Decommissioning San Onofre Nuclear Plant May Take Decades 266
gkndivebum writes "Southern California Edison has elected to decommission the San Onofre nuclear plant after a failed effort to upgrade the steam generation system. 'Nuclear economics' is the reason stated for the proposed decommissioning. Other utilities operating nuclear power plants in the US likely face similar decisions when it comes to weighing the costs of upgrading older facilities. Allowing the reactors to remain in 'safe storage' for a period of up to 60 years will allow for radioactive decay and lower radiation exposure for the workers performing the demolition."
This is crap (Score:4, Informative)
I have knowledge of this matter and I know it's crap. This is about negotiating with a supplier and throwing a tantrum. They have decided to cut off their nose to spite their face.
(If this sounds like a lot of opinion, it is...but I do have some knowledge on this matter. Once things are final, I'll be happy to share exactly what I know.)
For the moment, until things change, nuclear power is the only source that provides enough to keep things going without buring stuff and putting it into the air and everywhere. Already nuclear power has saved countless lives as they have safely displaced the amount of coal and gas to burn. Without nuclear power, the net carbon footprint of hybrid cars would be less than barely a net improvement over pure gasoline. Wind, solar, geothermal and others are not able to make it happen.
Anti-nuke people haven't been paying attention. But just about any way you look at it, nuclear wins. Sure it requires a great deal of care to handle it safely, but we've been doing nuclear in the US for a very long time with a pretty excellent record.
It disappoints me that greedy business interests are behaving this way. Until we have something better than nuclear, we need to keep nuclear going. (Shut them all down once we've got something better. It's not like I'm in love with the tech, but it's just so much better than burning stuff.)
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"For the moment, until things change, nuclear power is the only source that provides enough to keep things going without buring stuff and putting it into the air and everywhere....Anti-nuke people haven't been paying attention. "
We were paying attention to Germany who shut down their reactors but nonetheless had enough solar and wind to export power to nuclear France when their reactors couldn't run because there wasn't enough cooling water in summer or frozen in winter. The also had their first day last ye
Re:This is crap (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany
In 2012 The German electricity sector increased its coal usage by 4.9 percent over its coal consumption value of 2011.[43] This increase in coal usage was largely due to a power gap in Germany created after the nation shutdown 8 of its 17 nuclear power plants.[44] The shortfall in electricity supply from these 8 power plants, is primarily being filled by building more lignite coal burning power plants.
Yeah, real good job Germany, thanks for the CO2 increase...dicks.
Re:This is crap (Score:4, Interesting)
We were paying attention to Germany who shut down their reactors but nonetheless had enough solar and wind to export ...
hahahaha. Yes they exported something. It definitely wasn't solar and wind though.
Solar makes up a pathetic 3% of Germany's power in the summer months. Wind is struggling to crack 8% and that's in a country where you can see a wind farm from every other hill. I'm not sure where you're getting your data from but you may want to do this thing called research.
By the way your wonderful Germany who are abandoning nuclear power opened 2 coal power stations last year, and are planning to open 6 new ones by the end of this year. Yes that's right, your so presumed green country with green power to spare just built 6GW of coal fired glory and plan to open another 12 power plants by 2020. What a shining example of your argument. Germany hasn't even started making serious efforts to shut down nuclear yet but have already increased their coal consumption by 5% [bloomberg.com].
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German physicist here. This is not quite true:
When Nuclear plants were shut down (drop in 2010-2011), this was mostly compensated for by renewables (and less total production). Also the further decrease in Nuclear power in 2012 was less than the increase of renewables. Yes, also coal increased in 2012, which is mostly attributed to the low cost of emission certificates. Natural gas dropped at the same time, so this is a shift because of changes in cost for different non-renewable energy carries.
Electricity
Re:This is crap (Score:4, Interesting)
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IIRC, every one of those coal plants are intended to replace one that is end-of-life or soon to be. And the new plants will be significantly cleaner and more efficient.
I really wish that Germany hadn't decided to dump nukes and I'm guessing they may change their mind before all the remaining ones are shut.
One of the problems with phasing out coal is that there's been a subsidy on it since the 70s but that is slated to end by 2018. The major coal producers have stated that they'll shut their mines by then.
Bu
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(but away from the ITCZ which tends to block out the sun
There are a number of notable desers in the ITCZ, so I'm not sure how well that holds. The number of sunny days in an area is most important (still talking about the limited range of between or near the tropics).
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I have knowledge of this matter and I know it's crap. This is about negotiating with a supplier and throwing a tantrum. They have decided to cut off their nose to spite their face.
