New Mexico Nuclear Accident Ranks Among the Costliest In US History (latimes.com) 320
mdsolar quotes a report from Los Angeles Times: When a drum containing radioactive waste blew up in an underground nuclear dump in New Mexico two years ago, the Energy Department rushed to quell concerns in the Carlsbad desert community and quickly reported progress on resuming operations. The early federal statements gave no hint that the blast had caused massive long-term damage to the dump, a facility crucial to the nuclear weapons cleanup program that spans the nation, or that it would jeopardize the Energy Department's credibility in dealing with the tricky problem of radioactive waste. But the explosion ranks among the costliest nuclear accidents in U.S. history, according to a Times analysis. The long-term cost of the mishap could top $2 billion, an amount roughly in the range of the cleanup after the 1979 partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. The Feb. 14, 2014, accident is also complicating cleanup programs at about a dozen current and former nuclear weapons sites across the U.S. Thousands of tons of radioactive waste that were headed for the dump are backed up in Idaho, Washington, New Mexico and elsewhere, state officials said in interviews. "The direct cost of the cleanup is now $640 million, based on a contract modification made last month with Nuclear Waste Partnership that increased the cost from $1.3 billion to nearly $2 billion," reports Los Angeles Times. "The cost-plus contract leaves open the possibility of even higher costs as repairs continue. And it does not include the complete replacement of the contaminated ventilation system or any future costs of operating the mine longer than originally planned."
In need of a solution (Score:5, Interesting)
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/09/140909093659.htm [sciencedaily.com]
Re:In need of a solution (Score:4, Informative)
Those bacteria don't do any actual cleaning. They just help contain. The bacteria are able to consume molecules that contain nuclear elements and change the molecular structure of the radioactive waste. This change ends up preventing the waste from being dissolved in ground water, and thus preventing it from spreading around in ground water. So basically, they are able to absorb leaking waste.
Life is a chemical process. There is no life that can break down matter at the sub-atomic level. Except Godzilla!
Fuck mdsolar (Score:2, Insightful)
Just when I thought we might be done with mdsolar spam, this article shows up. He's a biased and intellectually dishonest submitter who will do anything to try to make nuclear energy appear awful. Can we ban mdsolar from submitting more stories and spamming the queue?
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I don't think that this submission was particularly biased. Nuclear technology does get lots of subventions by the state, some of them in the form that the state takes over if there is an accident like this.
I've seen lots of MS spam lately, that's far more unpleasant to read.
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The only reason that there is so much subvention is because certain people would fucking whine to high heaven if they switched to the nuke plants that could properly eat the majority of the truly problematic waste and use it as part of the fuel cycle.
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Why would that be the case? Are they illuminati who want to destroy humanity or something?
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Because they think that the plutonium produced(and mostly consumed if those reactors are allowed to keep working instead of being shut down to harvest it) will spontaneously get up and walk away.
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Because they think that the plutonium produced(and mostly consumed if those reactors are allowed to keep working instead of being shut down to harvest it) will spontaneously get up and walk away.
Specifically it's to keep countries like North Korea and Pakistan from getting nuclear weapons.
Oopsie. Looks like that worked out, didn't it...
The U.S. is the only major nuclear power that doesn't reprocess spent fuel; Russia does, Japan does, France does, Great Britain did, and, until Germany recently decided to no longer be a nuclear power, they had France process their for them. Thank Jimmy Carter for the executive order; we have a nice, shiny new reprocessing plant that's been mothballed.
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I still have never figured out how North Korea would somehow spontaneously get plutonium created at a breeder reactor in Tennessee. I guess the argument is "well if we spend billions and billions of dollars to prototype and refine the design until it actually works, then all of a sudden they have one too without all the pesky engineering and construction costs?
It's not a fucking MP3 - it can't be copied perfectly with zero cost.
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You wouldn't download a nuclear breeder reactor, would you?
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No, it's because reactors which recycle used fuel efficiently cost more to run. We can produce new fuel from freshly-mined uranium cheaper than we can breed and refine uranium and plutonium fuel rods. We don't even run plutonium fuel rods in reactors, usually, so there's all kinds of risk in using plutonium fuel and all kinds of costs in getting to a point where we can even attempt it.
Burning the fuel out completely is expensive.
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There's a lot of truth there. At least some of what is to be stored is perfectly good plutonium that could/should be loaded into a reactor and produce electricity for years but instead we're spending millions to throw it away. It makes about as much sense as building a facility to bury gasoline.
