Its Nuclear Plant Closed, Maine Town Is Full of Regret 380
mdsolar writes in with a story about the fallout from a nuclear plant closing on a small town in Maine. "In a wooded area behind a camouflage-clad guard holding an assault rifle, dozens of hulking casks packed with radioactive waste rest on concrete pads — relics of the shuttered nuclear plant that once powered the region and made this fishing town feel rich. In the 17 years since Maine Yankee began dismantling its reactors and shedding its 600 workers, this small, coastal town north of Portland has experienced drastic changes: property taxes have spiked by more than 10 times for the town's 3,700 residents, the number living in poverty has more than doubled as many professionals left, and town services and jobs have been cut. 'I have yet to meet anyone happy that Maine Yankee is gone,' said Laurie Smith, the town manager. 'All these years later, we're still feeling the loss of jobs, the economic downturn, and the huge tax increases.'"
And no plutonium to show for it (Score:4, Funny)
Think of the space probes
The Issue With Small Town Mindset (Score:5, Insightful)
The real issue isn't with Maine Yankee leaving...it's that the members the town thought it would be around forever.
The problem they are experiencing is the same one that most small towns (and some big ones) experience when they tie all their hopes and dreams on one industry instead of using tax revenues generated from that industry to help pull additional industries into their city.
When is it going to happen to San Francisco? (Score:5, Interesting)
At some point, this is going to happen to San Francisco, and the entire so-called Silicon Valley.
While the economy of this region was once diversified, ranging from professional services to software development to computer hardware development to heavy industry, we've seen much of that flee over the years.
These days, the companies and people that remain are nothing compared to the giants of days gone by. They are strangers walking through the ruins of what was once a great civilization. They try to imitate what they see, but they lack the inherent essence of what The Valley was in its heyday.
Some people call it economic stagnation; I prefer to call it rampant hipsterism. That which mattered has been replaced by that which is superficial. Where we once had leaders and innovators, now we have manchildren who wear tight jeans, large glasses, and act with the maturity of toddlers.
When Bill Hewlett was in the room, everyone listened to him, even when he wasn't saying anything. But today, we get to hear self-entitled young men prance around in fedoras, taking photos of everything while subsequently going on about social media and Web 2.0 and Ruby-on-Rails.
If it can happen in Maine, I think it can surely happen in California. The parallels between the two are astounding.
Re:When is it going to happen to San Francisco? (Score:4, Insightful)
If it can happen in Maine, I think it can surely happen in California
It can happen anywhere and it can happen for all the wrong reasons, especially in California because what people don't realize is that business will grow and prosper where it's welcome. Last year California lost 5.2% of its businesses [businessweek.com] and while the experts can't agree on a clear "why," I think that California has become more anti-business, anti-growth over the past few decades. I was born and raised in So. Cal and lived out there through the end of the 80s but even then it was still growing. Sure the recent recession has hit everybody but the decline in California is inevitable; Overpriced housing such as in Orange County [patch.com] means that even middle class wage earners have a very hard time of living there, which also helps to drive up the costs of labor. [doctorhousingbubble.com] You can blame speculation on most of that but without mass transit and massive urban sprawl it creates huge amounts of gridlock. [time.com] Add to it the anti-business legislation that's been passed and you have a perfect storm brewing over over-inflated housing prices, employees who can't get to work because of long commutes and an anti-business attitude [calchamber.com] and ranking highest in the nation on taxation in most categories [caltax.org], that makes California downright a sucky place to make a living and conduct business. As they say "it's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there."
What a surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
A small town loses a lot when the big business that was there has left.
Not quite sure why it's worth an article, or why it matters that it was a nuclear power plant though.
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Yeah, they could just as well have written about the next village where the fish factory closed. Or about the boom times in tiny villages in North Dakota where they've found oil.
Re:What a surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, it's called a "company" town, and it happens wherever there is a single major employer. Often the employer is the reason the town exists as more than a little village in the first place, so it's not at all clear how one would expect it to exist unchanged when the employer leaves. It happens to big towns, too... Remove Disney from Orlando and see if anyone wants to hit the center of Florida in the middle of the summer.
Re:What a surprise (Score:5, Informative)
It happens to big towns, too... Remove Disney from Orlando and see if anyone wants to hit the center of Florida in the middle of the summer.
Or if you want to see an example that actually happened, look at Flint MI without General Motors, which went from a prosperous manufacturing center of about 200,000 people to a bankrupt city half the size with the highest crime rate in America.
Re:What a surprise (Score:4, Funny)
That's just liberal propaganda from Michael Moore. Flint was killed by the union.
(Would I make a good troll?) :)
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For that to be a complete analogy you'd have to have national organizations lobbying the federal government to not license the fish factory, develop an entire movement opposed to fish factories, and then have the government regulate the fish factory to the point of insolvency.