We invented this technology and now, due to anti-nuclear regulations, we no longer have the people, resources, factories, or technical capability, to create nuclear pressure vessels or many of the components needed to build a reactor. Unless of course it's for the military. A single supplier, in another country, can "throw a tantrum" as you say, and deprive one of our major metropolitan areas with electricity.
And yet it's the fault of the electric company in your view, and the supplier in another's view. We
Re:This is crap (Score:4, Informative)
The supplier is not throwing the tantrum. Take my word on that for now.
The government, the NRC, is doing the right thing in all of this. As I have been exposed to this industry and have been learning what's what and what goes on, I have learned a great respect for at least THIS government agency. Every NRC person has also had direct experience in nuclear technologies. And the thing about people who know and understand the tech, know what can happen when things go wrong and NO amount of bribery or being told to look the other way will cause them to compromise what they know very well is a potentially global disaster event.
I could go on and on about this. But I do know there are forces opposed to the NRC... to its very existence. It was preciselu the lack of an effective "NRC" in Russia that allowed Chernobyl to happen and even though their regulators weren't quite what the NRC is, the people who caused the disaster had to shop their idea for drill/demonstration around quite a bit before they could find someone stupid enough to take the risks they did.
For the moment, please understand that you don't understand quite what's going on over there. From what I know, the suppliers are acting properly and appropriately. I've already said too much. But I have to say it's a common problem where business cares more about their bottom line than about other, larger issues. I'm not saying that other parties are not at fault -- the reports are public and I invite you to read through them for further insight. There's plenty of blame to spread around. But this thing about shutting down two plants which are otherwise capable of being repaired and restored to a good, safe and reliable operation? Based on everything I know, it's not merely "nuclear economics." There's a lot more.
Personally, I believe as the next steps proceed, they might well be forced to change their idea about shutting those down. And the article makes it pretty clear that the "shutting down and packing up" is a far cry from destroying the things and clearing the land.
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The supplier is not throwing the tantrum. Take my word on that for now.
I didn't say you were saying that. I said other people were saying that. I did not say that myself.
But I do know there are forces opposed to the NRC... to its very existence.
Yes. They're called capitalists, and left to their own devices, we'd all be swimming in our own sewage and slaves to mega corporations in some dystopic alternate reality. It's okay, you can call them out on it, I won't say anything.
For the moment, please understand that you don't understand quite what's going on over there.
I don't think it's really necessary for me to have intimate knowledge of the situation. Party A is pointing the finger at Party B. Party B is pointing the finger at Party A. And all
Re:This is crap (Score:4, Interesting)
As I have been exposed to this industry and have been learning what's what and what goes on, I have learned a great respect for at least THIS government agency.
The NRC hasn't denied an operating permit in 30 years.
The last permit denied was only under heavy pressure.
When the facts came out, everything ended up in court with General Electric & Contractors being charged under RICO statues.
It wasn't a traditional court case, in that it was a summary jury trial [wikipedia.org].
GE & others ended up settling because the Judge agreed that their actions were fraudulent and that they engaged in racketeering.
The NRC is a very captured regulatory body.
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No... sorry, they didn't cut their nose off in spite of their face: Our government did.
Private companies have built them. They must get piles of permits, and still don't get any immunities. So there's not that much blocking private nukes, if only the locals didn't sue. So it's not just the government spiting our face.
heh, "greedy business interests" (Score:2)
as if there were any other kind
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This sort of time scale is fairly normal. The UK takes 80-90 years to decommission its reactors.
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I thought they originally went with uranium, because you could build nuclear weapons from the waste. You can't do that with Thorium. So not greedy business interests, but more like the governments in a nuclear arms race. Much as I like to blame greedy businesses for the world's problems, I don't think this is one of those times.
Re:This is crap (Score:5, Informative)
"I thought they originally went with uranium, because you could build nuclear weapons from the waste."
Oh dear, The Lie That Will Not Die.
A uranium-fuelled reactor like a PWR works by stacking a lot of uranium fuel pellets in close proximity to each other and moderating (slowing down) the neutrons they emit so they cause fission in nearby uranium atoms, producing heat and yet more neutrons. That's it, steam-engine simple. Sure there are complexities of design and engineering but they're dealt with at the drawing board, not while the reactor is running. In the 1950s and 1960s that what was possible and cost-effective to design and build.
