Some bombs use essentially tiny wind turbines to measure fall, and ready the fuse when far enough from the releasing plane...
Now who's the militarist? :)
All existing nuclear powerplants are shitty Fukushima-style pressurized light water reactors in the US, are they not?
I'd have to think this company is an incumbent blocking entry of modern designs. Is this really a bad thing?
The people working for this company are a matter of national security. I sure hope Secretary Mattis understands that.
This, also, by the way, is a great illustration of Elon Musk's contention that these technologies don't just keep working. Brilliant, competent engineers and scientists have to invest themselves in making them work.
On the other hand, this does keep the number of people in the industry small. Sure, demonization of the power source, and regulatory standards that inhibit the development of new technologies also help, but it seems like this would be a problem regardless.
I've always wondered what the demand/pay is for engineers looking to enter the nuclear industry is like.
Seeing technology become outdated after 3-4 years is kind of amazing in all the wrong ways.
Don't get me wrong, I understand that what we're really seeing is explosive advances, and to think about being stuck where we were 3-4 years ago, frozen in time, without permission to advance is a horrible thought.
But at the same time, I hate not being about to used something I paid thousands of dollars for, less than five years later, because I scratched a CD-ROM, and downloads for compatible upgraded drivers are not supported.
Your water boiler hasn't changed in the past 70 years.
If a Naval unit has an issue, they'll attempt to reproduce it and develop a solution at a remote location. If they can't, they'll send an engineer across the planet to evaluate and fix it.
They do this even for not "critical" systems. I was impressed at that level of dedication.
It was this part that made me re-think whether or not I wanted the position. I wasn't ready to commit to being available to travel to the other side of the planet at a moment's notice if/when something goes wrong but I do appreciate the commitment.
The current rush to the bottom school of thought in cost-saving will have a serious detrimental effect on our military prowess. Sure, some people think that's a good thing but I do not.
Sending an expert to a remote site or a ship to fix a problem is a last resort.
My group used to have a list to sign up for going out on sea trials. I never got high enough on it to go. If you don't want to go, I doubt you would have to.
This is why I'm against nuclear power. As safe as the technology could be, it still run by humans who make errors.
If you think a bit being put in backwards isn't a big deal, check out the history of San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.
> The San Onofre station had technical problems over the years. In July 1982, Time wrote, "The firm Bechtel was ... embarrassed in 1977, when it installed a 420-ton nuclear-reactor vessel backwards" at San Onofre.
Backwards. The reactor was installed backwards.
It goes on.
> In 2008, the San Onofre plant received multiple citations over issues such as failed emergency generators, improperly wired batteries and falsified fire safety data. In its annual review of 2011, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) identified improvements but noted that in the area of human performance, "corrective actions to date have not resulted in sustained and measurable improvement”.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_...
Newer reactor designs can avoid these issues.
On a personal note, I grew up about 10-15 miles north of San Onofre, and I don't think many folks had an idea of how poorly that facility was run.
It's only recently that renewables have become a realistic alternative in some (but not all) cases, but for decades we've had people dropping like flies due to coal, entirely because the public is too science illiterate to understand that nuclear isn't anywhere as big of a deal by comparison.
1. https://sites.google.com/site/yarravalleyclimateactiongroup/...
Also they had a fin on one of the turbines of another reactor break off and it the reactor wall in the mid-2000s.
In a situation where something that severe (and malicious) is found, what would even be the short-term response? Are the management of the plant completely replaced?
The DoE does lots of work in Texas, and as former governor Perry had experience in working with them on managing the US's nuclear weapons stockpile. Part of his campaign platform in 2011 was to split the National Nuclear Security Administration out of the DoE and give it to the DoD.
In his statement accepting the nomination, he specifically called out the role of the DoE in safeguarding the US nuclear arsenal.
Otherwise don't let me stop the "hurr Durr stupid Republicans" circle jerk.
Couldn't remember the name of it either, but was going to get rid of it regardless!
My grandfather was a nuke eng for GE his entire career, built Hanford - he is the reason I got into what I do...
He died of cancer as they didnt quite yet know that radiation was a problem for human health when they started out...
My dads best friend was sec energy under reagan....
I am speechless with respect to how moronic this admin is to nuclear everything
That's putting it a bit strong, after all Marie Curie died of "aplastic anemia brought on by exposure to radiation" in 1934. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie
And "actress Midori Naka, present during the bombing, was studied extensively for radiation poisoning. Her death in 1945 was the first to be officially documented as having been caused by radiation poisoning" http://www.news-medical.net/health/Radiation-Poisoning-Histo...
So they might not have had good statistics but they certainly had reason to be cautious.
Of course radiation is also used to treat cancer, there is a good side to many things.
It should be impossible to install components backwards in a critical system (learned that when working on designs at Boeing).
and i'm pretty sure the secretary of defense "understands" the people who run his entire nuclear fleet are sort of important, the question is, does rick perry? magic 8 ball says: reply hazy.
Is this expressed in a paper, or conference that I can watch a video of?
Knowledge is a crucial part of that, too. The Saturn rocket program is a great example - if we decided to go back to the moon tomorrow, we'd be a decade or more in the doing of it, because all the people who knew how to build those rockets, and the tools to build those rockets, and the tools to build those tools, and so on - are by now retired or deceased. We'd have to figure all that stuff out all over again, as nearly from scratch as makes no odds. There's no reason to imagine any other similarly complex technology would be different.
Of course the company that builds nuclear plants can't succeed if new plants aren't being built. Westinghouse going under isn't going to destroy nuclear power, nuclear power was already dead.
The source of the troubles was Westinghouse's purchase of CB&I Stone & Webster, and it spun out of control.
It is sad to see that a energy giant is going bankrupt. End of an era for a Tesla fan, the company who believed in Tesla is going bankrupt.
This problem applies to mining as well, but very little mining has to occur near residential areas.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fue...
The salt mine Assen that they put some nuclear waste in is now flooded. Getting the nuclear waste back out will cost several billions. I don't think they will even do it. So they risk contaminating ground water. That alone can be a cost of several billion.
And even if they do clean it up they are back to square zero in their quest for long term storage.
"In Chapter 11, in most instances the debtor remains in control of its business operations as a debtor in possession, and is subject to the oversight and jurisdiction of the court." [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapter_11,_Title_11,_United_S...
Chinese are building reactors as fast as they can. They are buying reactors designs from all main manufacturers. There are 21 reactors under construction and they are three years late on average because manufacturers can't get these next generation reactors ready.
