Decommissioning Nuclear Plants Costing Far More Than Expected 288
Lasrick writes: "This article takes a look at cost estimates of nuclear power plant decommissioning from the 1980s, and how widely inaccurate they turned out to be. This is a pretty fascinating look at past articles in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that consistently downplayed the costs of decommissioning, for example: 'The Yankee Nuclear Power Station in Rowe, Massachusetts, took 15 years to decommission—or five times longer than was needed to build it. And decommissioning the plant—constructed early in the 1960s for $39 million—cost $608 million. The plant's spent fuel rods are still stored in a facility on-site, because there is no permanent disposal repository to put them in. To monitor them and make sure the material does not fall into the hands of terrorists or spill into the nearby river costs $8 million per year.'"
First.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Kill all the lawyers.
Re:First.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Also got to kill the stupid environmentalists (only the stupid kind that are opposed to nuclear because it contains the word "nuclear", to coal, oil and gas cause it contains carbon, to hydroelectric cause of sediments, to wind cause of birds, to solar cause of toxic elements during production, ...). Sadly, there aren't enough environmentalists who can look at the whole picture and realize that nuclear plants produce less radioactive waste than coal plants, skyscrapers kill more birds than wind power, etc., and that if they want to accomplish something they need to support a realistic objective.
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nuclear plants produce less radioactive waste than coal plants
This is so stupid it defies belief. Care to substantiate this claim with numbers and sources thereof?
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Hey if all the hardcore greenies die off, that will leave plenty more of the Earth's resources for the rest of us, and we could have clean nuclear energy without any issues.
And yes Coal does release more radiation than nuclear. Funnily enough they keep the radiation in the nuclear plant extremely well.
Coal contains radioactive compounds in small quantities, which are then burnt, sent up a chimney and left to spread wherever the air currents want to take them.
http://www.scientificamerican.... [scientificamerican.com]
Who is so stupid
Re:First.... (Score:5, Informative)
One, you have serious reading comprehension issues. OP claims coal produces more nuclear waste than nuclear power.
Two, that SA article has been debunked so many times, it isn't even funny. The 'research' it is based on is from 1977 and it discusses coal plants that aren't built anymore. Here, for your reading pleasure: http://tech.slashdot.org/comme... [slashdot.org]
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OP claims coal produces more nuclear waste than nuclear power.
Are the byproducts economically useful? No.*
Are they hazardous? Yes.
Then it's waste. The radioactivity makes it 'nuclear', for a limited definition of nuclear(IE you have to really stretch; you'll be poisoned chemically long before the radiation hurts you).
Still, I can't help but think that part of the problem is that since the power plants were constructed we completely rewrote the book on what's required in decommissioning it, besides inflation alone.
Really, it's a good thing most nuclear power plants
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You call it waste, I call it fuel. Actually I call it a fear stick, because of the insanely disproportionate fear attached to the hunk of metal known as a spent fuel rod. Yeah it's dangerous and poisonous, yet I'd rather have one of those sitting in my back yard than say an isotaner of hydroflouric acid, or drive behind a truck carrying methyl isocyanate. Think that's unrealistic? I'm sure there's more trucks carrying these instantly deadly liquids through your cities right now than trucks carrying around s
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No, it is not fuel. Part of it may become fuel if one is allowed to reprocess it. Reprocessing, however, is a very tightly regulated business, and in many places, for example in the US, or in Japan, or in Russia it is not an option, or not a very important option. Do you know why it isn't a wide-spread, happy industry? Yep, because it is expensive as hell, dangerous and dual-use.
Here's a fun experiment to do: stop pretending you carry a cesium source and a Geiger counter, and consider what should be done
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Gen 4 reactors will happily run in a way that it effectively reprocesses its own waste. It's also got passive safety and the resulting waste (which at this point really isn't fuel) has a half-life well short of the hundred years.
They are also fictional. We'll be able to judge how well they operate and how they reprocess own waste when we see one operating safely for some time.
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How about the all the raving nuke-u-like fans stop blaming the straw man environmentalists and come up with a workable solution to the actual problem?