Breeding plutonium for nuclear weapons was carried out virtually everywhere in the world in specialised reactors, almost all of which never generated a watt of electricity since they were optimised to turn U-238 into Pu-239 without producing much Pu-240 which screws up the functioning of a nuclear weapon. There were a couple of dual-use reactor designs like the British Magnox and the infamous Soviet-era RMBK-4 reactors of Tchernobyl fame which could be tasked with short-exposure fuelling cycles to produce nearly-pure Pu-239 but they were not popular and in most cases they were never actually used to make weapons-grade Pu-239, in part because by the time they came on stream the countries building them had produced as much nuclear weapons material (a few tonnes) as they would ever need from their military reactors. Since then the number of weapons has gone down, not up and the decommissioned weapon cores are stockpiled until they can be burned up in uranium reactors as mixed-oxide fuel (MOX) elements.
Thorium reactors of the liquid salt type require continuous processing of the fuel to remove assorted highly radioactive byproducts in a chemical plant while the reactor is running. Thorium itself is not fertile, it needs to be transmuted into U-233 which is fissile and can be "burned" in the same way U-235 is in existing reactors. It's the dark secret of the LFTR design that it needs a sparkplug of enriched uranium and even some plutonium to start up from cold to begin the transmutation process and the only place that can come from at the moment is the conventional nuclear reactor industry. In addition any unburnt U-233 they produce can be extracted from the fuel stream and used in nuclear weapons after processing.
Ah but the US built a thorium reactor in the 1960s! Yes, it was a 5MW thermal experimental prototype which never ran continuously for more than a few weeks at a time. Conventional 1600MWe PWR reactors being built in China, France and Finland (the EPR 1600 design) produce nearly 5 gigawatts of heat, a thousand times as much as the prototype LFTR did and they will run for 18 to 24 months at a time between refuelling operations and produce no weapons-grade plutonium.
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Not greedy business but a shortsighted military-focused bureaucracy.
And don't be too quick to jump on the thorium bandwagon - it shows great promise but there are significant engineering challenges still to solve before it can reliably be used for Gigawatt scale power plants.
I expect another decade before the 1st plants are ready.
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Likely better, if and when the remaining challenges are resolved. But we can't wait - coal-burning plants have to be gotten rid of unless we can capture all the particulates and sequester the CO2.
And clean up the mining sites.
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US Epic fail (Score:5, Insightful)
Other utilities operating nuclear power plants in the US likely face similar decisions when it comes to weighing the costs of upgrading older facilities.
Yeah, my country unfortunately has a 60,000% idiot tax. We get massive amounts of food poisoning because people fear irradiated food. We pollute so badly that we've managed to kill large lakes and entire biomes in Africa because we're burning fossil fuel as our primary energy source when we were the ones that first created nuclear power. 4% of my fellow countrymen believe that shape-shifting reptiles are trying to control the government through political manipulation... another 7% "aren't sure". And we're reporting record numbers of people joining the Flat Earth Society, and have one of the lowest rates of acceptance in the theory of evolution of any industrialized country on Earth.
In short, we're morons. That's why nuclear power is so expensive here, and why we're letting these plants rot... it's stupid, pathetic, moronic fear of technology, science, and progress. And it's killing the planet. Literally. We are literally dying of stupidity.
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Also you have such a high percentage of religious people compared to other first world nations. The two are linked.
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We get massive amounts of food poisoning because people fear irradiated food.
I don't fear it, it's just dead. The enzymes in the food are dead. It's crap.
4% of my fellow countrymen believe that shape-shifting reptiles are trying to control the government through political manipulation... another 7% "aren't sure".
Well, they do act like we expect killer mutant lizards to act... the government, I mean.
In short, we're morons. That's why nuclear power is so expensive here, and why we're letting these plants rot...
Let the plants rot until we find a way to deal with the waste.
And it's killing the planet. Literally
Well no. The planet is a ball of stuff. It's not alive. We're killing ourselves, and probably taking most of the complex life forms with us.
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I don't fear it, it's just dead. The enzymes in the food are dead. It's crap.
What does this even mean? What enzymes? You realize one of the reasons we cook food is to break down proteins etc so that our bodies can more easily take advantage of their components, right?
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It's not fear of nuclear power that makes it uneconomical. It's cheap fossil fuels. Back in the 70s it was the Saudis opening the oil spigot; today it's fracking natural gas and of course coal.
Which is not to say irrational fear hasn't created nuclear problems -- particularly when it comes to developing long term storage facilities for high level radioactive waste. We also give fossil fuels a break on externalized costs because we're familiar with the and therefore fear them less than we probably ought.
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I thought you were joking about the Flat Earth membership increase, so I did some research and discovered it to be shockingly true.
Then I read the Flat Earth FAQ on their website....