Re:What a surprise (Score:5, Interesting)
They are hardly alone in that, though. All kinds of industrial processes (especially anything inherited from the good old days when Men Were Men, Cigarettes were a health food, and PCBs were a Miracle of Science), even if their buildings are cheaper to tear down, leave the underlying site in lousy enough shape that it's usually cheaper just to say 'eh, fuck 'em' and choose a greenfield location somewhere else. Even something as minor as a gas station can be Wacky Remediation Fun Time if their storage tank leaked before they went under or moved.
(The only other aspect, though the article is polite, or feckless, enough to ignore it, is that nuclear plants operate under an NRC license, which is of limited duration unless renewed, which requires a variety of testing steps, so their demise is probably rather more predictable than the usual '$FOOCORP moves to China to save 10 cents per widget' story. If your town is basically fucked without its resident nuclear reactor, you really want your town leadership to be well informed(or doing their best to batter down the doors and demand to be made aware) of exactly where in the lifecycle the reactor is, whether HQ is looking for a renewal, whether there are issues that would scuttle that, etc. Predicting a 'Haha, Outsourcing Surprise!' event is relatively challenging. Predicting whether or not a reactor will get recertified or mothballed may not be trivial; but it's a much better defined problem. My guess is that there's a really ugly backstory there. Either the town ignoring the problem to bask in the present, the operator stonewalling/flimflamming the town until it was time to give them the shaft, some of both, some other flavor I'm not thinking of; but that would be the one major wrinkle distinguishing a reactor from any other 'industrial site not easy to remediate'.)
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It'll be even worse now with the fallout from a nuclear plant turning everyone into mutants. Oh wait, the article doesn't say anything about nuclear fallout. Damn click bait!
Yeah, I noticed that too- I would have said much the same thing if you hadn't already.
The only thing I'd say is that I think it was more a badly-thought out attempt to make a clever headline than an intentional effort to mislead. "Fallout" obviously has the nuclear meaning as well as a more general, metaphorical usage. In this case use of the term "fall-out" for the social after-effects of the closure ties in with the nuclear associations of the word and the fact it was a *nuclear* power plant.
Except th
We'll never have a sane debate about nuclear power (Score:5, Insightful)
On one side we have a lot of people talking technology and facts about something that few people understand and can't observe.
On the other we have people who are afraid, on a gut level, about something they don't understand and a deep mistrust towards the technical people. The technical people consider these guys stupid and irrational.
A sane dialogue is a complete nonstarter. They can't even agree about what's sane.
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Then there are those of us that do understand, and have a moderate distrust in human ability to foresee everything, and to do adequate safety checks, etc.
Personally, I think nuclear power is A Good Thing. From what has happened so far in the world though, it looks like we need to implement more modern reactor designs to avoid any more radiation leaks from human negligence, or the occasional natural disaster.
and then the human factor... (Score:5, Insightful)
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The same problem applies in all activism scenarios, whether we're discussing nuclear power, fracking, education, human rights, politics or war.
On the one side, you have all the people who cry for an absolute stop to the activity in question, and the other side will be pushing for the absolute requirement to do whatever it is. The two extremes dominate the debate, and anyone not in an extreme is derided as not being dedicated to the particular cause. Both sides are full of PhD-holding experts in tangentially
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I'm a strong supporter of nuclear power, but I believe that the 'stupid and irrational' people actually bring insights into important issues that are often overlooked by technical folk. And this article raises thought-provoking issues that I've never heard acknowledged in the media by any nuclear expert.
Any conceivable nuclear safety regime requires plant employees to act with honesty, integrity and procedural rigour. But what happens to honesty and integrity when the future economic prosperity of your fa
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I'm a technical guy from age ... hm. 5 i think. Been in tech business long time, started professionally when i was 16. Like..work in a IT company doing coding and server management. 28 now.
I'm not hating on nuclear tech. I'm hating on fukushima scenarios and then the world that is totally apathetic towards such scenarios. If the price to pay is to pollute this planet (our home btw) even further and more severe, then yeah.. we need to double think what and how we' doing stuff. Even if there's a remote chance
And you think this is a new phenomenon?! (Score:3, Insightful)
Settlements come and settlements go. That is the nature of the settlement! This has been the nature of settlement since the very beginning.
It does not matter if it is primitive people sleeping around a fire in tents, or a large city of antiquity, or an American town of today. Changing times bring changing economies which bring changes to where people reside.
So why the surprise? Why the dumbfounding? When situations change, people must change. They must move. They must adapt. It is the way of the world; the way it has always been.
Dangers of being the company town... (Score:2)
The fact that a bunch of nuclear waste casks prevent any redevelopment of that part of the site certainly doesn't help (though, nuclear plants are one of the flavors of facility that are wildly expensive to shut down permanently even if they could get rid of the casks).