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> Also got to kill the stupid environmentalists (only the stupid kind
It's always funny watching the pro-nuke crowd try to find who to blame for the current market drought.
Anyone who has any experience in the power industry knows precisely why this is occurring. Overnight CAPEX is too high, there's a decided lack of long-term funding available, and lifecycle costs keep cropping up, as this article points out. Worse, as we learned the hard way in the early 1970s, building very large plants has the effect o
Re:First.... (Score:5, Interesting)
While the $39 million build cost would be far, far greater after adjusting for inflation, making the $608 million decommissioning seem less ridiculous, this still seems much more expensive then it ought to be. Why? Lawyers? Regulations? A poor reactor design that is simply very difficult to dismantle safely?
Coal is the largest and fastest-growing power source worldwide, and as I understand it, the dirtiest in terms of pollution in general as well as CO2. Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] seems to say that renewables (including, er, wood burning?!) currently have 5% market share in the U.S. (the tables could use some clarifications). In practice, nuclear energy is a necessary ingredient to get CO2 emissions under control. So let's figure out what these huge costs are and then talk about how to reduce them in the future.
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Worldwide.
Not in the US, where the discussion is occurring about dismantling.
In the US, coal is being replaced by cleaner and cheaper Natural Gas.
Decommisiong is expensive because..... (Score:5, Informative)
Why is this happening? (Score:4, Interesting)
Is there a shortage of concrete?
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Re:Why is this happening? (Score:5, Funny)
I know getting all the books for 5th edition will be expensive but I still can't see D&D costing 640 million dollars-- even with a redone Vault of the Drow module.
It's not about profit (Score:3)
This is about the funds reserved for decommissioning out of the profits made from the plant while in operation. The idea is that you create a fund where you put in money for every KWh sold. Then, by the end of the lifetime of the plant, you use those funds to adequately deal with what needs to be done to keep the radiation and poison out of the environment. If those funds aren't sufficient because of miscalculations or bad fund management (sub prime mortgages anyone?) Houston won't help you with your proble
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I admit I couldn't believe it was so, so I worked out the numbers. Bear with me for a few assumptions. The plant is a tiny 185 MWe. If it runs 8766 h/y for 32 y, it will produce a total of 51.9 billion kWh. Even at only, say 8 cents/kWh (one wouldn't count delivery charges), the revenue over the plant lifetime is $4.15 billion. $0.6 billion does not seem a crushing burden weighed against that revenue, although it is a very significant cost element.
As a check, yankeerowe.com says 44 billion kWh; no doubt the
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In theory, this is a fine idea. In theory, it works. As you said, the funds are based on ridiculous cost predictions. Every expert knew it was not enough.
Unless the costs for decommissioning are fully independently evaluated - which is impossible - this idea will never work. And to think the independent evaluators would get the required information from the plant planners is just as utopic.
They kn
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I wanted to add, they new very well what they were doing. An planned exactly what is happening... That some else will pay for decommissioning and they keep the cash in their pockets.
Imo, the full cost of decommissioning should be burdened to anyone who was a share holder at some point and made profit through this scheme.
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Once society decides to place a nuclear plant (or a city) on a particular site then the best thing would be to permanently use that site for that purpose.
that makes me wonder, if 1 plant is decommissioned and turned into a long term storage facility for nuclear waste, how much capacity would it have? could part of the storage problem simply be resolved by using space reclaimed from one reactor to house the waste of a great number of other reactors.
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There is plenty of Federally owned land that states and residents can't dictate use for. 94.5% of Nevada, 69.1% of Alaska are Federally owned. All you really need is a tiny fraction of 1% of one state to solve the problem nationally. Just put through Federal legislation to reserve what you need for stated use. If you have to, declare a state of emergency based on public danger which cannot be ameliorated in any other manner.
Storing nuclear waste... (Score:2)
Well, it would vary quite a bit - how much space each plant 'takes up', how much is owned around it varies by OOMS. Palo Verde has 4k acres.
Surry Power Station, on the other hand, only has 840 acres. Commissioned in 1972 it's more likely to be decomissioned sooner than Palo Verde.