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I don't think that this submission was particularly biased. Nuclear technology does get lots of subventions by the state, some of them in the form that the state takes over if there is an accident like this.
I've seen lots of MS spam lately, that's far more unpleasant to read.
This isn't handouts from the state, this is nuclear weapons waste. This is the government cleaning up after itself. It's got nothing to do with subsidies.
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They didn't even hype it as *the* costliest; they put it in with three-mile island. 1979, $1 billion over 12 years, three-mile island. In 1979, that'd be inflation to $3.26 billion 2014; in 1991, that'd inflate to $1.74 billion 2014. You're looking at an average in the range of $2.5 billion; counting from straight 1985, it's still $2.2 billion.
In other words: this disaster has cost less than three-mile island. Amortized over the decade it'll cost, it's actually not so bad; there are 171 million tax
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Yeah, except that this story has absolutely nothing to do with nuclear power generation. All of this waste, and this waste disposal site, is designed for material coming from the manufacture of nuclear weapons, and the output of the DoE national laboratories.
So the FUD is implicit - anything that is bad about any nuclear technology at all, mdsolar will post just because people will automatically relate it to nuclear power. I still don't know why he thinks that nuclear is such a threat to his dream of sol
Re: Fuck mdsolar (Score:2)
What Envirmental Wacko caused it? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What Envirmental Wacko caused it? (Score:5, Interesting)
Speaking as an engineer, the number of headaches caused by people tasked with implementation making "equivalent" substitutions are outrageous. Some bean counter second guesses a line item somewhere, the inventory isn't on-hand to fulfill a customer need so the people who suffer negative consequences if the job isn't out the door decide to improvise.
Maybe the purchasing agent couldn't buy the specified cat litter because it was back-ordered. It doesn't really matter. When you have unqualified individuals making deviations from the prescribed procedure: that is a management failure.
Re:What Envirmental Wacko caused it? (Score:4, Insightful)
Designing a system easy enough to be catastrophically broken by a single seemingly harmless substitution is a big problem too.
I have no problem with nuclear power but fragile processes are not good for anyone.
Re:What Envirmental Wacko caused it? (Score:4, Insightful)
The system itself worked correctly, as the containment system properly contained the leak. The problem is that the "seemingly harmless" substitution wouldn't have appeared harmless to an engineer who knew what was going on, but the person who made the substitution didn't understand the requirements for the part he was substituting.
When I worked on government computers, I often saw similar problems. The developers would specify certain hardware requirements, but over the life of a program, as equipment went obsolete, other people would make substitutions based on the specs of the old part. After a few years, the same software was running on high-end components, at only about 1% utilization. Nobody ever wanted to be the guy who made the system less capable, even though the lower-end hardware would have cost far less.
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So, how many more mistakes before there is a release into the environment?
What would you suggest they do? Build a giant solar death ray in the 1950s instead?
How often... (Score:2)
How often...does the EPA inspect these sites?
Inspector: "Hey, this badge lets me go thru this door!"
Engineer: "And this badge will tell you that you are going to die as soon as you do. Have a nice day." (Runs away!)
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o.0 A huge chunk of the storage facility is contaminated because a supposedly stable drum exploded - no, the system emphatically did not work correctly. It was never supposed to blow up in the first place.
Re:What Envirmental Wacko caused it? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's nested fail safes. The drum was never supposed to blow. But we knew that and if "never supposed to" meant "never" then you could just stack the drums on the surface. The point of digging it into a salt mine was that if the drum did happen to blow, it would be contained. It did and it was.
It's like the difference between TMI and Chernobyl. TMI was built with nested failsafes. In fact the design assumed that the core would melt down and was designed to dilute the core to noncriticality, then spread out the molten stuff to cool it so it would not break out of the containment. That happened and that's why there was almost no external contamination.
Re:What Envirmental Wacko caused it? (Score:4, Funny)
A multi-cat household can be hard on even the toughest kitty litter; so when your litterbox needs a change, go for the Nuclear Option. Containment 100% silica-based kitty litter can handle even the toughest jobs, whether you're managing a two-cat household or a nuclear waste disposal site.
Containment 100% silica-based kitty litter: don't let your waste go nuclear.
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No, the problem is a management that guesses that a substitution might be harmless. There is no way to design around that other than just saying anyone who makes an unauthorized substitution will lose a finger at least.