I now exist in a dual state of utter horrified disbelief that people can be so gullible and stupid, and total despair at the state of Humanity
You are right, were morons. We deserve whatever we reap from our stupidity. The world would be a better place without us.
I used to have such high hopes for the future of Humans, now I have
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False dichotomy. It isn't "pollution spewing dirty dirty coal | clean and pure nuclear", there are other options. I feel your frustration because it isn't science or engineering that keeps them from expanding more rapidly, its politics and stupidity.
Re:US Epic fail (Score:4, Insightful)
The atomic era of investing heavily in a technology that burdens human beings with the most poisonous substances on earth for literally thousands of years needs to be put to rest and this is how we do it.
Yeah, worrying about a few hundred tons of waste we can easily bury deep in a mountain somewhere and forget about it for "literally thousands of years" is clearly inferior to cooking our planet to the point that it is no longer inhabitable.
. The promise of truly safe nuclear power will never be delivered upon due to human greed and incompetence.
No, it'll never be delivered upon because most of the human population will have died off in the next 150 years or so because we'll no longer have enough fertile land to support our current population due to global climate changed caused by fossil fuels. That's the entire planet, you know... billions are going to die from starvation because of fucking morons like yourself that are so worried about a few kilotons of nuclear waste you're willing to let the whole planet die. Also, coal power plants produce more nuclear radiation yearly than all the nuclear accidents in the entire history of the human race including our weapons testing and use.
But yeah man, let's keep trumpeting the "It has to be perfect" mantra, while we choke our planet to death with less than perfect fossil fuels.
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Actually, what's probably short-sighted is dismantling it at all. The right way to decommision a nuclear plant is almost certainly to fill the containment with concrete and lock the gate. Making them rip it all apart and cart it somewhere else after waiting only 60 years is pretty silly: it raises the costs without improving safety much. I think we do this largely for psychological reasons...
(All this, by the way, makes the infla
Re:US Epic fail (Score:4, Interesting)
"massive amounts of food poisoning " What!?!? 70% of the people in your country get food poisoning daily?
1 in 6 [cnn.com] americans get food poisoning annually. In Britain, about 5 million people [wales.nhs.uk] annually get food poisoning. The population of Britain [wikipedia.org] is about 63 million, or a rate of about 1 in 14.
I think a rate of over double in a country with similar eating habits, socioeconomic status, and climate, constitutes massive.
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"massive amounts of food poisoning " What!?!? 70% of the people in your country get food poisoning daily?
1 in 6 [cnn.com] americans get food poisoning annually. In Britain, about 5 million people [wales.nhs.uk] annually get food poisoning. The population of Britain [wikipedia.org] is about 63 million, or a rate of about 1 in 14.
I think a rate of over double in a country with similar eating habits, socioeconomic status, and climate, constitutes massive.
The British have a reputation for overcooking everything. Americans like rare meat. That may explain most of the difference right there.
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The American meat processing industry has a reputation for unsanitary practices. This is what causes most of the resistance against irradiated food, it has nothing to do with nuclear fear, but everything with opposition to industry just using a patch instead of cleaning up its act.
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Most food poisoning is due to improper storage or other contamination, which irradiation during manufacture would do nothing to help prevent.
Ironically the reason most people don't want irradiated food is because they don't trust the people doing the irradiating. For-profit companies have, time and time again, shown themselves to be irresponsible and to hold profit above human health and wellbeing. No point getting the government to do it either because they will just outsource it to a private company event
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I have lived in the USA and I have lived in the UK and food poisoning is not a problem in any of the countries.
you don't go out to eat much, do you?
Ironically, some of the few places that don't give me an ass-blasting or face-blasting good time are indian. Maybe the curry kills off the weak American pathogens, I don't know how it works. But it seems like about every time I go out lately I get sick. In California we literally now have a law saying that everyone who handles food at all has to be a certified food handler, you just used to have to have one in the restaurant. And it's still not enough. I had a spirited a
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you don't go out to eat much, do you?
I remember once when I went out. Worst food poisoning I ever had. Singapore. I was eating in the (mostly) unregulated portable food stands for 3 weeks, no issues. Last week of my trip (Saturday before flying out Tuesday), I pulled a late night on a Saturday, and everything was closed. The Hard Rock was just around the corner from the Hilton, so I figured I'd walk over and get some food. Damn California Pizza Kitchen I passed on the way I should have eaten at. Had 2 near me at home, but I've gone to H
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I have lived in the USA and I have lived in the UK and food poisoning is not a problem in any of the countries... And I am pretty sure the reason the few people who get food poisoning get it is not that their pepper or salad wasn't radiated. After you have radiated foodstuff it has to be hermetically sealed for it to have any effect. The main reason people get food poisoning is that they eat already cooked food that has not been cooled and refrigerated fast enough.