They had 17 years (Score:3, Insightful)
Nothing to see here (Score:2)
This is a story about a facility closing and the town losing jobs, this is not a story that supports Nuclear. If you are want to build nuclear plants to create jobs, the tail is wagging the dog. Supposing, just supposing, the plant had an accident and all those people had to evacuate. Do you think they would have been sad to see it close? Now that would have been a nuclear story.
Bad choice of words (Score:4, Funny)
the fallout from a nuclear plant closing
Maybe the fallout will cause a mutation in the town's economy.Together with the economic downturn it could be a toxic combination, resulting in an civic apocalypse.
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That's a pretty radical statement. Remember that this is still a gray area.
Sievert.
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As opposed to the glowing green area associated with most nuke plants.
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That's a pretty radical statement. Remember that this is still a gray area.
Sievert.
That's clever. If I hadn't commented I'd mod you up!
Bad headline (Score:2)
Contrary to the other posts in this thread... (Score:5, Interesting)
Contrary to the other posts in this thread...
It's doubtful that the activists who caused the closure actually live in the town; they are likely from out of area, and just uniformly against nuclear power for the sake of being against nuclear power.
From the article, it looks like there isn't a NIMBY in town, and that the town is actually filled with PIMBY's ("Please In My Back Yard").
Re:Contrary to the other posts in this thread... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's doubtful that the activists who caused the closure actually live in the town; they are likely from out of area, and just uniformly against nuclear power for the sake of being against nuclear power.
From TFA
But the plant faced serious allegations of safety violations and falsifying records around the time it was closed, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Agency investigators found Maine Yankee relied on inadequate computer analyses to demonstrate the adequacy of its emergency core cooling system; “willfully provided inaccurate information” to the NRC about its ability to vent steam during an accident; and provided falsified records of safety-related equipment.
Yeah .. damn commie hippie activists. Causing a proud 'Merkin company to close down.
Re:Contrary to the other posts in this thread... (Score:5, Informative)
From TFA
But the plant faced serious allegations of safety violations and falsifying records around the time it was closed, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Well, yes, and I could allege you eat babies. That doesn't make it true. It would cost you a lot of money to prove otherwise, however. One of the common tactics to stall the construction of a nuclear power plant is to rely on the AEC forcing multiple redesigns during the construction process. Before anything is built at all, and then after each redesign, you demand an environmental impact statement, in case the answer is different, and there's another two years. Believe me, these groups are not averse to implementing what in Congress would be called "filibustering" in order to delay plants and increase their costs as much as possible to prevent them being built.
Agency investigators found Maine Yankee relied on inadequate computer analyses to demonstrate the adequacy of its emergency core cooling system; “willfully provided inaccurate information” to the NRC about its ability to vent steam during an accident; and provided falsified records of safety-related equipment.
There are enough conflicting regulations, and enough changes in regulations, that if you measured an office building built 5 years ago in California against current "earthquake ready" standards, you would find some "violations" where it would meet current code, were it to have been constructed that way last week. The important point to consider is that despite this, not one operational accident or failure as a result of these supposed issues.
Re:Contrary to the other posts in this thread... (Score:4, Insightful)
Just because you say
The important point to consider is that despite this, not one operational accident or failure as a result of these supposed issues.
doesn't mean that an accident or failure cannot occur.
And if an accident does occur, then you are relying on safety systems to mitigate the effects. But when statements like willfully provided inaccurate information; and provided falsified records of safety-related equipment. get bandied about, you cannot trust in the ability of those safety systems to mitigate to the expected level of operation. At that point it is either fix it or shut down. In this case the operators chose to shut down.
This has nothing to do with complex regulations. The operators were simply caught out being negligent.
Agreed on the activists (Score:3, Insightful)
They killed the goose that layed the golden eggs.
The uber-green and anti-nuke activists likely don't live there, and probably consider these folks collateral damage in their larger fight. Ideally, such activists would be up-front about the economic costs of some of their stands. Even beyond this now-impoverished small town, growing economies need affordable energy; that's just an economic fact. High energy costs reverberate through the entire supply chain, and raise the costs of virtually every good-and-
Re:Contrary to the other posts in this thread... (Score:4, Informative)
The 'backyard' for a nukulur disaster is in the hundreds of miles.
Three Mile Island had a full core meltdown, and it basically didn't bother anyone. It seems the containment vessels contained things, just like they were designed to do. So Apparently in the TMI case, the "backyard" was limited to "inside the containment vessel". That's a "backyard" I can live with.
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I realize the US reactors are different than other models (and there are other designs that are even safer), but there are two pretty large areas on this planet that will be uninhabitable for some time due to contamination from nuclear plants.
I grew up in a one-industry town (Score:5, Insightful)
The modern time is an abomination because economics runs our lives.
Since that's the case, it's prudent to think economically and to never rely on only a couple industries in a town.
If your employment opportunities are (1) nuclear plant or (2) "fishing, I guess" then you're in for a rough ride if either of those shits the bed.
And since economies are both cyclic and random, expect that to happen.