Nuclear reactors being constantly late and exceeding their budgets is not new. This was true in 60's and 70's and it's true now.
http://www.oldmodelkits.com/index.php?detail=15662
You can even buy one today for the low price of $1250:
1. The supply of nuclear expertise and trained professionals is shrinking. Thus, nuclear EPC + O&M goes up. This article cites this factor at least 3x in different paragraphs. Though, that's great news for current nukes!
2. LCOE (EPC + O&M) forecasts show nuclear on par with substitutes. I'm not taking on the ESG risks of nuclear to achieve price parity.
[1] https://pdf.inforuptcy.com/pacer/nysbke/273388/dockets/4/1-C...
Has HN ever looked into clustering news using Google News to do it?
Reason I ask is how HN's de-dup filter works is puzzling to me and related stories would likely be useful to pool comments/de-dup/etc on a single news event.
Example of dups, clusters, themes on HN on this event: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=westinghouse&sort=byDate&prefi...
Google News cluster: https://news.google.com/news/m/more?ncl=dGww1eRZGqsOScMMCg3U...
Now, in a sense, there was a duplicate, but because the URL didn't match, it didn't count. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=https:%2F%2F*.nytimes.com%2F20... The de-dupe filter would've turned new submissions of your post into votes for your post, if it had caught the duplicate.
That being said, I don't think HN is designed to pool discussion over time, preferring to archive discussion of each story. At this point, you can't even upvote older posts; they can only be added to your favorites.
Not concerned about the votes, just curious if the topic of canonical URLs, clusters, etc. had come up.
http://www.ajc.com/business/psc-approves-georgia-power-rate-...
"January 2013: $1.05, third part of the three-tiered rate increase; 31-cent increase for energy-efficiency programs; 85-cent increase for Plant Vogtle
Note: Figures are amounts added or reduced on a typical monthly bill based on usage of 1,000 kilowatt hours"
Tesla sells patents for A.C. Polyphase System to George Westinghouse for $25,000 in cash, $50,000 in notes and a royalty of $2.50 per horsepower for each motor.
https://teslauniverse.com/nikola-tesla/timeline/1888-tesla-s...
Some tangential history regarding Westinghouse for fun.
But to those are actively working in a US Reactor Complex - you're working the dream I hope to achieve one day. Good job.
Its current incarnation is now CBS corporation which licenses out the Westinghouse name to other corporations.
> Westinghouse purchased CBS in 1995 and became CBS Corporation in 1997. In 1998, CBS established a brand licensing subsidiary Westinghouse Licensing Corporation (Westinghouse Electric Corporation). In 1997/1998 the Power Generation Business Unit, headquartered in Orlando, FL, was sold to Siemens AG, of Germany. A year later, CBS sold all of its nuclear power businesses to British Nuclear Fuels Limited (BNFL). Soon after, BNFL gained license rights on the Westinghouse trademarks and they used those to reorganize their acquired assets as Westinghouse Electric Company. That company was sold to Toshiba in 2007.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westinghouse_Electric_Corporat...
My dad was always in nuclear though (well, after a brief stint at Tektronix).
Was it a court injunction that put the Vogtle project behind schedule? Local citizen protests? "Direct action" work disruption from Greenpeace hardliners? Nope! The locals are mostly looking forward to the tax revenue and employment boost from the new reactors. The project has had no legal interruptions nor on-site activist-disruptors. Whatever has gone wrong with these new reactor projects originates inside the nuclear industry itself.
(I was happy about the new AP1000 builds until they blew their budgets and schedules. Same with the disastrous EPR projects. I still believe that nuclear power is safe enough, certainly safer than continuing to burn fossils for electricity. But at this point I'll only believe the industry's next "this project will be faster and cheaper to build, I swear" promise five years after the project has met all objectives and demonstrated smooth commercial operation.)
Thus your argument does not support your conclusion, since regulations come from outside the industry.
Westinghouse is a bit of a special case. There was accounting/financial fraud and they took on stupid fixed contracts that bit them in the ass when safety regulations forced them to spend more on design/construction.
For as maligned as the nuclear industry is, a lot of this was self-inflicted.
However it seems the real reason, as in all things, is economics. They're just too damn expensive to build and run, and the expected returns on investment take an extremely long time to materialise(20+ years) Noone wants to put up the enormous capital, with the very real risk that they'll never see returns as the alternative energy markets(gas, solar, etc) are evolving and dropping in price so quickly. I know I'd be pretty hesitant taking a half billion dollar 30 year bet against technology.
The economics might be different if we paid for the real cost of carbon-based energy, instead of imposing that cost on the world as an externality.
Who's going to invest a billion dollars to build a new facility when they know that at any step along the way, some half-wit celebrity can decide that they want to buy property in the area and they don't want to live near a nuclear power plant, start protests and cause the project to be delayed or scrapped.
Continuing to run an old design is a very big part of how we ended up with the current situation with Fukushima.
[0] http://www.naic.org/cipr_topics/topic_nuclear_liability_insu...
In many ways this wound on Westinghouse (and nuclear power) is self inflicted. As engineers moved out of senior management and politicians moved in in the late 70's, the company became less about moving technology forward and more about 'getting money for management'. It really lost its way.
I expect that the Chinese nuclear power industry will become nearly all of the civilian reactors by the end of this century.
All of this is just armchair reasoning though. I have not the faintest idea what the most expensive parts of building a reactor are.
The cost overruns were absolutely ghastly and made the plants way too expensive. All the cost was charged to consumers on their electric bills. Nobody in their right mind will order more nuclear plants when they see the expensive disaster that the currently built nuclear plants are.
There is also no accountability on the part of the customer companies either.
The public service commission pretty much votes to allow ga power to pass the costs to the rate payer.
Georgia Rate payers are already paying for the cost of votgle 3&4 in the form of rate increases when their completion is no where in sight.
It's interesting that the fossil fuels do far more harm, but nuclear is what everyone fears. (In fairness, nuclear problems do far more harm locally to the plant.)
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
Air pollution deaths are "normal operation" not catastrophic event. Whereas normal operation deaths for nuclear is essentially 0, where deaths happen as a result of catastrophe. So there is something of a lizard brain mentality going on when it comes to near term risk assessment. I think the rational arguments pretty much are all economic: they're expensive and basically even a highly regulated and subsidized "free market" has said this isn't worth it and we can't make it work.
