.
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Re:Weird (Score:4, Insightful)
The problems with Chernobyl go way past that. Here are a few:
1. Positive void coefficient of reactivity. Once bubbles started forming in the reactor coolant, it sped up the reaction, causing a positive feedback loop. This is, of course, not the case with light water reactors.
2. The SCRAM rods actually sped up the reaction because of their graphite tips. There's a pretty crazy design defect.
3. It was physically possible for those morons to disable the safety systems.
Compare this with a truly modern design like China's HTR-DB modular pebble bed reactors, and the difference is striking. The HTR-DB has a strong negative temperature coefficient of reactivity, so all the feedback loops are very negative. They can actually shut off the cooling systems and the reactor will simply shut off because it's not able to sustain a reaction without active cooling. Overheating inherently kills the reaction. Nice, isn't it?
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Re:Weird (Score:4, Interesting)
I've worked as an Operator at a US Power Reactor ( North Anna Power Station in Virginia ) a long time ago. It is a Westinghouse pressurized water reactor and it's a completely different design than Chernobyl. The containment dome is of sufficient volume to maintain integrity during a complete meltdown. It's one of the biggest expenses. ( A description of the construction can be found in the license application [nrc.gov] in section 2.4.1 page 2-97 ).
The Unit 1 and Unit 2 Containments are Seismic Class I structures that house the reactor and other Nuclear Steam Supply System (NSSS) components for the respective unit. Each Containment consists of a reinforced concrete cylinder with a hemispherical dome and a flat, 10-foot-thick reinforced concrete mat foundation. A waterproof membrane is located below the Containment's structural mat and extends up the Containment wall to ground level.
In fact, it's such a large expense that this particular design keeps the interior of the containment dome at about 9 psia to allow for the expansion of Reactor Coolant during a meltdown in a smaller volume. Meaning a smaller containment dome. It also has the advantage that if there are any leaks, it leaks in, not out. If an accident did happen, the containment dome would probably been sealed and filled with concrete.
So why have nuclear plants? Why all the expense?
When I worked at that plant. Dominion Power ( Then Virginia Power ) had 4 reactors and about 17 coal fired plants and I think 2 natural gas plants. Those 4 reactors could at times supply about 40% of the power for the company's power grid covering almost all of Virginia and the northern part of North Carolina. This was usually at night when energy consumption dropped.
The coal plants also didn't operate at 100% all the time. They altered their power output increasing output during peak demand during the day and late evening and decreasing output as demand dropped during late night and early morning.
I hope you have noticed like I have that the standard operating procedure of the coal fired plants closely mirror what you would expect to see from a solar & battery power plant.
Also, I know how much coal ash is produced in a single day from a coal fired plant. I also know, for the nuclear plant I worked at, only one third of the fuel rods were replaced every 18 months. So, given the choice of fields covered in tons of low level waste or only a few tons of concentrated nastiness, I'd opt for the later because it is far easier to maintain stricter and safer control of it.
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Re:Weird (Score:4, Informative)
Normally I would not be so blunt but quite frankly you started this one:
a)It is clear you don't understand how the energy produced in a nuclear reactor correlates to the quantity of fission products produced.
b)It is clear you have no idea about what properties breeder reactor waste have and how it compares to regular nuclear waste.
c)It is clear you don't understand how breeder reactors work or what impact the destruction of the transuranics would have on repository capacity and requirements.
For your ( and other's ) information this is how it works:
Nuclear reactors produce energy by splitting nuclei. If they split relatively safe Uranium or the much more toxic and dangerous alpha emitters ( such as neptunium and plutonium ) does not really matter in energy terms since the energy produced in each fission is about the same. As it happens the elements that make nuclear waste storage problematic are all very heavy transuranics that are alpha emitters since these decay with a halflife of a few thousand years. The problem is that even thousands of years from now they produce enough heat to potentially melt the fuel rods if you don't allow sufficient separation between them. It is this heat that limits how much radioactive waste you can store in a given space.