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And it's worth pointing out that fishing and lobstering is also in trouble in Maine, because fishing and lobster stocks got really depleted about 15 years ago. So that leaves lumber, paper, farming (particularly blueberries, apples, eggs, and potatoes), maple syrup, shipbuilding, and tourism as your options for work.
Don't put all of your eggs in one basket. (Score:2, Informative)
Meanwhile in the Amazon Rainforest (Score:2)
the fallout from a nuclear plant closing (Score:2)
What an idiotic choice of words. It makes it sound like more anti-nuclear drivel about how radioactive waste is leaking from the closed plant or something. Or that every closed plant instantly becomes Chernobyl. This isn't sim city where plants auto-explode after 50 years.
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Also, who cares about 3700 people in a small town in Maine? (besides those people themselves) As if this is the worst economic or environmental consequence of the plant closing. What about the pollution caused by the coal plants they are firing up to replace this Nuclear plant?
Re:the fallout from a nuclear plant closing (Score:4, Informative)
Also, there is plenty of stupidity to pass around:
- The author of the article made it very vague as to when the reactor shut down. It was shut down in 1997 [wikipedia.org], which the article does not mention. I am not sure if the 600 workers the article talks about were involved in decommissioning or were former workers let go in 1997. If these are decommissioning workers then shouldn't it be obvious when the project would be finished? Why does everyone treat it like a big surprise? Or were they surprised back in 1997?
- The plant had run unsafe and falsified reports to the NRC. No wonder it was closed down.
- A town of 3700 has 7 fire engines and a bunch of other crap they can no longer afford. Well did they expect the gravy train to never end? Sounds like the residents of the town were idiots too.
- This lady: “Most of my family died of cancer, and I think the plant was the reason,” said Thompson, 55, a cashier at a fireworks shop. Because no cancer is hereditary, and the author trusts the gut feeling of an old woman over actual medical science. Ace reporting there.
When livelihoods depend on doing the wrong thing. (Score:5, Interesting)
There are an enormous number of cases where government cannot find the will to do the right thing because so many people's livelihoods are dependent upon doing the wrong thing. Fixing healthcare, ending the war on drugs, reining in surveillance, saner military and foreign policy, a lot of people stand to loose well paying jobs if these things come to pass. This isn't just come greedy CEO who isn't going to make as huge a profit. Its middle class professionals and skilled workers who will be obsolete because what they do is harmful to the world.
How do we structure plans to do the right thing in a way that deals with this problem? A lot of the political pushback comes because of this issue. Congresspeople need to protect jobs in their districts, even if they are jobs that make the world a worse place. How do we do better while having a plan for the people and communities left behind?
The flip side of the argument in those in this position take a big gamble. A small town with a sustainable fishing economy expands to support a new nuclear industry that won't be there forever, but never really establishes or expands parallel industries that can survive independently. When nuclear goes, the infrastructure for it is still there, costing money, but the people and taxes to support it are not. In the meantime, its original economy from before the nuclear plant has gone through change and neglect. Its a story that plays out again and again in small formerly industrial towns. The clock turns back, but there is no support for doing that sanely, and so negative feedback loops happen, and as a nation we loose the stomach for change. If we better addressed this issue, maybe more could get done.
Re:Shift (Score:4, Insightful)
And in North Dakota, the opposite thing is happening. We can't all have everything, we need to select the best and least toxic way to fuel our country's demand for energy and pursue it. The Mainiacs would be screaming twice as loud if the nuclear plant had suffered an event that released even modest levels of radioactivity into their pristine environment. They should be celebrating - they gambled, they won. (Except for the multi billion dollar cleanup, even without a meltdown.)
Except that Nuclear is still the best solution if you are talking about the least toxic, unless you ignore all the fracking, and greenhouse emissions, and other issues that comes with burning carbon fuels. Renewable is not there yet to support the people.
Re:Shift (Score:4, Insightful)
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Even with massive efficiency improvements we need to at least double electricity production, as we need to electrify transport and heating in order to stop emitting CO2. ( And that's from an environment group http://zerocarbonbritain.com/ [zerocarbonbritain.com] )
The USA may have a low enough population density for renewables to work, but not europe or the far east. Don't be fooled by the 'will provide electricity for N homes', as household electricity is just a fraction of the problem.
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Tell that to the people of Fukushima (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Tell that to the people of Fukushima (Score:5, Insightful)
Fukushima was a disaster waiting to happen.... just like Chernobyl. Neither plant had any indication of learning from previous experiences in the nuclear power industry and were plain cruddy designs that any newly graduated nuclear engineering student could have designed better. Both plants also required electrical power being supplied to those plants simply to operate.
I'd also point out that even if you treat the designs of these plants as typical (which they aren't, nor are they anything approaching the design of a plant that would be built today) the amount of pollution and I dare say even radioactive debris contamination is far less than what you get from other energy producing activities around the world. No, it isn't perfect and there are some embarrassments in the nuclear power industry that certainly need to be examined with proper engineering reviews and teaching those lessons to the next generation so they can improve and do better.