Other political factors such as the inherit stigma around nuclear and the upheaval of the defense-sector supply chain make them a harder sell.
What is probably dead is the idea of a highly regulated and subsidized monopoly nuclear industry. Whereas an entirely state own industry is still making a go of it, but we'll see what China does with all their nuclear power plants in 15-30 years.
The whole saga is bizarre because CB&I sued Westinghouse claiming it was paid too little for S&W [1] a few months after the sale was finalized, and then a few months later sued Westinghouse again [2] seeking to wipe out their liabilities in the S&W's businesses.
[1] http://www.powermag.com/cbi-sues-westinghouse-over-2b-closin... [2] https://www.bna.com/chicago-bridge-iron-n73014448199/
It's fraud - people refusing to tell or put things down on official financial reports, writing false statements, signing false financial reports, using non GAAP, unusual accounting methods, etc. Also, audits and due diligence didn't uncover the magnitude of the problem. It took a whistleblower to get the story out to upper management.
https://www.thestar.com/business/2017/02/14/toshiba-chairman...
this article outlines the contract issues, but there were other issues at play at the same time
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-toshiba-accounting-working...
I think only having power sources cheaper than carbon will fix it. Which could potentially include sources cheaper because a carbon tax forces carbon prices to include their externalities.
Perhaps renewables can scale up, but last I heard that wasn't realistic on the time scale humanity needs. Does anyone have good information on that question?
http://www.reuters.com/article/france-power-winteroutlook-id...
(Reuters claims that there wasn't enough spare capacity in Germany; in fact the transfer capacity of ~2 GW was the limiting factor; http://www.iwr.de/news.php?id=32860)
For what it's worth, I think the temperatures improved before the more drastic measures had to be implemented. And of course people are free to argue that taking those French plants down for review was an overreaction by an overly critical nuclear regulation regime.
If I had a nickel for every time.
Nuclear power has no excuses. The cost of accidents is astronomical and uninsurable. That's not a regulatory cost unless you think a risk of that magnitude should "go naked" in some free-market fantasy of handling uninsurable risks.
It sure would be nice if there was a grid-scale power source that emitted no CO2. But it's not anyone else's fault but the nuclear industry that we don't have such a thing.
The excuse for incidents like Fukushima are "Well, they made these mistakes...". Personally, I'd rather not risk zero-notice forced evacuations, permanent quarantine zones, and making significant portions of populated land uninhabitable for centuries on some people not making mistakes.
For those who write this off, there are some very tragic photo essays from Pripyat and Fukushima that can make this impact feel very real. Do you want to risk that happening to your area?
Already do. 55% of my state's power comes from Nuclear.
Coal releases 100x more radiation and 68x more CO2 than nuclear for equal energy production. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/202/4372/1045
And it isn't like coal is immune from having zero-notice forced evacuation, and making land uninhabitable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...
That's an exaggeration. Even if containment were to fail completely on all reactors at Fukushima, the release of radioactive products would make some area uninhabitable and cost a lot of money, but won't lead to even a large loss of life, let alone extinction.
I agree that Fukushima could get hella messy if not dealt with right over the next decades.. but 'extinction level' seems a tad dramatic?
For example, if the hydraulics are hooked up backwards, the controls are reversed, which is a disaster. So the design:
1. uses different port sizes for the input and output 2. one port uses left hand threads, the other right hand 3. the lines are physically not long enough to reach the wrong port 4. very clear labeling 5. inspections and signoffs
Except the losses come from the construction of new reactors (the AP1000 for the Vogtle and Summer plants), not the operation of them.
I would love to see a full breakdown of the budget on some nuclear power plants, but I have not yet seen anybody provide evidence that R&D or unnecessary regulations are significant enough of a cost burden that reducing them by a factor of 10 would make nuclear more cost competitive.
It looked very similar to this:
https://img1.etsystatic.com/163/0/7022168/il_340x270.1212341...
They are all passed - so I dont have the details, I just recall having some minor conversations with my grandma about this.
That generation was fiercely quiet and corporate loyal...
From the bankruptcy declaration:
As described in more detail below, the Debtors’ need to avail themselves of the protections of the Bankruptcy Code arises primarily from a series of unforeseen challenges that significantly delayed and increased the cost of construction of the nuclear plants in Georgia and South Carolina (referred to as Vogtle and VC Summer, respectively). These challenges potentially expose the Debtors to billions of dollars either in (i) cost overruns to complete the projects or (ii) penalties and liabilities if they abandon the projects. The Debtors cannot afford either option. Notwithstanding that the Debtors’ other businesses are profitable and world-class, the Construction Business cost increases have led to a liquidity crisis that the Debtors can only solve in chapter 11.
...
The Construction Business division delivers both new-plant projects and major projects for new and already operating nuclear power plants globally. It consists of two business segments: (1) engineering, procurement, and construction (“EPC”) services for customers around the globe, primarily offering the AP1000 technology; and (2) engineering and procurement (“E&P”) services, such as design, equipment, and site installation and startup support, to both AP1000 and non AP1000 projects. While some portions of the Construction Business are profitable, the main portion of the EPC business, which constructs the Vogtle and VC Summer projects, has damaged the profitability of the entire Construction Business. As a result, the Construction Business generated EBITDA from FY2013 to FY2015 of negative $343 million. As described in detail below, these losses have accelerated in the past 15 months following the Company’s purchase of CB&I Stone & Webster, Inc. (“S&W”).
https://pdf.inforuptcy.com/pacer/nysbke/273388/dockets/4/1-C...
(Thanks to mikikian for linking this declaration elsewhere in the discussion. All of Part III, "Events Leading to Chapter 11", is worth reading.)
EDIT: if you're talking about the valuation dispute around the Chicago Bridge & Iron acquisition, pg 22, that is presented as a $2 billion problem. The construction projects have another $6 billion worth of expenses now estimated necessary to complete before 2020 (pg 23-24). It's not clear that Westinghouse could dig itself out of this hole even if the money pit was only $6 billion deep instead of $8 billion.
It's only gotten more expensive as time has gone on.
Like, one of the first projects I worked on was diagnosing a malfunctioning valve where most of the work was finite element analysis on computers, but we still had to send someone to take measurements and temperature readings since the company that made the valve no longer existed (and I'm not sure how you'd ship something like that since it was very large and used with contaminated water)
You usually get much better results when you work in a well equipped lab and have access to the right experts. For anything non-trivial "replicate, understand, fix, deploy" is a much better approach. Not always possible, and when it is not going to site may be the only option, but it should be fallback, not primary path. My 2c.