Still, per the NEI [nei.org] all nuclear waste nuclear fuel for the last 50 years would fit in a football field to a depth of 7 yards. Given that a football field is 1.3 acres, I'm confident that you could fit a few eons worth of waste fu
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> Once society decides to place a nuclear plant (or a city) on a particular site then
> the best thing would be to permanently use that site for that purpose.
But that's not what the industry told us. They told us they could be returned to greenfield. So they built some of them on land that is, after 35 years, extremely valuable real estate. And now we're left holding the bag, again.
Google Maps Pickering Nuclear. That land is worth, literally, billions. If we're being told that we can never use that lan
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Is there a shortage of concrete?
There is going to be a moratorium on concrete lest it lead to an end of the American Empire.
It's a government contract job. (Score:2, Insightful)
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No, Rowe was not a government plant.
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More like BANANA - Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone
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More like BANA - Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere
FTFY
Re:It's a government contract job. (Score:4, Funny)
Yucca Mountain is full
Ok. Whatever source of information has led you to that belief ...... never go back there. Just don't. They've messed you up and you must get away from them.
Seriously.
In fact there is no waste inside Yucca mountain. Zero.
The only thing we've stored in Yucca mountain is bullshit from Harry Reid and the libtard moonbeamers that run this pathetic romper room country. We keep it there because he is old and when he dies we'll need a continuing supply Harry Reid's bullshit to keep the system running. There is enough bullshit stored in Yucca mountain to keep the system operating for approximately 20 years, during which time we will have to develop a new source of bullshit and transition our system to this new bullshit supply.
Re:It's a government contract job. (Score:4, Insightful)
Obviously you are opposed to state rights, extremely opposed to state rights, at a guess this would make you politically schizophrenic (you are aware it was the state that opposed the facility). If you are going to have a national nuclear waste facility obviously the state affected has to approve it and all states affected by transport of the extremely dangerous material will have to approve the transport of that material through their state. One person has very little outcome on the issue, failure to achieve consensus is a nation wide failure at state and federal level. It seems the bullshit is nation wide and chaotic and prevents any reasonable outcome with regards to pretty much anything. So it would seem you are also contributing.
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With respect, the state can go straight to hell. Spent fuel storage is a national emergency, not a political issue. Yucca Mountain is in Nevada. I don't know if Yucca Mountain is federally owned, but 84.5% of the land area of Nevada is federally owned, so it may well be. If it's not, just take it. It's a desolate mountain, for god's sake.
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They can. It's called "eminent domain". It's the process any government uses to seize private property....
Nuclear costs way too much (Score:2, Insightful)
The costs associated with Nuclear energy are always downplayed.
The truth is we have no coherent plan of what to do with the waste products. Lots of good ideas, but that ain't a plan.
Not to mention when things go wrong, it is VERY wrong.
why don't we keep them and use them? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:why don't we keep them and use them? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Man, I was changing a flat on my bike the other day and ran into that neutron damage thing. I decided to walk.
(This comment has nothing to contribute really.)
Time and material (Score:2)
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Given how much space most nuclear sites have, you could build a new nuclear 'plant' - reactor and associated generation equipment every ~60 years or so, retire the old one, decommission it gradually over the course of the next 30 years or so, then build a new one - with the general effect of the plant 'shuffling' a bit around on the property, potentially for centuries.
Nice thing about nuclear power stuff is that if you can let it sit for a few years it generally becomes a lot less radioactive and easier to
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In addition to the lawyers you'd have to kill a significant percentage of environmentalists, plus all the NIMBYs. The real issue isn't decommissioning costs, the real issue is the inability to build new reactors. If it wasn't for the public/political aversion to nuclear reactors, you could decommission the place, build a modern one right beside it, and use the leftover waste to power the new reactor.
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Which is ironic because nuclear fallout preserves nature but wipes out mankind from the lands.
It preserves inorganic nature and the lowest lifeforms.
The Chernobyl exclusion zone acts like a sink for big mammals coming from safe areas.
This is not a paradise where they thrive.