In this case, it shouldn't have been that hard to guess that organic matter wouldn't make a good substitution for inorganic clay.
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Try substituting ethanol for methanol in your whiskey. They're both alcohol...
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Why is why those cleaning products have labels on them that say "do not mix with any other cleaning product".
I believe the thinking (such as it is) goes something like:
"They're just trying to get you to not buy a competing product, once you've bought theirs... they are both cleaners, right?"
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The thinking of whom? The cleaning product makers or the customers who mix them anyway?
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No, wrong. It's nuclear waste disposal. It has a precise set of instructions and materials. Do not substitute anything for anything else without involving a nuclear waste disposal engineer. Don't even consider a different type of *steel* for the barrels--steel made from ore sourced from a different mine can have a much different chemical composition, including different levels of vanadium or copper or whatnot, so only used the approved material from the approved manufacturer operating on approved quali
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The really interesting question is who made the substitution and why. There is a lot of pressure to use COTS (commercial off the shelf) products to save money. Was this a case where the commercial products had the same or very similar names but were completely different? Was this someone trying to save money but not doing a proper review? Was it simply a blunder: accidentally ordering the wrong product?
Should certified "nuclear clean up absorbent powder" rather than kitty litter have been used in the fir
Reminds me of a crazy, hot girlfriend (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuclear energy is the crazy hot girlfriend of energy. She may be nice, kind, and wonderful for days, months, or years - maybe decades. But someday, somehow, she's going to go berserk on you. 100% chance. And cleaning up the mess at that point will leave you with a very long term scar.
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*holds up hand for high-five*
No one? No one? Whatever, worth it.
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Your mom was worth more. :)
Re:Reminds me of a crazy, hot girlfriend (Score:5, Insightful)
You get an economic benefit from mistreating and neglecting her. If she freaks out, you don't have to pay for the outcome, the federals do. Just look at japan, where tepco now got money from the government to clean up the fukushima mess. And in this case, the feds have to pay as well.
So if there is no consequence to fear, why shouldn't you mistreat and neglect her?
Re:Reminds me of a crazy, hot girlfriend (Score:4, Informative)
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> still far safer, cleaner, more efficient and better than coal, gas, wind, solar etc etc.
This got voted -1, but statistically, nuclear actually does cause the lowest number of deaths per MWh energy produced.
http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2... [nextbigfuture.com]
There really is nothing safer than nuclear, and the facts back this up. Still, when did /. moderation ever have anything to do with reality?
Re:Reminds me of a crazy, hot girlfriend (Score:4, Insightful)
Deaths per MWh is a really bad metric though. It ignores the vast economic damage, the loss of valuable land, the social ramifications of losing whole towns and communities. The people who were evacuated from the area around Fukushima may still be alive, but their lives were blighted by what happened and they are still struggling to get compensation for what they have lost.
Even once cleaned up, those towns and communities won't just magically appear again. A lot of people moved away permanently, found new jobs. After years of decay and unrepaired earthquake damage many of the buildings need to be torn down and replaced, but the insurance money and compensation payouts have already been spent elsewhere setting up new homes and businesses. That's why many of the residents are pushing for the full value of their homes and property - if TEPCO can argue that repairs are cheaper, they will be left with largely worthless buildings that no-one wants in a place with no economic prospects.
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In economies, you expand population until you end up with the haves and the have-nots. 40% of the American workforce turns over every year, and there are job postings everywhere; the 5% unemployed have 6 months of unemployment insurance before they run out, and our unemployment system thus relies on some of that 40% turn-over ending up unemployed as someone else snaps up their job and escapes the jaws of economic death.
A nuclear accident wobbles your economy for sure. Some source of production is gone,
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This got voted -1, but statistically, nuclear actually does cause the lowest number of deaths per MWh energy produced.
Because nuclear leaves waste that persists for thousands of years, you don't get to determine how many deaths nuclear power causes for thousands of years. You can only determine how many it's caused so far. There's plenty of time for inadequate waste management practices to kill more people.
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Shortcut (Score:2)
Seriously? The Japanese with what looks to an outsider like ridiculous amounts of infrastructure to deal with tsunamis didn't understand?
It's been mentioned frequently elsewhere that the initial design would have dealt with it but to save costs it was done in a different way.
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Right. If only those assholes in the 1950s would have designed a perfect system without the benefit of 60 years of hindsight and iterative process improvement, and without the 60 years of improved understanding of nuclear physics, and 60 years of improved tools. You know, like computers actually existing now instead of doing the whole fucking thing on blue paper and chalkboards with a slide rule.