I'm not sure "food poisoning" is the best term, there are lots of ways food can make you sick, and sometimes it's not obvious that it was related to food. The way you describe is often what happens in food service (that, and poor sanitation). But there are lots of ways people get food poisoning. Sometimes it's because they (or their utensils or counter) touch raw chicken and spread bacteria to other foods (US poultry processing facilities are cesspools). Sometimes it's because the melons or lettuce or o
I thought the point (Score:3)
I thought the point of such extensive containment structures was that they would never be destroyed? Just remove the fuel and any equipment that isn't cemented into the structure and leave the rest. I imagine the general thought-lines behind a lot of nuclear plants was to simply to continue to build new reactors as the old ones had to be decommissioned and continue to use the same generators, transmission equipment & facilities with incremental upgrades over the years. But I think I see why they're going the decommissioning route with this one, even if it was economic to build some new reactors this plant is sandwiched between the Pacific and a major highway. The reactor structures themselves are not more than 400' from the ocean, at least on the face of it this place is another Fukushima under the wrong circumstances.
Re:I thought the point (Score:5, Informative)
The licencing for nuclear reactors in the US, the UK and a few other countries requires that the site be returned to greenfield status after the reactor(s) on site are decommissioned. That means total demolition of the structures including the metre-thick reinforced concrete containment buildings.
In some cases if the site is to be reused immediately then the reactors are demolished quickly with special handling of the slightly radioactive pressure vessel which has suffered neutron activation. It costs a little bit less to wait a few decades for that radioactivity to decay at which point the demolition can go ahead with no radiation-specific problems. The real problem during demolition in either case with older (1970s vintage) reactors is the presence of asbestos in pipe lagging, tank insulation etc.
What is the REAL cost? (Score:2, Insightful)
Nuclear proponents are always running around yelling wind and solar pawer can't compete on a per KW basis. Well, not if you skim off the profits and leave the cleanup to taxpayers!
Take the total lifetime cost ( including what is usually shifted onto us after the investors skeedaddle with the profits ) and divide that by KW's produced.
Hogwash! Nuclear power is too expensive to be sustainable.
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nonsense, it's far cheaper than coal if you count health problems
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Ergo, coal is ALSO too expensive to be sustainable.
I concur.
Solar, wind, hydro and geothermal it is then.. at least unless ITER [wikipedia.org] and DEMO [wikipedia.org] pay off.
Re:What is the REAL cost? (Score:4, Informative)
Japanese killed because of radiation in Fukushima-Diachi: zero. Total count of Japanese with radiation induced health problems around Fukashima: zero.
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And the total cost of Chernobyl? A whole region contaminated? Life time medical costs? Add that number up and divide it by the number of operating nuclear plants.
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1. Chernobyl was of a plant design that wouldn't have ever been approved pretty much anywhere else. It didn't even have a containment dome.
2. Lifetime medical costs divided by operating nuclear plants? Probably about a million bucks each, when viewed on a per kwh basis under a hundredth of a cent per kwh.
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Why bother with this line of discussion?
I don't live in Soviet Russia, and never will. I don't care what their mistakes cost them.
If anything, Chernobyl taught the rest of the world the following: YOU DO NOT DO RISKY EXPERIMENTS WITH A FULL-SCALE REACTOR, ESPECIALLY WHEN IT ISN'T FUCKING WORKING PROPERLY AND YOU FUCKING KNOW IT.
Which, you know, might mean a thing or two about why such an incident has never happened again.
Was it a monetarily-expensive lesson? Again, I don't give a shit: It wasn't any of
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Re:What is the REAL cost? (Score:4, Insightful)
The true cost of Nuclear power is more than any other method.
Talk about easy mode! "Any other method" logically includes coal [forbes.com]. And [transitionvoice.com] coal [nextbigfuture.com] sucks [ibm.com]. To put it in perspective, about twice as much electricity is produced each year from coal(44.9%) as from nuclear power(20.3%) in the USA.
What, you want healthcare costs included along with the fatalities? Okay [env-health.org], sure [vice.com] thing [cleantechnica.com]. How does $500B/year sound, for the USA ALONE?
I'd say I hate to break it to you, but that would be dishonest. I LOVE breaking this to you: The world could suffer a Chernobyl level event EVERY year and it would STILL come out cheaper than coal.
And while we are at it, lets add in all of the cost for nuclear power plant accidents both public and private funds and divide that by the the number of operating plants. Let's see, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, smaller costly but less publicized accidents.