I spend part of my time developing large, real time, visible systems and when things do not go as planned there is always a lot of pressure to go on site now and "just fix it". I have taken my lumps to learn that the right approach is to say "no, we will start in our lab".
The boiler will get software updates until the next 3-4 year cycle, then you will need to buy a new boiler to get the latest BoilerOS(tm) that adds the ability to remotely set the temperature. No need for that to be secure...What's the worst that could happen??? It's just a boiler...
You can expect a nastygram from the BSA(Boiler Software Alliance) for your attempt to circumvent their DRM.
https://www.recode.net/2015/5/5/11562326/hps-5-billion-fraud...
The health effects have been small in Sweden, but it still affects our quality of life, in the sense that we have to be vary of what we eat.
If we keep having an incident every 15-20 years, it will potentially affect large areas, and another incident in Europe might be unfathomably expensive.
Has nothing to do with lizard brain mentalities but a lot with the history/culture in different regions of the world and the false dichotomy of "anti nuclear = pro coal".
The US never had a large scale catastrophic event like Chernobyl happen to it, something that's burned deep into many people of Europe to this day. From one day to another, millions of people had been told they shouldn't eat the "fruits of the land" anymore. When I grew up my family used to regularly gather mushrooms in the woods, that just stopped just like eating any game meat, that had a huge impact which can be felt to this day.
For most US Americans that scenario is only a theoretical one they played trough in pretend during the cold war but for many Europeans Chernobyl made it an way too scary actual reality.
Because solar farms are disastrous to the environment as they sterilize the ecosystem in their shade.
Because Thorium is neither rare nor cumbersome.
This is also somewhat surprising because the previous-gen projects in France are usually seen as an example of a fairly well managed nuclear industry, with construction coming in reasonably close to budgeted cost, and a good safety record.
For some reason I get the feeling that such people are not paid in the millions. Maybe double or triple a traditional salary but not in the executive-bonus tier. Do they deserve to be?
I can't wait for Nucly, the only reactor control panel for iOS and Android.
Not the kind of startup you'd hear about on HN of course.
And no, I don't know what the motivation was for the nuclear power plant to issue a RFP that involved web dashboards. Maybe upgrading their interfaces from the analog ones built in the 80's?
[1] more of an internship
[2] not quite a startup, more of a spinoff iirc
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kr%C5%A1ko_Nuclear_Power_Plant
Apparently hacking plutonium is not easily accomplished.
See COBOL.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darlington_Nuclear_Generating_...
update: added link
the cost of shutting down San Onofre is $4B+
From stories I've heard, in these situations people like to come in not as employees but as consultants, at which point there are many hundreds of dollars per hour spent.
https://ntguardian.wordpress.com/2017/03/13/on-programming-l...
This is one of the things I've noticed about a lot of nuclear advocacy. Though there's often appeals to science and reason, the main driver appears to be an emotional one. There's the claim that the real interest is in combating global warming, but many advocates have shown no interest in learning about the best ways to combat global warming. Their interest seems to start and stop with advocacy for their preferred solution, whether or not it's even a good solution to the problem.
[1] https://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publicatio... [2] https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-08/documents...
Don't get me wrong. I think efficiency is good. I'm just not sure it actually can reduce emissions globally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_st...
> 1,917 deaths
> 26,000 dead from flooding, 145,000 dead from subsequent famine and epidemics, 11 million homeless.
> 1800 - 25000 people killed
> 75 fatalities, due to turbine failure
There's also the part where we have tapped out the Earth's exploitable hydro capacity. Hydro output is expected to grow by ~20% by 2050. [1]
Unfortunately, it needs to grow by ~200%, if we want it to replace even half of the electricity currently generated by coal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity#Future_potent...
Dams hold back silt and sediment essential to farm land and despite everything you learned about fish ladders and salmon, they don't really work as well as the power companies say.
Plus carbon pollutants are known to be carcinogenic.
it's a public park!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rancho_Seco_Nuclear_Generating...
(it's actually a nice area and the lake is decent.)
You're saying that you trust an industry that...
> In 2008, the San Onofre plant received multiple citations over issues such as failed emergency generators, improperly wired batteries and falsified fire safety data. In its annual review of 2011, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) identified improvements but noted that in the area of human performance, "corrective actions to date have not resulted in sustained and measurable improvement”.
There's a history of human error and negligence within the industry. That history of errors and negligence is why I am against nuclear power.
So keeping in mind that incompetence and fraud are commonplace and not something industry-specific, you have to consider what the numbers tell you about the safety of each option, and those numbers turn out to favour nuclear energy. Keep in mind that those statistics implicitly take into account all that incompetence and fraud you're worried about.
I sure as heck wouldn't try it on my 1999 Golf. I can't even change the headlight bulb.
In case it wasn't clear, my point is that this history of errors and negligence is present in literally every industry. Literally all of them.
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/coal-and-gas-are-far-more-...
Nuclear has saved an immense number of preventable deaths.
Coal is the dirtiest, most dangerous form of energy production available.
>...Also, the radiation from nuclear disasters is highly concentrated, while that from coal is distributed at far lower concentrations.
The radiation emissions from a properly working coal plant are high enough that the plant would be shut down if the NRC regulated coal plants. But the real danger from coal plants is the massive amounts of CO2 that they emit which is one of the biggest contributors to climate change that might end up destroying our future. It is pretty obvious which power source is more dangerous.
Not sure how you could quantify the respective environmental damage, either financially or ecologically.
But there is another effect to consider: total monetary damage. Deepwater Horizon cost BP $62 billion pre-tax[0]. The total cost of Fukushima including victim compensation is currently estimated at about $180 billion[1], but the estimate has skyrocketed over the past 6 years, so one could suspect further escalation.
[0] http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2016/07/14/bp-deepwater-...
From your link:
>the spill caused a mudflow wave of water and ash that covered 12 homes, pushing one entirely off its foundation, rendering three uninhabitable, and caused some damage to 42 residential properties. [...] Though 22 residences were evacuated, nobody was reported to be injured or in need of hospitalization. [...] [T]he spill [...] covered an area of 300 acres (1.2 km2).
42 homes were damaged, 4 to the point of destruction, and 22 homes were evacuated. There was zero human injury from this incident.