Still, it is a hell of a lot better to build a nuclear power plant today than it is to build dozens or hundreds of coal/oil/bio-diesel plants which generate electricity. Not only it is technically cheaper (especially if you use standard designs for those plants and not constantly try to re-invent the wheel for each new plant), but the impact on the overall environment is far less for nuclear power plants than it is for any other kind... including solar farms.
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Typical? Does 23/104 23/104 plants in the US [nbcnews.com] count as typical? Perhaps you are right to say that such a design wouldn't be built today though. At least, I hope that's right.
Re:Tell that to the people of Fukushima (Score:4, Insightful)
It isn't for the lack of engineering ideas that offer a substantial improvement in terms of both safety and reliability to build nuclear power plants, instead it is a bunch of Luddite environmentalists who don't know a damn about even the periodic table, much less actually comprehend the basics behind nuclear processes that go into these reactors which are impacting public policy regarding permits and environmental assessments for building new nuclear power plants.
One of the more "recent" design ideas is to build a pebble bed reactor [wikipedia.org] which would have survived both of the mishaps that hit Fukishima and Chernobyl. This basic design has the reactor shutting itself off through chemistry rather than active participation of the plant engineers when power fails or temperatures go too high. In other words, the core simply can't melt down.
This is hardly the only design of its kind, and there are other ideas that clearly make building fission reactors much safer today than they were in the 1950's and 1960's. I would dare say quite a bit has happened in terms of nuclear plant construction since the 1971 commissioning date of the Fukushima Daiichi plant.
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Pebble beds are nice in theory but in practice all of the experimental designs have had issues with broken fuel pellets creating the potential for unsafe concentrations of Uranium.
It was all about the by-products (Score:3)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor [wikipedia.org]
The problem is that a LFTR reactor doesn't give you all those great by-products for thermonuclear weapons.
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Yeah, but the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant in the article uses the same GE BWR reactor/Mark I containment design as the Fukushima Daiichi nu
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So first you blame the plant's design "plain cruddy designs that any newly graduated nuclear engineering student could have designed better". And then when someone points out there's dozens of plants in the US using the exact same design, suddenly the design has nothing to do with it?
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Both plants also required electrical power being supplied to those plants simply to operate.
You present that as a wrong-headed design and imply that other nuclear power plants can operate without grid power. I'd like you to show me a currently running commercial reactor which can do that. Practically no base-load power plant, no matter their type, can do that. The only ones that can generally run as an island are peak gas-powered plants.
It is not a particularly interesting capability either. A nuclear power station that goes off the grid has a serious problem getting rid of all the power it genera
Re:Tell that to the people of Fukushima (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all, your memory of how Chernobyl went wrong is off. You should read the account again, it has been extensively researched by now. It was a bad design, absolutely, and the engineers on duty did not understand what they were doing to it when they deliberately ran it at too-low power for too long, but they did not intend a scram. Anyway, we can discount Chernobyl, no one will ever build a reactor like that (alas, there are still Chernobyl-type reactors operating).
I consider myself an environmentalist, so it is a bit annoying to be tainted with the "nuclear is poison" and "DHMO must be banned" brush. I think you give environmentalists too much credit though if you think they could stop nuclear power plants being built practically throughout the world. We have certainly been much less successful when it comes to coal mines and oil rigs, even though those are more harmful. The major difference seems to be that coal and oil is actually profitable whereas modern nuclear power needs more subsidy than even offshore wind power.
Also, I remember arguments from the pro-nuclear side that Japan was an example of how nuclear power could be safe and profitable when it is done right. Well, it turns out it was not done right, and suddenly there is a lot of criticism about how Fukushima was built. Where are the critical articles about German power plants? About French? They were built at the same time, were they really built so much better? Let us see how the French handle a really hot summer where the rivers they use for cooling cannot provide enough water -- they have had that problem before, but at least there was still enough water to cool the reactors after they were shut down.
Smaller nuclear power plants are even less economical, and if a storm hits you have to spread your people thin, trying to handle a bunch of spread-out plants generally located in out-of-the-way areas. That does not seem like an obvious improvement to me.
Luckily it is all academic, only China and Finland are doing significant nuclear expansion, and the ones in Finland have turned out ridiculously expensive so they will not be trying that again. England is waving pound bills around desperately, but no one is biting, despite there being plenty of existing nuclear sites available where NIMBY'ism is a solved problem.
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Don't lump renewables all together. Hydro is quite viable (full disclosure: Yes I am an Electrical Management System analyst with a power company). We've been using hydro electric power for years. It's safe, efficient, and has minimal enviornmental impact. Yes the turbines do destroy a few fish, but we replentish those fish more than 10 fold. In the summer time here there are some days that hydro handles most of our load. We do have a couple of nat gas plants, and a coal plant that is shared with o
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Re:This is disputed (Score:5, Informative)
Hold on... Where did you read that? ? ? Nuclear is by far the cleanest and most superior way to provide power. The melt down at Three Mile Island only leaked the amount of radiation as a chest x-ray. Carter even toured the facility a couple of weeks after it happened. Chernobyl was the result of shoddy, bureaucratic management - see how well that worked for the USSR. It's too bad many people are ignorant about nuclear power.