Also, there is a gradient between the misanthropes that would pretty much like a planet Earth in the state it was ten thousand years ago, and left activists who pose as environmentalists and feel uneasy when one talk about overpopulation.
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And nothing of value would be lost.
Re:why don't we keep them and use them? (Score:5, Insightful)
A lawyer can't make you do anything. I once had a business partner who froze like a deer in headlights whenever our lawyer opened his mouth. As I said to him, the lawyer's job is to advise you of the trouble you might get into; but there's always *something* to be concerned about; it's *your* job to make a decision and shoulder the consequences. Business people choose which risks to take, and lawyers help them figure out what those risks are, simple as that. If your plans go kaplooie, it's your fault; possibly for hiring the wrong lawyer, or possibly hiring the right lawyer but letting him run your business for you.
This "it's all the lawyer's fault" business is childish baloney. It's not lawyers that keep owners from continuing to use these old reactors, it's the fact that these reactors are old and obsolete. It's not lawyers that made decommissioning the plants more expensive than projected, it's that nobody had ever done such a thing when the costs were estimated, and everyone chose a best case scenario in their plans because they wanted to see the things built. That's a *business* mistake, and an engineering mistake, but unless the lawyer was telling them they'd be able to cart their waste off to the town dump it's not a *legal* mistake.
Recycle (Score:2)
Why don't we use the lawyers to line the containment facility? There is a near limitless supply of lawyers.
Not talking main structure here, just internal, cosmetic purposes.
There has to be a huge cost saving this way.
Increase fuel burnup and this becomes cheap ! (Score:4, Informative)
This is a solid fuel water cooled reactor problem. Ok, that's 95% of current reactors, but there are many alternatives.
We must see all water cooled, solid fuel reactors as a legacy.
LFTR Molten salt reactors running primarily on Thorium could take 3% of it's fuel as spent nuclear fuel from water cooled reactors are fission that completely (99%). There is so much nuclear energy on accumulated depleted uranium and spent nuclear fuel to produce a trillion dollars worth of electricity.
Remember, it's not nuclear waste, its mostly unburned fuel, a result of extremely inefficient solid fuel reactors cooled by water.
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> a result of extremely inefficient solid fuel reactors cooled by water
, a design which was chosen over thorium reactor designs because thorium reactors do not produce any significant amount of "waste" plutonium required for nuclear weapons production.
Fixed that incomplete thought for you.
Re:Increase fuel burnup and this becomes cheap ! (Score:4, Informative)
The true reasons for the MSR project at ORNL (Oak Ridge National Labs) being cancelled look more like this:
It was never a mainstream project. Dr. Alvin Weinberg got funding for his idea due to ORNL being the sole responder to USAF demand for a nuclear powered bomber in the 60s. They managed to do their thing kind of under the radar, I believe other nuclear guys thought they would never be successful, so when he showed he was (MSRE 5MW test reactor ran for 22000 hrs) and he asked for real money to do the whole thing, then he got shot down.
Only ORNL was researching into Thorium, all other nuclear labs were working on fast uranium/plutonium breeders.
The thing about other reactors being better for Plutonium production is a very big misconception that conflates reactor grade plutonium and weapons grade plutonium. Weapons grade plutonium has always been produced by irradiating lots of U-238 with a fairly small dose of neutrons, to avoid double irradiation of U-238 atoms (leading to Pu-240). Conceivably weapons grade plutonium can even be produced by placing a blanket of U-238 around any existing reactor (catching only neutron losses). Any reactor will do. But today it's way easier to obtain highly enriched U-235 instead. Reactor grade plutonium = premature detonation or nuclear artifacts becoming duds in storage, both a huge problem. Too much Pu-240 and Pu-241. Pu-239 does simple alpha decays, while Pu-240 has spontaneous fission probability.