Although Wikipedia tries very hard to make it sound like the spill was massive, if you look at the real area affected, 300 acres is less than half of a single square mile, and that area can be cleaned up (if it hasn't been already). People can walk on the ground affected without having to watch a geiger counter, and no exclusion zone is required.
For reference, Fukushima's exclusion zone is about 12 sq miles and Chernobyl's exclusion zone is 1,000 square miles. (both numbers from the relevant Wikipedia entries)
Are you really trying to compare this minor accident to large-scale international incidents that have made caused the permanent evacuation of entire cities? Humans will not safely be able to live in those areas for decades.
The point is not that industrial accidents never happen or that they're pleasant or inconsequential when they do happen. The point is that the cost associated with nuclear accidents is massively higher, and it's entirely reasonable to find that risk unacceptable v. more controllable risks like greenhouse gas emissions.
Even dam breakage, which is about the next-largest threat profile for industrial disasters, won't create a permanently uninhabitable radius of literally-irradiated land. Maybe the land gets too wrecked to rebuild on? OK, but you're not going to get cancer by going to check it out.
It's silly to pretend like you can't tell the difference. Nuclear may be safe while it works, but the question "What happens when it stops working?" is just as important, if not more.
It's a great energy source. It's also incredibly dangerous, and cannot replace coal.
In case people are curious about this claim the reason Germany's "renewable energy" releases so much CO2 is because a large portion of their 'renewable energy' is burning wood.
Burning wood isn't "net neutral" until trees live over 100 years. Until then, it's worse than coal. http://www.pfpi.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/PFPI-Biomass-...
Most tree farms don't let trees grow 100 years either.
>Based on consumption trends in our region, using wood to generate power here or to make fuel pellets for power generation in Europe is projected to produce higher levels of atmospheric carbon(300%) than fossil fuels for 35 to 50 years. After that time, carbon levels will begin to fall as regrowing forests absorb CO2 from previous combustion, but it is likely too late to avoid irreversible effects on the climate system.
https://www.southernenvironment.org/cases-and-projects/bioma...
citation needed.
Now more seriously:
The human race would easily survive without seafish. Maybe in smaller numbers, but for example in the inlands people eat much less seafish, as they don't have seas nearby ;) A century ago not much seafish was available in the inlands, yet the European inland population was comparable in numbers to the current population.
Radioactive materials were in the ground already, and have been solved into water, which people drank, and had comparable life expectency (shorter, but also due to numerous other factors).
Poisoning the wells and ocean is not very good, especially for business, as many people are irrationally afraid of radiation, and even suspicion of possibility of radiation hurts just as much as actual hazardous contamination to the sales of a product. Apart from that it would truly cause large economic problems, as large areas would have to be excluded from agricultural use, yet nothing like extinction would happen. Even after Chernobyl some people are still alive in Eastern Europe. Even animals live mostly happily in the zone...
If you really want to go down that route then the human race can easily survive without clean air, water, ground or any animal life on this planet. Why would we need any of that? We, at least a few of us, could just as well be living in sealed underground bunkers powered by thermal energy while eating mushrooms all day and recycling our pee and sweat. Doesn't that sound like a lovely future? ;)
>A century ago not much seafish was available in the inlands, yet the European inland population was comparable in numbers to the current population.
They didn't need seafish because they did have enough land for agriculture, many other places, especially insular nation states and Asia in general, did not and do not have that luxury. I also doubt that current European inland population numbers are in any way comparable with the population numbers of a century ago, back in 1900 global population didn't even break 2 billion, now we are at over 7 billion.
That's ad hominem, Tex
And nuclear power generation also emits a very dangerous pollutant: nuclear waste.
I have a fundamental mistrust of the industry and our government's ability to properly regulate it. That mistrust is based on historical facts.
Even with newer designs, I think human error and regulatory capture is too dangerous to make nuclear viable.
The problem with nuclear is that it is so heavily regulated that every little mistake that would fly under the radar in any other industry is instead explicitly called out, cited, and a resolution demanded. Which gives great visibility. But then some people misleadingly characterize it as "more unsafe" simply because its more visible, when really the alternative (followed by coal, natural gas, solar, wind, hydro) is to not call problems out at all in the name of "deregulation" which is an absolutely more dangerous way to go about things.
I'm more worried about the coal plants that are still spewing ash and uranium into the atmosphere and killing people by the tens or hundreds of thousands every year.
Nuclear waste is stable, does not migrate when handled properly in containment pools, and can be reprocessed if required. All existing spent nuclear fuel in the united states is stored on-site. It's been that way since the beginning of the industry.
In contrast, particulate and greenhouse gas (including CO2) emissions from coal-fired plants migrate with the wind, often polluting areas far from the plant.
I don't see how you can compare the two.
It's true that spent fuel is very toxic but every single attempt to deal with this issue has been stymied with rampant NIMBYism and non-science based fear mongering.
You can control the operational risks associated with nuclear power. Doing so with fossil fueled plants is not nearly as easy.
That's the crux of the nuclear issue. Everything works great in the theoretical world where everything is handled properly, all factors are properly accounted for, and all tradeoffs were wisely made. That is simply not how the real world works, and Fukushima reminds us of that.
No matter how many failsafes you put in place, they will, at some point or another, be breached. The question is then "What happens when every failsafe fails, and is that risk acceptable compared to the alternatives?"
So long as it's stored in stable geologic formations, or controlled by stable human institutions. Where "stable" is a period of time longer than human history in many cases.
>does not migrate when handled properly in containment pools
Which are dependent on active management and security indefinitely. This is challenging as the service life of the plant where the pool is located and revenue is generated is less than indefinately.
> can be reprocessed if required.
Which is also a proliferation risk.
I am fighting an almost overpowering impulse to laugh and cry at the same time.
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-new-mexico-nuclear-dump-...
No, you get kicked out of life when you get diagnosed with cancer.
Until we get a couple more of degrees globally and we'll see floods in many coastal cities. Not to mention destroying the stability of weather we had for ~12,000 years and allowed farming to thrive.
What historical facts would those be? Historically nuclear has been about the safest form of mass power when looking at accidents:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents
Anything at all related to nuclear is covered by the media orders of magnitude more than other power sources so people have an understandable perception that it is much more dangerous than the reality. A recent example would be the evacuation at the Oroville dam - almost 200,000 people were forcibly evacuated since the worst case failure scenario would have have been a tidal wave of water 30 feet high rushing down stream. This made the news for maybe a day. Can you imagine the type of coverage the media would have given if 200,000 people had to be evacuated near a nuclear power plant?
http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/12/us/california-oroville-dam-fai...