What a bunch of assholes.
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Masataka Shimizu, president and CEO of TEPCO, is now an executive director at Fuji Oil.
Coincidence?
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Nuclear energy is the crazy hot girlfriend of energy. She may be nice, kind, and wonderful for days, months, or years - maybe decades. But someday, somehow, she's going to go berserk on you. 100% chance.
She wouldn't have gone off on you, if you hadn't also been porking Coal, Oil, Solar, and now that bitch Wind!
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> Nuclear energy is the crazy hot girlfriend of energy. She may be nice, kind, and wonderful for days, months, or years - maybe decades. But someday, somehow, she's going to go berserk on you. 100% chance. And cleaning up the mess at that point will leave you with a very long term scar.
Coal is the dysfunctional fat chick that'll take anyone for a ride, but eventually comes knocking on your door pregnant and tagging along a few babies, named Katrina, Sandy, Ike, .... Keep banging coal and whatever life y
Re:Reminds me of a crazy, hot girlfriend (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, except nowhere in this article is anything about nuclear power actually mentioned. This article, and storage facility, are for the waste coming from nuclear weapons production and research.
I guess that's "nuclear energy" in a way, but commercial nuclear energy generation has vastly different waste outputs, with completely different handling procedures. For example, you usually don't have liquid radioactive waste [wikipedia.org] that needs blotting up and stored in barrels, because you haven't dissolved the nuclear material in nitric acid in order to extract the remaining plutonium and uranium from all the other crap you don't want.
Harry Reid (Score:2)
It's a damn good thing that Harry Reid and Obama was able to stop an investment in containing things like this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] - or so I am told.
Me? I think it was stupid to stop it.
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A far better location would be a bit west of that in California.
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Apples to Oranges (Score:5, Informative)
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It should be noted that the waste was from nuclear weapons production not nuclear power.
That makes it hard to spot the News for Nerds angle. If it was power generation we could assume that someone used the electricity to charge a Tesla or run a computer mining bitcoin.
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Unless you do reprocessing.
Then you produce the exact same waste as in nuclear weapons programs.
No big deal (Score:2)
No outside contamination and a badly written cost plus contract.
If that's as bad as it gets, it's pretty damn good.
Forget it, Jake, it's New Mexico (Score:2)
How did anyone even notice that there had been a nuclear accident in New Mexico? It already looks like Fallout 3. I'm pretty sure there are already feral ghouls and radscorpions there.
But anyway, any excuse to play this:
https://youtu.be/GFfaR3I--zI [youtu.be]
Slashdot noticed (Score:3)
We need a solution... (Score:2)
Need to compare on an energy generated basis (Score:4, Interesting)
Three Mile Island has been operating since 1974 generating on average 6645 GWh of electricity each year (yes it's still operating). At the U.S. average of 11.5 cents/kWh, that's $764.2 million/yr worth of electricity. Over it's 42 year history, that would be $32.1 billion worth of electricity generated by the plant.
So the $2 billion to clean up the partial meltdown of TMI reactor #2 amounted to an extra 11.5 * 2 / 32.1 = 0.72 cents per kWh.
Now consider that TMI was the only major commercial nuclear accident in U.S. history, and nuclear power in the U.S. has generated 24,196,167 GWh between 1971-2015 [nei.org]. Then the $2 billion cost to clean up TMI works out to just 0.0083 cents per kWh.
Now consider that mdsolar's favored solar receives a subsidy of 96.8 cents per kWh [ncpa.org]. Or in other words, per unit of energy generated, the subsidy for solar is 11,711x more expensive than cleaning up TMI was.
Re:Need to compare on an energy generated basis (Score:5, Insightful)
Can you honestly put your hand on your heart and say the true decommissioning costs of these nuclear plants are built into the prices today? I don't think anyone can. We have properly decommissioned and cleaned up so few nuclear plants that all of the cost estimates I see have a massive risk of cost overruns associated with them. The unfortunate feature of such a long-lived asset and then waste stream is that it's very hard to price in the true cost and the community end up wearing the risk if these are miscalculated. I don't claim malice or conspiracy, just that pricing long term costs is really, really hard.
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Can you honestly put your hand on your heart and say the true decommissioning costs of these solar plants are built into the prices today?