Plus the main fast breeder research site was in Southern California, right where Richard Nixon was from (exactly when the ORNL Thorium project was cancelled and officially buried). There is a very complete video about this on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Re:Increase fuel burnup and this becomes cheap ! (Score:5, Informative)
The Slashdot frenzy for Thorium reactors which do not exist anywhere in the world, except as a hypothetical, is constantly astounding. It's nigh-equivalent to denying the round Earth, evolution, or global warming. Sure, they may exist "soon" if your definition of "soon" is on the order of a century. India has had a 3-stage plan for Thorium reactors since the 1950's and they're currently about halfway through that plan, according to its handlers:
"According to replies given in Q&A in the Indian Parliament on two separate occasions, 19 August 2010 and 21 March 2012, large scale thorium deployment is only to be expected “3 – 4 decades after the commercial operation of fast breeder reactors with short doubling time”.[66][31] Full exploitation of India’s domestic thorium reserves will likely not occur until after the year 2050.[67]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India%27s_three-stage_nuclear_power_programme [wikipedia.org]
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Thorium molten salt reactors were tested in the 60s/70s, achieving 22000 hrs of trouble free operation. Got cancelled by Richard Nixon because the lab researching it wasn't from his home area (south Cali). Plus they didn't wanted advanced nuclear power to succeed, since inefficient nuclear power was enough of a threat to mighty american coal and Oil in general. Most great research projects outside of wartime are meant to take a long time. Employ a lot of people, give profits to pork&barrel govt supplier
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You do realize that the US is not the only country in the world with nuclear labs, right?
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"Employ a lot of people, give profits to pork&barrel govt suppliers."
For example: Flibe Energy, whose shill video you linked to, and whose master plan is to pull down a few hundred million in U.S. military contracts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flibe_Energy#Military [wikipedia.org]
These "corporate conspiracy" arguments are self-defeating when they come from another corporation in the same industry.
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Shill ?
How would the US Army / Air Force rather power a base in the middle of nowhere ?
Trucking diesel fuel for 1000 miles (hundreds of truckloads of fuel / year) or a single truckload of nuclear fuel for a decade ?
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Sure, they may exist "soon" if your definition of "soon" is on the order of a century. India has had a 3-stage plan for Thorium reactors since the 1950's and they're currently about halfway through that plan, according to its handlers:
So what you're saying is we should start building them now?
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I am pretty skeptical molten salt reactors are going to be cheaper to decommission. Liquid anything is going to contaminate whatever it's stored in more or less permanently. The real issue is almost certainly that we simply haven't been doing enough decommissions (because we keep extending the license and operating periods) for any sort of standard practice to really emerge. A decent fuel reprocessing industry would help a lot, because at least you could ship the rods somewhere and remove radioactive materi
Nuclear power is too expensive (Score:2)
I'm not against nuclear power per se but the more I learn the more it seems that it's just too expensive and won't be able to compete with other forms of power production. Many blame anti-nuke and environmental activists for the fact that no nuclear plants have been built in the US since the 1970's but I think most of the reason was that it was just too expensive compared to coal plants and now natural gas plants. They still can't be built without government guarantees for the loans to build them and gove
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Many blame anti-nuke and environmental activists for the fact that no nuclear plants have been built in the US since the 1970's but I think most of the reason was that it was just too expensive
It's possible that the activists made building one too expensive. I'm all for doing things safely, but committee meeting, after committee meeting starts to costs real dollars (which is why the activists insist on their being so many).
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Rowe was constructed before there were widespread protests against nuclear power, and it was still too expensive. The problem is that large portions of the plant are radioactive, so you can't just pound them to dust and put them in a landfill the way you would a similar concrete structure that wasn't radioactive.
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Rowe was constructed before there were widespread protests against nuclear power, and it was still too expensive.
If 1960s technology wasn't good enough, we may as well give up. That's what I always say.
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>>The problem is that large portions of the plant are radioactive...