NASA has estimated that using nuclear power has saved an estimated 1.8 million lives that would have been lost if the power has been replaced by coal/gas: https://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/coal-and-gas-are-far-more-...
(And yes, I know the people who oppose nuclear power usually will say they don't like coal and natural gas either, but we are going to need a predictable, reliable form of base load power for a long time. One of these three ways of generating electricity has much less health consequences than the other.)
So what does that tell you about the motivations of much of the movement that opposes nuclear and fossil fuels? They're not motivated by continued human flourishing, that's for sure.
Note the change from nuclear to coal.
Just so you know, you get more radiation from coal burning plants than nuclear plants.
Don't believe me: http://boingboing.net/2011/08/18/what-fukushima-can-teach-us...
Original paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/108/35/14422.abstract
tl;dr: Fukushima radioactivity measurements regularly get swamped by radioactive sulfur from coal burning plants in China.
Meanwhile how many people have died in propane bottling plant explosions? In coal mining? In off-shore drilling incidents?
It's not perfectly safe, not even close, but it's statistically one of the least dangerous power generation methods.
A lot of stuff that is theoretically guaranteed to be a disaster looks very safe and profitable until shortly before disaster strikes.
People are worried about automation, the nation that can cheaply power automated factories and server farms in the future will prosper.
This surprised me! So I Googled it. Is this your source? It is Wikipedia's source. Who are the 440 people dying per trillion kWh of rooftop solar? (note: this is rooftop solar; utility solar statistics aren't included in the below source)
[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents#Fatalities
There wasn't even a single tkWh of power produced by rooftop solar in 2012. The total solar (rooftop, commercial, and thermal) energy produced in the US in 2012 was 4,327 million kWh... or half a percent of 1 tkWh... making me think that the 'deathprint' of 440 deaths per tkWh for rooftop solar in 2012 was extrapolated by taking the number of people who slipped and fell off a roof and multiplying it by 200. My guess, based on the expression "Mortality Rate (deaths/trillionkWhr)", and the fact that less than 4.3 billion kWh of solar energy was produced in 2012 by rooftop solar (Wiki doesn't break out production by method), is that approximately two people have died in the quest for solar energy.
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_the_United_Stat...
Further - it is too soon to tell what the 'deathprint' for any given kWh of nuclear energy is. The method of production could kill someone for some time after the kWh is consumed.
When you pick a rock off the ground there's about an 80-90% chance it's very good quality silicon carbonates. Silicon metal can even be made from sand, dredged from underwater or excavated from topsoil. Sand is a readily available resource.
Silicon mining is the greenest mining process we have, and on a mass basis is better than the metal required for nuclear plants and fuel. Silicon refining involves some nasty chemicals (one gas in particular turns into solid sand once it hits the water on the inside of your lungs), but they are located in very good, very expensive, very safe equipment. They get regenerated so no chemicals escape the machinery (99.9999% retention).
The regulations haven't changed since the new American units began construction. Regulations were supposed to be factored in to the cost/schedule estimates. Yet the original cost/schedule estimates turned out to be badly mistaken. Being in a highly regulated industry (like making nuclear reactors, airliners, or pharmaceuticals) does increase costs over lightly regulated sectors. But it isn't an excuse for mis-estimating costs and schedules that were supposed to be developed considering those factors. Boeing would be in crisis too if every unit of its latest airliner were double-digit-percentages over budget and over allotted assembly time.
I've been following the American AP1000 projects for years. The contractors blame the sub-contractors. The new sub-contractors are behind schedule just like the old sub-contractors. Nobody actually involved with these projects, AFAICT, is blaming the cost/schedule problems on regulators. Pro-nuclear bloggers have still tried shifting the blame away from the industry and back to environmentalists/regulators/the public at large.
EDIT: here's what Georgia Power and Westinghouse alike believed about the new AP1000 design:
Plant Vogtle units 3 and 4 will be the first in the industry to use the Westinghouse AP1000 advanced pressurized water reactor technology. This advanced technology allows nuclear cores to be cooled even in the absence of operator interventions or mechanical assistance. The AP1000 is the safest and most economical nuclear power plant available in the worldwide commercial marketplace, and is the only Generation III+ reactor to receive Design Certification from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).
The AP1000's simplified plant design results in a plant that is easier and less expensive to to build, operate and maintain. The plant's design has:
+ 50 percent fewer valves
+ 35 percent fewer pumps
+ 80 percent less piping
+ 45 percent less building volume
+ 70 percent less cable
than earlier-generation nuclear plants. The modular design also allows for faster construction.
https://www.georgiapower.com/about-energy/energy-sources/nuc...
The builder and the buyer both believed that these reactors would be faster and cheaper to build than past designs, before they actually tried to build them.
I don't think I've ever seen the prediction of such sentences bear out as planned. The word "modular" seems to have a way of taking big bites out a project's end performance and destroying budgets.
Maybe you weren't following closely enough...
John Ma, a senior structural engineer at the NRC was quoted on his stance about the AP1000 nuclear reactor:
"In 2009, the NRC made a safety change related to the events of September 11, ruling that all plants be designed to withstand the direct hit from a plane. To meet the new requirement, Westinghouse encased the AP1000 buildings concrete walls in steel plates. Last year Ma, a member of the NRC since it was formed in 1974, filed the first "non-concurrence" dissent of his career after the NRC granted the design approval. In it Ma argues that some parts of the steel skin are so brittle that the "impact energy" from a plane strike or storm driven projectile could shatter the wall. A team of engineering experts hired by Westinghouse disagreed..."
In 2010, following Ma's initial concerns, the NRC questioned the durability of the AP1000 reactor's original shield building in the face of severe external events such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and airplane collisions. In response to these concerns Westinghouse prepared a modified design... In May 2011, US government regulators found additional problems with the design of the shield building of the new reactors. The chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said that: computations submitted by Westinghouse about the building's design appeared to be wrong and "had led to more questions."; the company had not used a range of possible temperatures for calculating potential seismic stresses on the shield building in the event of, for example, an earthquake...
In November 2011, Arnold Gundersen published a further report on behalf of the AP1000 Oversight Group, which includes Friends of the Earth and Mothers against Tennessee River Radiation. The report highlighted six areas of major concern and unreviewed safety questions requiring immediate technical review by the NRC...