Yes nuke plants have a lot of nasty radioactive materials but solar panels and electronics have a lot of nasty materials of their own that most people ignore.
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Can you honestly put your hand on your heart and say the true decommissioning costs of these solar plants are built into the prices today?
Of new ones? Yes. Modern panels are required to be recyclable. But even of old ones, it's not anywhere near as big a deal as it is to decommission a nuclear plant. It's not the same ballpark. It ain't even the same motherfuckin' sport.
Yes nuke plants have a lot of nasty radioactive materials but solar panels and electronics have a lot of nasty materials of their own that most people ignore.
Not a lot. A small amount. A tiny, minuscule amount compared to nuclear waste. Nice FUD though, troll.
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That's a bad comparison, not comparing like-for-like. Solar is still developing rapidly and the subsidies are falling away, so a fairer comparison would be with the money invested in developing nuclear from the early days. It's difficult to do because a lot of that investment was for military purposes, but it's still a very significant amount of money.
In any case, what really matters is the economics of the two options today. Nuclear is vastly more expensive than renewables in Europe, maybe someone else has
Re: Need to compare on an energy generated basis (Score:2)
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Bitch your ass is subsidized by the fucking NUCLEAR FURNACE in the sky.
You claim to know of subsidies but refuse to acknowledge that your very own subsidy is provided by multiple things.
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Since uranium runs out, the subsidies for nuclear never tend to zero the way the do for solar which can produce energy without bound long after subsidies end.
Uranium doesn't "run out" if you use breeder reactors. They effectively have fuel indefinitely.
Solar panels are good for about 20 years. That's what the three major Solar sales companies in the Bay Area said, when they visited my house, and we talked about it. Sadly, on the lease program, Solar City was not willing to install updated panels when better panels became available: I was stuck with them for the "full lifetime of 20 years". Also on the lease programs, all three companies owned the panels on m
Re:uranium runs out (Score:5, Interesting)
This.
Just reprocessing fuel from ordinary reactors and putting the unburnt plutonium and U235 back into new fuel rods greatly increases the years of proven reserves we have of uranium. Breeders ups it another order of magnitude. Beyond that, ion exchange processes have demonstrated extraction of uranium from sea water. This was demonstrated by the Japanese back in 1970something, at a cost of a few hundred dollars per pound. Not economical now, but at some point it would be.
Not to mention thorium. My CRC Handbook says that the available energy in the earth's crust from thorium is greater than uranium and all fossil fuels put together; thorium is about as common as lead.
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> Not to mention thorium. My CRC Handbook says that the available energy in the earth's crust from thorium is greater than uranium and all fossil fuels put together; thorium is about as common as lead.
The problem appears to be that you can't make plutonium from thorium.
And plutonium is the military industrial's buy in.
Otherwise it's just relatively inexpensive, safe energy. Clearly nobody actually wants that.
On point, the explosion in question was waste from nuclear weapons production.
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Uhm, Actually, one of the byproducts in a Thorium LFTR design is P-238 (which is used in "nuclear batteries").
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Good catch. Thorium can't be used to produce weaponizable plutonium. My recollection is:
P-239 is weapons-grade plutonium.
U-238 is weapons-grade uranium.
P-238 is an alpha emitter, degrading to U-234(5?) (i.e. it skips U-238).
Thorium produces P-238 (and not P-239/U-238), so it is not useful for nuclear fission weapons.
In any case, I recall back in the debate about uranium or thorium reactors, DoD refused to produce Thorium precisely because they cannot be used to produce nuclear weapons.
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Just how many operating commercial breeder reactors are there? Exactly, just two, both in Russia. There are other two, in India and Japan, but these are just research reactors. Even the reactors in Russia are still considered prototypes. Breeders are very difficult and expensive to build and operate. Solar power is cheap as dirt compared to the cost of operating a breeder reactor.
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Just how many operating commercial breeder reactors are there? Exactly, just two, both in Russia.
OMG, Russian? - We're All Gonna Die!
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Most solar PV panels are guaranteed for 20-25 years, but should last much longer than the guarantee. We have 40 year old panels still going strong.
The problem with breeders and thorium reactors is that they are unproven on commercial scale. Every time anyone has attempted them, there have been many serious and expensive problems. Thus no-one wants to invest in such a risky proposition, except governments where cost isn't the primary motivating factor.
In any case, even the current reactors are way too expens
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There's the whole heat death of the universe to worry about as well. It's just as much of a problem to is as uranium running out.