Bingo, the fatal flaw of nuclear power. Those darn high-energy neutrons get randomly sprayed all over the place, and then large portions of everything around is radioactive. Haven't seen a design for a fission reactor that admits this, solves this, or even attempts to address it (hey, just "clean it up" when it's done - which means move all the radioactive stuff somewhere else and let it simmer in their back yard for 10's of thousan
Re:Nuclear power is too expensive (Score:5, Interesting)
> All the NIMBY types and loud anti-nuke folks have made sure it's too expensive
So they're the ones to blame for Brown's Ferry and TMI, which basically trebled the cost of nukes in the US due to faulty engineering and operations? I guess they were also the reason that the turbine shafts at Darlington kept failing, that the fuel pod got stuck in the AVR, that Superphénix developed leaks in the cooling system, that the Magnox's all had to be dramatically upgraded to get rid of "shine" and that Soviet reactors have nasty positive void coefficients.
Do you really think ridiculous statements like this help the cause?
No (Score:2, Informative)
"physics" does not make it expensive, mis-guided political activists, their lawyers, and the "soccer-moms" they scare make it expensive.
Nuclear power is actually remarkably simple and straight-forward. If you want extreme safety and are willing to sacrifice some efficiency, then you can even build a nuclear generator with no moving parts and that is incapable of melting down (ever hear of an RTG? the Voyager probes? ring any bells?). As for waste disposal: nuclear fuel is remarkably dense and as a result, i
Re:No (Score:5, Informative)
For every person that died from radiation, 10000 died from coal and 100 died from hydro dam bursting.
Get your numbers straight.
Coal alone kills 200k / yr worldwide, 13k / yr in USA.
Hydro killed 170k in a single incident in China in the 70s. It kills hundreds yearly even disregarding that horrible event in China.
Nuclear is the safest energy source in the world. Look up the numbers.
Looking only at civilian nuclear accidents (including mining, transportation, processing, fuel preparation plus reactors), nuclear power have killed less than 1000 people ever, worldwide.
It is expensive and it always will be. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It is expensive and it always will be. (Score:5, Informative)
Spent fuel is 96% fuel. Combined with the depleted uranium its 99% fuel. It just takes a more efficient reactor to burn it.
Nuclear energy is orders of magnitude environmentally cleaner even than natural gas.
The main issue is nuclear regulators decided to make it economically unfeasible to to nuclear power.
Learn about it and you will find out you are wrong.
https://class.coursera.org/nuc... [coursera.org]
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Oh for fuck's sake, can we please stop talking about "burning" nuclear fuel? It doesn't burn. It fissions, releasing heat and neutrons. If you're going to be pro-nuke, at least learn the science. Given that Project Orion never took off, it's not rocket science, either.
Re:It is expensive and it always will be. (Score:4, Interesting)
I just complete an introductory course to nuclear technology, they say burn fuel, burnup ratio all the time. Technically is wrong, but even nuclear engineers talk about burning nuclear fuel.
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Once it was "power so cheap we won't even bother to meter it".
Now that's actually something worth researching towards. Imagine what we could do with such plentiful electricity.....
France: 75% of electricity from nuclear ... (Score:5, Informative)
Nuclear power has always been a pipe dream of some sort.
Not in France.
"France derives over 75% of its electricity from nuclear energy. This is due to a long-standing policy based on energy security.
France is the world's largest net exporter of electricity due to its very low cost of generation, and gains over EUR 3 billion per year from this.
France has been very active in developing nuclear technology. Reactors and fuel products and services are a major export.
It is building its first Generation III reactor.
About 17% of France's electricity is from recycled nuclear fuel."
http://www.world-nuclear.org/i... [world-nuclear.org]
Re:France: 75% of electricity from nuclear ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Damn right. The main reason Nuclear isn't truly strong in USA, Germany or the UK is they have lots of coal and/or natural gas. The correlation is extremely strong.
But even then, there are dozens of countries producing over 1/3 of their electricity from nuclear. Many use reactors to both produce electricity and provide district heating.
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The tour guide may have been misquoting Strauss, but I remember those very words from that day, so don't tell me no one ever said that about a fission reactor.
You're right, random, poorly informed people said it. And are apparently still saying it. Good job on calling him out - we need more pedants on slashdot.
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Once it was "power so cheap we won't even bother to meter it".
No one ever said that about fission reactors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... [wikipedia.org]
And it does not mean free. You would pay a flat monthly fee based on the max supply (e.g. 100A) like your internet connection may be now.