In 2012, Ellen Vancko, from the Union of Concerned Scientists, said that "the Westinghouse AP1000 has a weaker containment, less redundancy in safety systems, and fewer safety features than current reactors"....
In October 2013, Li Yulun, a former vice-president of China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC), raised concerns over the safety standards of the delayed AP1000 third-generation nuclear power plant being built in Sanmen, due to the constantly changing, and consequently untested, design...
So, a bunch of NIMBYs hire a professional witness/fraud like Arnold Gundersen (who stated in Al Jazeera that "Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind") to keep doing what he's been doing for his entire career, while other anti-nuclear groups (I mean, 'league of concerned scienticians') dogpile on. Then the NRC dogpile on too, because the AP1000 might not be able to withstand a plane flying in to it (a standard requirement of any self-respecting electric generation plant), and so Westinghouse redesign the containment structure to mercifully get regulatory approval.
Then one of their major buyers (CNNC) and owners of derivative intellectual property (the CAP1400 reactor) begins to raise concerns about delays and lack of testing due to the constantly changing design. From my point of view, it just looks like Westinghouse couldn't catch a break. In other words, par for the course in the nuclear power generation industry.
These people don't give a damn about the environment, climate change, human lives or rationality. They're far too busy keeping up their image as an 'anti-nuclear friend of the earth', an identity they've spent most of their lives investing in.
Here are some example studies of where things could go: http://blog.ucsusa.org/mike-jacobs/suddenly-the-future-is-cl...
Nuclear is interesting in that we have around 70-90 thousands years of fuel for the plants, which can only get cheaper/safer over time as the technology gets better. Currently, their capital requirements (they are expensive to build even if they are cheap to fuel) and waste problems make them fairly unviable. Couple that with being even less on demand than coal...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-glo...
The article specifically mentions that pretty much every major builder of nuclear plants outside of China are in trouble and/or downsizing/restructuring in big ways.
So, tell me again how "nuclear can scale up"?
The proximate cause AFAIK is lack of demand, which depends on politics, which depends on public perception of its danger. It doesn't depend on economics, or at least that's not the immediate problem.
(What did you mean by Tex?)
http://www.ucsusa.org/clean-energy/coal-and-other-fossil-fue...
Ever wonder why you read that you should avoid eating fish because of mercury?
"...Every state in America has issued health advisories warning people to limit or avoid eating certain species of fish due to toxic mercury contamination, many of which cover every waterbody in the state. ...Coal-fired power plants are the single largest source of mercury contamination in the U.S., responsible for approximately 50% of human-caused mercury emissions."
https://www.nwf.org/~/media/PDFs/Global-Warming/NWF-Mercury-...
These are long terms effects of burning coal - in the short term tens of thousands die each year from the air pollution from coal plants.
The failure of government is that we allow coal and natural gas to be burned when there are alternatives that are much better for the environment and much better for the general health.
1. http://www.rmi.org/RFGraph-health_effects_from_US_power_plan...
The jury is still out on which will kill more in the end. Though so far nuclear is looking really, really good.
See https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d... for some statistics on how dangerous things are so far.
If this your contention, then you immediately want to stop all coal and oil plants pending regulatory overhaul. Coal plants release 100x more radioactive material than any other source in the world.
And that's not even to mention the operating dangers, from poor work environments to accidents. And that's not even mentioning the environmental disasters. Fossil fuel accidents have routinely devastated entire ecosystems, from Exxon Valdez to Deepwater Horizon.
Nuclear power has the 'airplane safety' problem, people are terrified of air travel despite repeatedly being proven to be the safest form of transportation. The same is true for nuclear power. It is by far and away the safest form of energy generation, with the common myths repeatedly debunked time after time.
You have a rather large flaw in your logic.
The statement that you are quoting is directly supported by the data in my link. Fatality rates in the US are generally an order of magnitude lower than in the rest of the world, because of US regulations. This is a statement of fact, and not an argument for any random regulations that you just thought up.
On your statement about radioactivity, coal plants distribute more radioactive material than nuclear, but nuclear produces more nasty waste per gigawatt than coal. So far nuclear has been astoundingly safe, but the eventual damage from nuclear depends on our ability to safely store that waste for longer than human history.
Science illiteracy has nothing to do with it. The industry has a history of non-trivial reasons for mistrust.
Regarding coal plant deaths, I'm not in favor of coal either. The sooner we can move away from fossil the better.
The German population is about 30% larger than it was 100 years ago. The industrial revolution resulted in a population boom, which has had most if its effect already in Europe by that time, that is why I referred to Europe. On one hand the world wars have resulted in many lost lives, yet the population boom since then happened mostly in the developing world since then.
Now while this is not a desired development in human history, but inlands of continents could support life in large enough numbers to have civilization(s) survive, even if the net number of humans would be smaller than currently.
Please rest assured, we will not be forced to live in bunkers because of Fukushima, and even if another such tragedy would happen, we could mostly keep out lifestyles, until the global warming caused problems would cause much more changes in it.
> This is not in any way a desired event, and if nuclear technology would be developed, and not demonized, its probability could be far smaller, as many technologies are already available to avoid such accidents, which have all happened on old power plants.
There are still hundreds of these "old power plants" active, you want to replace them all with the magical new wonder power plants which never fail and are immune to human error? How is that supposed to work, considering the costs for decommissioning and long-term waste storage?
>Please rest assured, we will not be forced to live in bunkers because of Fukushima, and even if another such tragedy would happen, we could mostly keep out lifestyles, until the global warming caused problems would cause much more changes in it.
I never claimed that we'd be all forced to live in bunkers because of Fukushima. I merely took issue with your flippant statement of "humans can survive without seafish" because that's as much of a slippery slope as it can get, thus the "surviving in a bunker just eating mushrooms" example. Humans might be just fine without eating seafish, tho the rest of this planet's ecosystem (on which we still depend to function properly) probably wouldn't. As such I don't consider the "let's just poison the oceans because humanity can survive without seafish" approach as viable.
But your point is well taken; the obligation was on Westinghouse to communicate (probably in 2011) that delays were likely and to update their timing and cost estimates. In hindsight, staying quiet and hoping everything would somehow work out probably wasn't the best strategy...
But their are many technologies that make that number skyrocket. Those numbers are in the 10ky range, and of course, if we ever get fusion going...