Let's see: Chernobyl [forbes.com]: $235B, TMI: $975M, Fukushima: too early to tell. Let's go with roughly between Chernobyl and TMI: $118B. It's probably quite high, but eh. Total: $354B, or about 3/5ths the damage coal does to the USA alone each year.
As I've said before, Chernobyl's design wouldn't have been allowed anywhere, the cost would have been far less if it had been built with a containment dome. 437 [euronuclear.org] reactors, leaving the share per nuclear plant at $810M per your stupid standard.
Let's put it into better context: End of 2012 nuclear power had produced 69,760 billion kwh. Chernobyl, TMI, and Fukushima amount to .5 cents of cost per kwh. Yes, half a cent.
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Well, let's see. TMI didn't actually do any harm at all. Fukushima hasn't injured anyone, so no medical costs there.
Chernobyl was built under Soviet Communism and would never have had an operating permit anywhere else in the world.
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Nuclear proponents are always running around yelling wind and solar pawer can't compete on a per KW basis. Well, not if you skim off the profits and leave the cleanup to taxpayers!
Just a reminder that a decommissioning fund of almost ~$3 billion has already been collected and is sitting there ready to pay for the cleanup. And for 60 years the place will be watched over by a few security guards. $3 billion in the bank plus long term interest earned on $3 billion minus the cost of a few security guards... might cover it.
The money for this fund is skimmed off the top from operating revenues over the life of every nuclear plant. This arrangement is not imposed on all types of power pl
Re:What is the REAL cost? (Score:4, Insightful)
I live in Ga and here we're actually building 2 new reactors now. I look forward to them coming online. I like low cost electricity that doesn't kill fish and birds or strip the land of all life.
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You are assuming 60 years of continued economic growth (averaged out).
What if that paradigm is wrong, if we are at the downslope of a temporary 150 year economic growth fueled by an anomaly of cheap energy (see Peak Oil)?
In a shrinking economy, those future decommissioning costs will loom larger and larger. See also Jared Diamond's Collapse, and John Michael Greer's Long Descent.
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Many of those articles and hate-blogs written on computers powered by the plant itself, filled with dreams of paving Nevada (or just Somewhere Else) with windmills and unspecified solar miracle-widgets to generate 2 gigawatts to replace San Onofre.
According to what I just googled, California currently has just over a gigawatt of installed solar production, and just over half a gigawatt of installed wind power.
Therefore, to replace the 2 gigawatts that used to come from San Onofre with renewable energy (and ignoring the possibility of increases in renewable efficiency), we'd have to roughly double our current amount of installed renewable infrastructure.
That won't be cheap, but its certainly doable -- and given the steadily decreasing cost of renewabl
Technical debt (Score:3)
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After the 60 years or so waiting, it's really not any different than demolishing any old plant.
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You have a pretty poor perspective on things here. The reactors produced [iaea.org] 1100 MWe for 28 years with an average capacity factor around 80%. That's ~50 GWe-years or ~1,200,000 megatons TNT (thermal). I'm pretty keeping the lights on in the building for a few decades is a bit less than a million megatons of TNT.
we are not using distance at all (Score:5, Interesting)
for 50 years, the federal government has taxed nuclear fuel to build a permanent waste depository. where is it?
weasels.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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as much as i agree that solar, wind, geothermal etc will never replace coal & nuclear for base load, governments have been corrupted by the nuclear industry to preserve the status quo of reliance on uranium and plutonium instead of investing in safer nuclear technologies like thorium that operate at lower pressures and have negligible half lives compared to heavier cousins so waste is less of a problem... thorium was proven in the 60's but killed pretty much immediately
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Thorium has some pretty nasty proliferation risks.
However uranium/plutonium-based fuel cycles involving fast reactors and advanced reprocessing (such as the IFR) are far less of a proliferation risk and would be able to generate, if I recall correctly, 100% of this country's electricity for 50-100 years using only our current waste reserves from older reactors. In addition, the end "waste" product of an IFR fuel cycle decays to lower radiation levels than the initial unenriched uranium after approx. 200 ye
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Out of interest - anyone know why we've not re-visited thorium?
It's not like we need to recreate more nuclear weapons, which as I understand it was the original reason for choosing uranium in the first place.
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Because it is impossible to get funding for nuclear energy research these days. No money, no research.
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Out of interest - anyone know why we've not re-visited thorium?
There is no good reason, only various excuses people give when pressed on the matter. Some of the excuses are pretty lame, some are clever but are lacking in know-how, such as how different molten salt designs are from water reactors. Many excuses defer to fear of radioactivity, imaginary authorities who would never "permit" such a thing to come about. It's sad to witness.