Interestingly, increasing PV solar power is also driving things in that direction. Already, a huge portion of the costs of electricty companies are fixed by capacity, not marginal kwHr costs. So homes with rooftop solar power have their grid power (e.g. nighttime) subsidised by others.
4th gen reactors can use current waste as fuel (Score:3)
The plant's spent fuel rods are still stored in a facility on-site, because there is no permanent disposal repository to put them in. To monitor them and make sure the material does not fall into the hands of terrorists or spill into the nearby river costs $8 million per year.
4th generation reactors can use this material as fuel and the new waste created will only be dangerous for hundreds of years rather than tens of thousands.
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>4th generation reactors can use this material as fuel
> and the new waste created will only be dangerous for
> hundreds of years rather than tens of thousands.
Citation, please?
"Relative to current nuclear power plant technology, the claimed benefits for 4th generation reactors include:
Nuclear waste that remains radioactive for a few centuries instead of millennia
100-300 times more energy yield from the same amount of nuclear fuel
The ability to consume existing nuclear waste in the production of electricity
Improved operating safety"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... [wikipedia.org]
Re:4th gen reactors can use current waste as fuel (Score:4, Insightful)
>"the claimed benefits"
Wow, you call that a citation? I'm willing to believe that safe/efficient nuclear tech is possible, but Wikipedia is NOT an authoritative source. Got anything better? Maybe a quote from an unbiased nuclear engineer? Respected NGO? Anything?
The word "claimed" was an appeasement to the nuclear deniers, to avoid an edit war erupting on that page. Don't read too much into it.
...
The citation above was just the first thing googled and reflects a consensus among qualified scientists and engineers. I did some more googling for you
Click on the links for the various reactor types: https://www.gen-4.org/gif/jcms... [gen-4.org]
"First the EM2 core will be started using 12% enriched uranium and used fuel or depleted uranium (DU). After the initial U235 amount has been consumed in the “starter-part” of the core, enough fissionable material will have been created to switch over to a second part of the core where the nuclear reactions will continue and be fed nuclear waste.."
http://meteolcd.wordpress.com/... [wordpress.com]
"The scientific method requires that we keep an open mind and change our conclusions when new evidence indicates that we should. Climate change is the new evidence affecting the nuclear debate -- we need low-carbon energy. Current (2nd generation) nuclear reactors are not as fail-safe as possible and they burn less than one percent of the energy in uranium ore. Next (3rd) generation reactors are safer, shutting down automatically in case of anomalies, and are ready to go, but they still leave 99 percent of the energy in long-lived waste piles. 4th generation reactors, tested but not commercially available, can extract all of the energy in the nuclear fuel and burn nuclear waste. We urgently need R&D to make the combination of 3rd and 4th generation reactors available with comprehensive international controls.
James E. Hansen heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City. He has held this position since 1981. He is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University."
http://www.thesciencecouncil.c... [thesciencecouncil.com]
Careful with your NGOs. Some are nuclear deniers that are as purely political and scientifically unfounded as the climate deniers. The climate deniers and nuclear deniers differ only in their political allegiance, they abuse of and rejection of science are quite similar.
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The word "claimed" was an appeasement to the nuclear deniers, to avoid an edit war erupting on that page.
Or was it an appeasement to nuclear lovers, to avoid an edit war erupting on that page? The whole point is that without reliable, unbiased citations it's all just your opinion.
Let's examine your citations:
https://www.gen-4.org/gif/jcms... [gen-4.org]
http://meteolcd.wordpress.com/... [wordpress.com]
http://www.thesciencecouncil.c... [thesciencecouncil.com]
So you have an industry PR site, a shitty Wordpress blog written by climate change sceptics [meteo.lcd.lu] and the dubiously named "Science Council" that is run by a motivational speaker [thesciencecouncil.com].
The reality is that salesmen have ma
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For hundreds of years Yucca Mountain would be more than sufficient. Make synth-stone (or whatever it's called) bricks out of the nasty waste just so it's extra stable and you can just keep filling the caverns - nothing will migrate far enough in a few hundred years to be an issue. You could get away with something a lot less stable as well, *if* you were 100% committed to not letting any long-lived waste get stored there.