Solar is dead. Most of the US doesn't get enough sun to make solar feasible. And the lead battery technology used to store solar electricity is nasty. Have you seen what lead battery recycling has done to Mexico, India, and China? Absolutely disgusting. It destroys entire towns and small ecosystems.
Re:This is disputed (Score:5, Funny)
Solar is dead. Most of the US doesn't get enough sun to make solar feasible.
http://americablog.com/2013/02/fox-news-solar-only-works-in-germany-because-its-sunny-there.html
Re:This is disputed (Score:5, Insightful)
So this Fox News story was idiotic. Solar only works in Germany because it is heavily subsidized. German consumers pay a great deal more for electricity than they would without the solar subsidies. Solar will always be expensive until you figure out a way to create a much less expensive solar infrastructure, such as nano-tech based solar that you paint on a road or a roof. You have to maintain solar arrays and the low power density means large areas are needed for solar capture, and the sun does not shine at night, so you have to solve the energy storage problem too.
Re:This is disputed (Score:4, Informative)
So this Fox News story was idiotic. Solar only works in Germany because it is heavily subsidized. German consumers pay a great deal more for electricity than they would without the solar subsidies. Solar will always be expensive until you figure out a way to create a much less expensive solar infrastructure, such as nano-tech based solar that you paint on a road or a roof. You have to maintain solar arrays and the low power density means large areas are needed for solar capture, and the sun does not shine at night, so you have to solve the energy storage problem too.
Solar used to only work in Germany because of the subsidies. At this point, solar is Germany is much cheaper than retail electricity. As far as German's paying much more for electricity because of solar, that's not really so clear either. If you look here:
http://www.transparency.eex.com/en/ [eex.com]
you can see where Germany's power is coming from at any given time. Solar is doing an incredible job of peak shaving, which lowers the cost of electricity. The accounting problem then becomes that people know how much the solar subsidy costs, but don't know how much lower the cost of all the other power is because of solar.
You mention solving the storage problem, and the Germans are working on that as well:
http://bosch-solar-storage.com/ [bosch-solar-storage.com]
Best estimate I've seen is that solar+storage for an average retail German customer will be cheaper than grid power sometime next year.
Even if none of this is cheap enough for you, just wait a bit. Solar is getting around 7-8% cheaper every year. Best estimate I've seen for the USA is that between 1/3's and 2/3's of American's will be able to save money by 2020 with unsubsidized solar power. A great tool to play around with and see this is here:
http://www.ilsr.org/projects/solarparitymap/ [ilsr.org]
Re:This is disputed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:This is disputed (Score:5, Informative)
Have you ever witnessed the anger of the good shopkeeper, James Goodfellow, when his careless son has happened to break a pane of glass [wikipedia.org]? If you have been present at such a scene, you will most assuredly bear witness to the fact that every one of the spectators, were there even thirty of them, by common consent apparently, offered the unfortunate owner this invariable consolation -- "It is an ill wind that blows nobody good. Everybody must live, and what would become of the glaziers if panes of glass were never broken?"
Now, this form of condolence contains an entire theory, which it will be well to show up in this simple case, seeing that it is precisely the same as that which, unhappily, regulates the greater part of our economical institutions.
Suppose it cost six francs to repair the damage, and you say that the accident brings six francs to the glazier's trade -- that it encourages that trade to the amount of six francs -- I grant it; I have not a word to say against it; you reason justly. The glazier comes, performs his task, receives his six francs, rubs his hands, and, in his heart, blesses the careless child. All this is that which is seen.
But if, on the other hand, you come to the conclusion, as is too often the case, that it is a good thing to break windows, that it causes money to circulate, and that the encouragement of industry in general will be the result of it, you will oblige me to call out, "Stop there! Your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not seen."
It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented.
Re: This is disputed (Score:5, Interesting)
Guy points out solar works in Germany, which is cloudier than America.
Solar "works" in Germany only as a supplement to other, traditional plants.
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Re:This is disputed (Score:4, Insightful)
Which is far less than the mining or drilling for fossil fuels!
Re:This is disputed (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes you do, but a little bit of uranium goes a long way. 1kg of uranium produces as much energy as 14 tonnes of coal. That energy equivalency isn't exact, because the uranium has to be refined after mining. I have no figures for how much that adds to the carbon emissions related with producing energy from uranium but it's not a factor of 14000. And despite failures, the uranium IS easier to contain. The pollution from coal or gas can't be contained at all on a commercial scale. It just spews into the air. The issue with nuclear is the intense toxicity and radioactivity of the byproducts. That calls for very careful reactor design with multiple levels of failsafes. With coal, oil and gas we have just assumed it was OK to spew millions of tonnes of crap into the air, but it turns out that it's not OK at all. The Earth can't absorb all that shit without changes to the atmosphere and oceans that affect life all over the planet.