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Uranium will never run out. We have enough depleted uranium sitting around unused as by-product of enrichment process to power the entire earth for 10,000 years if utilized in fast reactors. That is just the uranium sitting around in barrels now. Not including all known uranium deposits, all unknown uranium deposits, uranium recoverable from spent fuel, and uranium distilled from seawater. And not to even mention thorium, which is much more abundant than uranium.
Re: uranium runs out (Score:2)
What's the lesson here? (Score:2)
Say what?! (Score:2)
"When a drum containing radioactive waste blew up..."
I about dropped my jaw when I read that. "What!?" I said to myself. Then poking around, I found that it was the Kitty Litter accident as I call it. The drum did not "blow up" in the sense of explosion, either chemical or criticality, but the kitty litter used expanded and burst the container. Ok, that was pretty stupid (the kitty litter).
What exceeds "Dumb as a box of rocks with all the smart rocks thrown out" followed that trying to clean it up.
"Blew Up?" (Score:2)
They make it sound like there was some sort of big explosion. There wasn't. One drum ruptured, and leaked some radioactive material.
The material wasn't high level, and only trace amounts made it through the facility.
Someone's looking for a lucrative payout.
And yet, this cost more ... (Score:2)
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What we invested into O's solar project: http://m.washingtontimes.com/n [washingtontimes.com]...
Solyndra was an obvious scam and Obama should be taken to task for funding it. But the other solar investments paid out, which proves the point that solar isn't bad. Corporatism is.
Welcome back (Score:2)
We missed you mdsolar. Was your summer break good? Slashdot just wasn't the same without your alarmist contributions.
Re:Welcome back (Score:4, Informative)
Well... (Score:2)
Need safe reliable rockets and just blast the waste into the sun rather than leaving it here on Earth to waste taxpayers money....
Re: Well... (Score:2)
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Informative)
Because someone has to pay for the mishap. And that is in this case the feds.
So, essentially a $2 billion subvention for nuclear technology.
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Informative)
To be fair it looks like we are going to subsidize any type of energy production though; by allowing climate change we are collectively giving a much bigger hand out to the fossil fuel industry. Don't misunderstand, I'm not saying let people off the hook for actually causing problems like this or trying to be dismissive of the actual problems, but realistically, since it looks like we're already dealing with the externalities of energy, $2 billion dollars is still less than we will be paying for fossil fuels over the long run. It still sucks, but before anyone jumps on the inevitable anti-nuclear soapbox, don't forget that we're all subsidizing energy in one way or another.
This has nothing to do with energy, this is waste from nuclear weapons production.
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Sure. And it's being stored away in casks, rather than being reprocessed.because of silly laws by people who think that somebody's going to make bombs out of it.
Also, it's being stored away in casks, rather than being used in reactor types that could cook it down into a form of waste that's far less long-lived.
Also, it's being stored away in casks, rather than the byproducts being dumped into the environment at large the way fossil fuel power production does.
So how cheap would fossil fuel-based power be if
Re:It did what it was designed to do (Score:5, Informative)
It contained the leak, yes, and the public is in no danger, but for workers in that facility it's a real problem, hence the cleanup expense
The amount of radioactivity released was estimated [energy.gov] at 2 to 10 plutonium-equivalent Curies - not a small amount. While you could walk through the room and receive an insignificant dose from a meter away, if even a tiny fraction of that got into your body (e.g. via the contaminated ventilation system), that's an entirely different matter - close-range exposure for days or months is far more serious.
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We don't get idiocy like this with oil storage anymore due to multiple levels of containment built to handle the maximum amount stored in an area.
Maybe we should treat this like a Three Mile Island event which resulted in monitoring systems going from below regulations for a fertilizer plant to the systems we have today. That accident was a perfect example of a huge shock that hurt nobody - a wakeup call that could have been far worse and led to som
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We don't get idiocy like this with oil storage anymore due to multiple levels of containment built to handle the maximum amount stored in an area.
We still have idiocy like this in oil pipelines and rail transport, though. Oil pipelines are single-walled.
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well it seems to work for me
But you wouldn't like him when he's angry...
Re:No, that can't be right (Score:5, Informative)
This is not from nuclear energy. This waste is from our nuclear weapons program, so bill it against the DOD.
Re:No, that can't be right (Score:4, Insightful)
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Any energy source has a better ROI than the nuclear weapons this waste came from.