Thus if instead of splitting uranium you recycle and split these heavy transuranics you only end up with comparatively short lived fission products. It is true that the fission products initially has a higher radioativity than the transuranics, but the amount of fission products you get is exactly the same as if you ahd been splitting uranium. Thus by splitting the troublesome transuranics rather than uranium you end up with the same amount of fission products ( for a given amount of energy ), but you don't get any transuranics. I'll repeat that to make sure you got it:
Regardless of reactor design the quantity of fission products is the same for a given quantity of energy. The energy produced is directly proportional to the number of fissions that occur (and consequentially the amount of fission products in the waste. However, while regular reactors produce long lived transuranics that need to be safely stored for thousands of years, breeders only produce the fission products ( the same quantity as regular reactors would produce for the same energy ) and thus their waste reaches the same levels of radioactivity as uranium-ore within approximately 300 years.
Your assertion that the waste becomes more dangerous after recycled in a breeder reactor presumably refers to the fact that the radioactivity of the fission products is higher than that of the actinides. However as I mentioned above the quantity of fission products is no greater than it would have been for uranium. Also many of the fission products are so radioactive that they very rapidly decay to stable compounds that are not troublesome. Some of them have half-lives of minutes or even seconds, and after just a short period of storage they are less radioactive than what the actinides would have been. More importantly however is that the overall heat generation decreases rapidly and since you keep recycling the uranium you reduce the waste volume by almost a factor of 100. Because of these reductions in heat generation and volume, storing all the waste a power plant would produce within the 300 years it takes for breeder waste to decay is quite feasible to do on-site. Or in other words:
A breeder reactor produces so small quantities of waste that it would take much longer to fill the plant's storage facilities than it would take for the waste to decay to safe
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
and producing LESS but MORE DEADLY waste!
To be more precise, the waste would have a shorter half life. What does that mean? More dangerous in the first year, much less dangerous in the 20th, radiation wise.
Something with a half life of 100 years vs one with a halflife of 10.
Radiation Year 1: 1 vs 10, Year 100: .5 vs .01
I am sick to death of nuclear proponents throwing breeder reactors around like they are the Second Coming or something. At some point it'd be nice if someone just said "hey... we're using too much power... we need to find ways to cut back on that" instead of "full speed ahead! Breeder reactors!"
Conservation GOOD. However, look at some of our proposed conservation efforts - plug-in hybrids and electric cars rather than gasoline engines. Heat pumps vs traditional hydrocarbon fired furnaces.
Notice a trend? We can cut ou
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Good luck with the insurance policy. As AIG shows, what makes anybody think the insurance company will have the money - or even be around - in 60 years to cover the cost of dismantling a reactor?
The only way you can get nuclear power to pan out financially is if you have the government own and run all the reactors on what amounts to a non-profit basis (as in France, with EDF, which is something like 80% government-owned). You can't even get private insurance for the things (and I wouldn't trust private in
Re:the plant is the lesser problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really, since burying the radioactive "waste" is a huge waste; more than 99% of the energy has yet to be extracted from it. (Which is also why it is so dangerous and long lived.) This "waste" can be burned in fast reactors though, and there is enough to supply them for hundreds of years before any further mining is necessary.
All that needs to be done is build the reactors. General Electric even has a design ready for a commercial reactor, called the S-PRISM. This is modeled after the Integral Fast Reactor, a modern design which addresses all of the concerns about nuclear power.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
As we found out last year, Capitalism in the hands of very smart people can cause worldwide havoc. So, in summary, Capitalism in the hands of both idiots and very smart people can be deadly. So, why are we using it again?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Can someone explain to me? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because a nuclear reactor doesn't last forever. The steel and concrete (and the steel reinforcing structure inside the concrete) absorb a lot of neutrons over the years, and that weakens them. Now, you could replace it all, but that costs as much as (or more than) building a new reactor in a new location and shutting the old one down (especially when you consider the changes in technology over the life of the reactor).
Now, in some cases, it may be possible to build a new reactor on an existing site next to the old one, but that is touchy (lots of heavy construction == lots of shaking of the ground == sometimes cracked walls in nearby structures). That would save on upkeep for the shut-down reactor, as things like the security and technical staff can be shared between facilities.
Even fusion produces neutrons that will limit the life of the reactor (if someone could ever build a net-power-producing one).
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