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1kg of uranium produces as much energy as 14 tonnes of coal.
1 kg of uranium is equivalent to 2.7 million kg of coal.
http://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/f/fuelcomparison.htm [euronuclear.org]
No it's not. That site says,
"With a complete combustion or fission, approx. 8 kWh of heat can be generated from 1 kg of coal, approx. 12 kWh from 1 kg of mineral oil and around 24,000,000 kWh from 1 kg of uranium-235. Related to one kilogram, uranium-235 contains two to three million times the energy equivalent of oil or coal. The illustration shows how much coal, oil or natural uranium is required for a certain quantity of electricity. Thus, 1 kg natural uranium - following a corresponding enrichment and used for power generation in light water reactors - corresponds to nearly 10,000 kg of mineral oil or 14,000 kg of coal and enables the generation of 45,000 kWh of electricity. "
Complete fission is not possible, to begin with. Pay special attention to the last sentence, where it states the figure I quoted.
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Hold on... Where did you read that? ? ?
No doubt, on the Internet.
Bonjour!
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And the lead battery technology used to store solar electricity is nasty.
That's probably the worst thing you could do with solar electricity. You either store it in pumped storage, either hydroelectric or pneumatic, or even better, you anticipate the inputs in individual geographic areas (what do we have all those real time meteo satellites for?) and use the grid to redistribute it. Of course, if your grid is incapable of doing that over large areas, you have to upgrade it first. But we're definitely not at the point where total solar PV output would outdo momentary nation-wide
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"Solar is dead. Most of the US doesn't get enough sun to make solar feasible. "
Apparently I have been hallucinating all the sun in the Southern US States. Who knew that coulds could be so bright and shiny? Who knew that cloudiness would make me so sun... sorry, cloud-burned?
Wow. I have been learned good.
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Re:This is disputed (Score:5, Interesting)
the mining and preparation of the nuclear fuel is quite carbon dirty. Not to mention the enormous costs of the structures and transportation of the fuel and whatever.
Yeah, coal plants don't have any of those problems.
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Re:This is disputed (Score:4, Insightful)
I have read that nuclear is not really net clean. That the mining and preparation of the nuclear fuel is quite carbon dirty. Not to mention the enormous costs of the structures and transportation of the fuel and whatever. The amount of money we have spent on Nuclear was a waste compared to much greater advances we could have made in solar to achieve the same output.
Clean or not, in solar Vs. Nuclear one big problem remains, which has conveniently left out of every economic equation: who pays for continuous availability? if any solar plant had to contract as baseline, i.e. find and/or build conventional plants to meet output at night or in bad weather, they'd be up brown creek without a paddle. After all, conventional plants have to state to the grid output and availability at the auction.
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That the mining and preparation of the nuclear fuel is quite carbon dirty.
So you blame the comparative cleanness of nuclear energy being spoiled by filthy fossil fuel inputs into the energy sector - on nuclear energy, and not on those fossil fuels? How does that work?
Re:This is disputed (Score:5, Insightful)
The research that concluded that was based on theoretical calculations.
Empirical data paints quite a different picture. Here's a basic sanity check for you: if it took prohibitively huge amounts of diesel fuel to mine uranium the nuclear plant could not afford to buy uranium and stay competitive with oil-fired plants.
Re:This is disputed (Score:4, Insightful)
I have read that nuclear is not really net clean. That the mining and preparation of the nuclear fuel is quite carbon dirty.
The anti-nuclear lobby is very vocal. I suggest being careful of your sources, and doing some basic sanity checks. For example: to mine some uranium, you run the mining equipment on diesel fuel. So the cost of uranium is, at a minimum, equal to the cost of the diesel fuel used to produce it. The cost of uranium is only a smallish fraction of the cost of nuclear power (~10%?), while the cost of getting the same amount of power from diesel generators is higher (~150%?). So the CO2 emissions from mining uranium produce, at most, ~1/15 of the CO2 of fossil fuels, and probably a factor of a few less than this.
Okay, there are big error margins on these numbers, but they're enough to convince me that the claims I've seen - that nuclear power produces as much or more CO2 than fossil fuels - are bogus. And, since solar and wind power are so much less energy-dense, I would expect the CO2 emissions from mining silicon/iron/etc for renewable energy infrastructure to be greater than those for nuclear.
Re:This is disputed (Score:5, Interesting)
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I was going to bring up concerns about deuterium leaking into the water table, but on further research it seems you'd have to replace 25% to 50% of your body's water content (eg drink nothing but it for days on end) with it for ill effects. Far safer than I had (for some reason) thought it was.