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While the trillion tons of CO2 we put in the atmosphere is still haunting us. At least radioactivity decays away. As well as the millions of tons of lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium from burning coal.
Being anti nuclear today = being pro coal. As simple as that. Only those in favor of all non fossil fuels are really anti coal and anti natural gas.
NASA: Nuclear has saved lives, reduced CO2 ... (Score:2)
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Being anti nuclear today = being pro coal. As simple as that. Only those in favor of all non fossil fuels are really anti coal and anti natural gas.
Not even close. I have hung around with a few ardent environmentalists in the past and most of them actually think we should just use less electricity in the first place.
For instance, one of the things that may drive up global electricity consumption over the next few decades is electric cars replacing good old gasoline and petrol. If you ask quite a few environmental types though the solution here is clearly that you simply throw away the idea of a car and move to mass transit and walking or cycling instea
In other news (Score:2, Informative)
Hoover Dam cost $49m to build. Today, the price tag would be over $10b. Stuff gets more expensive over the years. Today the power plant produces 4.2TWh per annum. At $100/MWh, that's $420,000,000 of power per year. Kind of significant ROI.
The bottom line is, long term projects like nuclear or hydro will always cost massively more in the future than today simply because of inflation. This is another reason why these are strategic assets to invest in.
As for decommissioning of nuclear power? It sits there for
lets put this more in perspective (Score:2)
counting for inflation to 2007 dollars it took 267.7 million to build, not to mention the safety risk of disassembling an irradiated environment that probably had every square inch covered in asbestos and lead paint, in the day and age where a contractor cant even scrape a window sill without getting it lab tested ...
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Yup, I was going to say CPI calculator says $39M in 1965 == $293M in 2014.
It could be a lot cheaper (Score:2)
If nuclear plants were held to the radiation standards of coal plants and if fuel reprocessing had actually been implemented, it would be a lot cheaper.
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Quite so, though I'm not so sure it's the nuclear plants we should be changing the standards for...
Maine Yankee's decommisioning (Score:2)
From Wikipedia:
The eight-year $500 million decommissioning process spanned from 1997 until 2005.[6] In 2000, the first structures were gutted out by workers. In 2003, the reactor pressure vessel was shipped to Barnwell, South Carolina via barge. Finally, in 2004, the facility's containment building was brought down by explosives.
Maine Yankee shut down after about 25 years of operation due to significant deficiencies and cost to correct them. Younger, but no one seems to claim that decom was easier because
nuclear benefits (Score:2)
uh, wait (Score:2)
First, are we talking inflation adjusted dollars? Second, a large part of the problem is the continued ever since the 70s anti-nuclear power hysteria. This has greatly inflated costs, danger estimates, required procedures and so on. It is also why we have no spend fuel repository although we no several ways to create a quite good one. And it is also why all forms of breeder reactors, even those not good for making weapon grade materials, were killed. That move means there is around 20x more "nuclea
Why should we find this surprising? (Score:4, Insightful)
'The Yankee Nuclear Power Station in Rowe, Massachusetts, took 15 years to decommission—or five times longer than was needed to build it.
Of course it takes longer to decommission than to build. When it was built all the materials were essentially safe, non-toxic materials where handling is easy, well-understood, and well supported by standard systems, factories and the like. When it is torn down much of the material is unsafe or toxic to some degree, some is extremely unsafe and toxic, and all of it must be dealt with in situ using systems that are not commonly used elsewhere. Handling toxic material safely takes more time than handling safe materials. The extended time leads naturally to extended cost. As wise people have observed, time is money.
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How much Asbestos is in an old nuclear plant?
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that worked really good
http://www.theverge.com/2013/1... [theverge.com]
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Nuclear subs are made of metal. Nuclear plants are made of metal and concrete. Radioactive metal is (relatively) easy to deal with. Radioactive concrete, not so much. I can't recall any anti-nuclear activist getting involved in regulating the de-commissioning of nuclear plants. I think you are just talking through your hat.