Most commonly it's Mr. Nobody. "If thorium was such a big deal somebody would have made it happen by now." A whole generation seems
Re:we are not using distance at all (Score:4, Informative)
Gas is cheap and nuclear is not popular. China is supposed to be working on it, though.
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Out of interest - anyone know why we've not re-visited thorium?
My guess is that it would compete with fusion research.
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FUCK OFF you whiny bastards, we HAVE TO HAVE power to power to run those latte makers and iToys you love to play with and we can't get shit built with you assholes cockblocking every damned thing we try to have! Sorry if that comes off a little harsh but if you have ever talked to one you'd know there is NO right answer, they will have an objection to building ANYTHING near them, you'd have to build everything in fricking space before they would be happy.
Not when they start thinking about the ground stations. Nobody wants to be near one of those.
do I have to tell you apes how to do everything?!! (Score:2)
you'd have to build everything in fricking space before they would be happy.
Not when they start thinking about the ground stations. Nobody wants to be near one of those.
Just run power cables down the space elevators. Totally supersedes the need for beamed power deathrays.
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One word...NIMBYs. Frankly NIMBYs is why america will be fucked in the future, you can't get shit done here without the NIMBYs having a royal fucking shitfit so we either keep the pre-NIMBY shit running or do without, that really is the only choices we have.
My favorite bumper sticker when it comes to energy was one I saw when Switzerland was voting on nuclear power: "Who needs power plants? I get my electricity from a wall outlet." That pretty much summed up the challenge.
Yucca Mtn (Score:3)
for 50 years, the federal government has taxed nuclear fuel to build a permanent waste depository. where is it?
As much as I love blasting on our danged ole federal gummint, on this one I have to blame the NIMBY asshats in Nevada. You see, the Feds identified a pretty damned good place in Yucca Mountain. The place is geologically pretty stable, made of solid rock, and has a crazy low water table. Oh, and it's about 100 miles away from civilization, which in this case means Las Vegas.
The feds spent deca
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A pretty good summary [wikipedia.org] of the sad story of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. I was briefly involved with that project in a past life when I worked for a defense contractor.
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In doubt, better invade.
Re:Three factors of dealing with radiation (Score:4, Interesting)
Radioactive decay is the mechanism by which something decays which gives off radiation.
Radiation is all sorts of stuff, from the mundane visible light, to high energy beams of doom, to, unfortunately, electrons flying around (beta radiation) and helium atoms stripped of electrons (alpha radiation), although fortunately the term 'radiation' for alpha and beta particles has mostly fallen out of use.
Any given radiation photon (or alpha particle or beta particle) is indeed short lived in the area, but the radioactivity - the amount of radiation being given off in a unit of time can be constant for quite a long time. Normally we talk about the half life (how long it takes for the amount of radiation given off to drop to 1/2 of its previous level) but half of 'enough to kill you 1000 times over' is still a problem.
Different types of radiation have different effects.
With a nuclear power plant you have a fairly diverse collection of radioactive materials and types of radiation, some of which will be a problem for a few minutes, some for a few thousand years and everything in between (and potentially some things which are going to be a problem for millions). With regards to an american reactor (which I know nothing about) 60 years could very reasonably be long enough for a large portion of the short lived radioactive isotopes to decay into something safe, and the radiation to be either absorbed by the casing or simply be radiated away at a low enough dose that it doesn't matter. And then you have to deal with the stuff that's going to be radioactive for a lot longer. Or maybe not. Who knows, in 60 years someone might actually come up with and implement a plan for what to do with all this nuclear waste we're making that isn't just 'keep in under water on site'.
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When Lucifer's Hammer hits, this beacon will help light up the dark for our children's children!
Re:Our Children's Children (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Our Children's Children's Children Will Save Us (Score:4, Interesting)
[Our Children's Children's Children Will Save Us]
From certain doom now. Just let them deal with it.
Both my aunt and neighbor told me the same crap when I asked why they don't recycle. They'll be dead before the world goes to hell.
I went through their trash and recycled for them. Each time I was scolded for going through their trash. I said I would stop...
However, to each I also told that research in neuroscience, cybernetics, and stem cells will give us the ability bring our dead back to life by scanning in their brain. [youtube.com]
I promised that I would stop recycling for them, and also swore that if they do not start recycling that after they are dead,
I will have their bodies exhumed by whatever means necessary, and their brains scanned and I will bring them back to life
after the carelessness of people like them has caused the world they leach life from to truly "go to hell".