Nuclear not clean? (Score:3)
I have read that nuclear is not really net clean.
Basically NO power source is 'net clean'. Even power sources like wind and solar aren't clean or even 'carbon neutral'. Wind requires, on average, massive amounts of concrete and steel for the footings and towers. It actually ends up taking considerably more concrete for an equivalent amount of energy per year. Solar cell manufacture involves nasty amounts of chemical waste.
Nuclear isn't perfectly clean, no, but it produces so much energy in such a compact fashion that it's a real contender for cleanest
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Even in renweables there are many toxics that make it not so nice.
And there IS a reason, the tech is not there to support it without the cost that makes it completely prohibitive and the space to to support the entire populace.
Re:Except Nuclear is not the best solution (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not common knowledge but most coal contains small amounts of radioactive material. When the coal is burned, this is either released into the atmosphere or put in some glorified dump along with the rest of the ashes.
I say coal fired plants are plenty radioactive and not nearly as conscientious about handling as the nuclear guys.
Lets not beat around the bush. The alternative to nuclear power is coal and coal fired plants are shooting up like mushrooms all over the world.
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Re:Uh oh! (Score:5, Interesting)
I know you're being sarcastic, but it's not just nuclear power plants that generate revenues. Where I live, there's a large wind farm that pays millions a year through council and business taxes: they make my small sleepy town mega-rich and pose zero threat to the environment, save for a few birds that think they can fly through the spinning blades now and then.
Re:Uh oh! (Score:5, Interesting)
We've had wind farms erected on some of the windier ridges near my hometown. One of the coolest things about them is that you can drive right up to the windmills and check them out. A majority of them are erected on farmland, and the farmers are paid about $3000/yr per windmill on their property... even if it's on land that was otherwise unused (such as very rocky soil or old pastures no longer in use). Some people complain that they make the skyline ugly, but most people I've talked to think they make rather serene vistas along the tops of the valleys.
Re:Uh oh! (Score:4, Interesting)
I know you're being sarcastic, but it's not just nuclear power plants that generate revenues. Where I live, there's a large wind farm that pays millions a year of other taxpayers' money through council and business taxes: they make my small sleepy town mega-rich and pose zero threat to the environment, save for a few birds that think they can fly through the spinning blades now and then.
There, fixed it for you. and recall that the prim promoters of wind and solar brush the necessity of backup, on-call generation under the taxpayer's carpet as well.
Do not think that I am a dr. Strangelove or something: I am just trained in analysing economic alternatives where my money and livelihood are on the table, and there's no taxpayer whom I can pass the buck to. I'd love to see a comprehensive, "all side effects in" study of such things, but all are more or less ass backwards things:" Since renewable energy is good per se, we'll subsidise it to the tune of [insert number of billion Euros here] each year, and therefore it achieves grid parity".
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they make my small sleepy town mega-rich and pose zero threat to the environment, save for a few birds that think they can fly through the spinning blades now and then.
and bats...don't forget the bats: http://trib.com/news/updates/wind-turbine-pressure-change-kills-bats-research-may-help-prevent/article_24b620cf-9e69-58e1-b638-32499d9ef11f.html [trib.com]
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You could argue that politicians can only keep burning money as long as the economy is fairly stable. Tax money has to come from somewhere.
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Yes, not as many people would be employed by a Wind Farm of equal capacity to a lost Nuclear Power Plant, but the revenue would still benefit the local community by reducing the individual tax burdens.
Re:Uh oh! (Score:4, Insightful)
A lot of the issues point to bad management by the town planners - there are several mentions of overspending in the article, such as for ladder firetrucks when the town has nothing over 3 storeys high, town water to even the most outlying rural surrounding areas, new sports uniforms every year, etc etc.
Much of the tax burden would be to service some of the debt that was incurred while times were good, or support maintenance on excessively built out infrastructure - otherwise there's no need for tax to be proportionally higher than any other place.
Re:Uh oh! (Score:5, Informative)
The fact that the plant is in Fukushima probably exacerbated that fact. The Japanese political system is set up sort of like the US system in that the rural prefectures have a disproportionate amount of influence in the Diet. Couple that with the fact that rural Japan has been bleeding population(Fukushima lost 3% of its population between 2005 and 2010, keep in mind the earthquake was in 2011...) and you can see why there was a lot of pressure to keep good jobs in Fukushima. Unfortunately for Fukushima the pressure to keep jobs there had a lot of unfortunate circumstances, and although there aren't firm numbers to be had yet, my guess is the flight of people from Fukushima to elsewhere is only going to increase.
*Yes I am aware that even if the extension to run the plant had not been granted there still would have been a calamity at Fukushima. But it may not have been as bad, the CEO of Tepco initially did not want to dump seawater on the reactors because he thought he could save them. If you dump seawater on them there is no way they can ever be used again. Had the plant already been in the process of shutdown, there may not have been nearly as many hydrogen explosions at the plant.
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