They both now have incentive to recycle, and have continued to do so; Even gotten some of their friends to recycle too.
These "God Fearing" people would throw the world away. It took someone putting the fear of life into them to change them.
Nuclear energy is most important. Once the last specs of coal and drops of oil are sucked from the Earth, we will look back at our fearful folly and think:
"All that useful material for making plastics and things, and the fools fucking burned it all."
It is time to realize the startling truth. You may literally have to live with the consequences of your actions forever.
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Once the last specs of coal and drops of oil are sucked from the Earth, we will look back at our fearful folly and think: "All that useful material for making plastics and things, and the fools fucking burned it all."
I used to worry about that too, but you can harvest the CO2 back out of the atmosphere, it's just more expensive. So they'll still shake their heads at us, but it won't be disastrous.
Also, your recycling story is hilarious.
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how do you get all that from the link you posted?
- it's also fission.
- it's somewhat safer, but all next-gen designs are somewhat safer
- decommissioning will be much the same as the same thing is going on in there.
- it has the inherent (and hard to "design out") ability to produce pure (like 100%) U233, which is a tremendous proliferation hazard.
i still think they're a good idea, but i just don't like magical utopian thinking or misinformation.
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City 1 - Recycling program? What recycling program?? ('Merrica!)
City 2- Garbage 1/week, recycling 1/month. A large
City 3- Garbage 1/week, recycling 2/month. A 60-gallon bin, with wheels, machine-emptyable was provided.
City 4- Garbage 1/week, recycling 2/month. At first, an 18 gallon bin was pro
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There is no significant safety issue here
"i did not have sexual relations with monica lewinski"
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you missed the bit about the heat exchanger. my god, you think all nuclear plants release radioactive steam as a matter of design? that perhaps radioactive water can transfer it's heat to clean running water without touching or mixing with it?
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What does that have to do with the safety of the decommissioned reactor?
Next generation needs to be trained as demolishers (Score:4, Interesting)
If you have to wait some 40-60 years for the iodine and some of the cesium and strontium to decay, it means that:
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what makes you think the reactor is de-fueled yet? there's your first fuck up right there
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You really have no clue, do you?
Decomissioning a nuclear plant isone of themost difficult technical undertakings andit is still unclear how to do it for large reactors. There is some experience with small ones, with the result that even long after stopping operation and removing the fuel, there is a lot of higky dangerous meterial left. Theother experience is that it costs someting like 100 times decomissioning a nuclearpower plant than it did cost building it. This is for small reactors, for large ons, it
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There is starting to be a market for nuclear cleanup. Just think how many companies out there are researching, or have a product that helps to mitigate oil spills? People dump millions of barrels of oil into the ocean then go out and try to clean it up.. we're still using it though, even though it's really nasty and really hard to clean.
The same can be said of nuclear waste. If they start handing out multi-billion dollar contracts to clean things up then shit will get cleaned up. Impractical methods of r
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Call me a cynical dirty hippy, but I have a problem imagining the directors of a commercial nuclear power station handing out a multi-billion dollar contract to clean things up 40 years after they're retired.
Or do you mean the government, payed by the taxpayer, hands out that multi-billion dollar clean-up contract? I agree, good for the economy 40 years onwards, but it's a bit of a broken-windows fal
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Just my thoughts. There are countless examples of this happening. In a sense, TEPCO being now state-owned is just the same: Privatize the earnings, but if something goes really wrong or becomes really expensive, just foldand let the taxpayer deal with it. Despicable.
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The containment dome is never irradiated; the reactor pressure vessel is bombarded with radiation and neutrons but it's made from steel over a foot thick and that stops any particles or gamma radiation getting out to affect the primary containment. A regular part of a refuelling and inspection operation involves technicians entering the containment volume next to the reactor vessel to check for damage, leaks etc. and to replace instruments and do other remedial work before the reactor is restarted.
And guess
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Mybe read up on it? There is one large decomissioning project currenly runningn (former) easter germany. That they need to do _research_ there, and this is just a simple russian-build design in the lower power ranges.
Of corse, people like you that want to believe their fantasies willneverbother to actually look at facts.
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back in the 70s I used to Surf the beach down there. It was great because the cooling pipe system went out into the ocean and you could expect the water temps to be a bit warmer.
It's sad to see this facility close but I have to believe having a bunch of sites sitting idle during decomissioning will create more eerie industrial abandonment issues. Don't believe me? Look at the old Packard Plant in Detroit [google.com] It's been abandoned since 1958 and it's just sitting there, decaying with nobody cleaning it up. If