It's arguably the most harmful kind of science illiteracy because it has the biggest impact on public policy. Everything from people opposing mandatory seat belt laws, to being overly concerned about e.g. genetically modified food or cell phone tower radiation.
I'm sure you mean well, but really, people who hold exactly the opinion you hold are in the aggregate the reason for literally millions of deaths that didn't need to happen worldwide since WWII.
We had all the data to indicate that burning fossil fuels was causing massive diffuse harm, nuclear was realistically the only alternative in most cases, but people didn't go for it because they were afraid, even though all the science showed that there was little to worry about in comparison to what we were already doing.
Sure someone installed a reactor backwards, but how are minor incidents like these at all relevant compared to literally tens to hundreds of thousands of deaths per year because we keep using the alternative?
Regardless of the law, people are wearing seat belts at roughly the same rates. This is to say, at least in my corner of the world--seat belts save lives, but seat belt laws don't. People oppose these laws on philosophical grounds; the role of the state, acceptable levels of police discretion, etc.. Policy is messy, but at minimum must accommodate the values of those it represents.
[1] http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatalit...
E.g. Germany's rush towards decommissioning after Fukushima has had a massively detrimental effect in Europe for this reason.
The death toll as a direct result of fearmongering against nuclear is by this point likely to be far larger than the total death toll of all nuclear incidents. If we hadn't had nuclear in first place, the cost in lives lost to other forms of plants would have been far greater than that again.
The government official estimated cost of shutting down all German nuclear plants is 55 billion Euros over the next decade. Although the (frankly more credible) 'unofficial' estimate puts the cost at 250 billion euros over the next decade.
Not to mention the fact it's resulted in their co2 emissions increasing in both 2015 and 2016 (https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-greenhou...). This also means increased deaths from air pollution. The German environment ministry now predicts they will probably not make their 2020 co2 reductions targets.
So other than the enormous cost, increased co2 emissions, and needless human deaths, good policy.
EDIT: And as for the whole "let's just replace everything with wind and solar", I'm not sure people fully appreciate what will be involved. In Germany's case, on a monthly basis, their wind plants manage an average capacity factor of ~20% (std. dev. 7.65 percentage points) and their solar plants manage an average capacity factor of ~10% (std. dev. of 6.41 percentage points). They have had months where solar only managed a measly 2% cap factor and wind 11%.
So let's say demand is 1TW/hr per month. This means they need to build about 11 times that in nameplate solar capacity, or around 5-6 times that in nameplate wind. So you also need to build 11/6 times the transmission infrastructure. And even then you will still have random blackouts due to the high variance in generation, so you also have to spend a bunch of money on grid-level storage.
https://gist.github.com/anonymous/f1a6d064890d67fbfc98d66dbd...
This says that German emissions from electricity generation were down, but that was offset by heating increases from a cold winter and emissions from increased good transportation:
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-reiterates-g20-...
Nuclear plants can, in a worst case scanario, be given the SCRAM treatment to shut them down hard. If that procedure is successful then the reactor is off.
The worst case is probably like Chernobyl but involving multiple reactors. The probability of that is pretty low not only because Chernobyl served as a wake-up call, but because what happened at Chernobyl was an unfortunate chain of events that focused on only one reactor.
So in the worst case secnario you have a disaster which creates a new national park-sized area you can't live in. Compared with coal plants which used to render large portions of the continent unlivable for the hottest, haziest, smoggiest days in the summer, that's an acceptable risk.
It isn't as simple as that, with a lot of reactors. The ones at Fukushima were SCRAMmed. A running nuclear reactor will build up a collection of fission products that have various half-lives that can cause problems. In Fukushima's case, these fission products continued to decay and produced lots of heat (about 6.5% of the heat produced during normal operation, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...). It was this heat that raised the temperature of the fuel and boiled off the cooling water and caused the disaster.
So basically, with lots of reactors, SCRAMming is not enough - you need to maintain cooling for quite a long time afterwards. It is entirely possible to build reactors where this is not the case.
An appropriate response to the turkey statement along these lines is to ask where the farm is and what people it serves. There are many farms in the world where statistically, Thanksgiving makes no difference to the mortality of the Turkeys.
Accounting for Murphy's law, and that the worst case is always x% below your expectation (even after accounting for Murphy's law).
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/map-shows-solar-panels-to-pow...
What really brings it home for me are the warnings to limit seafood consumption for pregnant women, children, and other vulnerable populations due to mercury contamination. About half of that contamination comes from coal power. Coal is so dirty that it has made an entire type of food dangerous to consume!
Obviously you haven't looked into the cost of enriching nuclear waste. It is prohibitively high for all but dedicated nation-state actors, who if have the technology to enrich radioactive materials to weapon-grade material aren't going to use nuclear waste.
Worst case for proliferation is being used in a dirty bomb, which just kind of spreads the waste across a limited area. Even then you're looking at alpha-emitting particles that won't cause any radioactive damage unless you ingest it. Take a shower and you'll be fine.
We've had not one but several nuclear disasters in the past several decades and in each case the sky hasn't come crashing down.
The risks from a nuclear plant disaster are localized and controllable.
The risks from runaway climate change are global and uncontrollable.
The planet is going to be fine. Whether human society survives is going to be a whole different matter entirely.
Unless of course you're one of the people who lived in the nuclear exclusion zones created by Chernobyl and Fukushima, in which case, yes, everything you own and possess, very potentially including your long-term health, were destroyed in a matter of hours. Those residents can never go back for more than a quick temporary visit, and they can not take back their belongings because they've been irradiated. They will always be asking themselves if they got enough of a dose of radiation to cause early disease.
Call that localized and controllable all you want, and if you propose building these plants in areas with no nearby inhabitants for many sq miles, maybe it works OK. The current system, where we say "Don't worry, it's all perfectly safe, we double-pinkie-promise that we won't make the mistakes those guys in Ukraine or Japan made, and if you disagree you're an idiot who hates science" is just not going to fly.
This is not general alarmism about being unable to mitigate every risk in life. This is a comparative analysis of the potential risk profiles of fossil fuels and nuclear, and fossil fuels being much better because the cost of a catastrophic non-nuclear failure is much smaller than the cost of a catastrophic nuclear failure.
When you account for the full lifecycle of fossil fuels, from the extraction, refining, transportation, and ultimate consumption and measure that impact in both short-term impact (coal-mining deaths) vs. long-term impact (climate change, pollution, cancer) you'd find that nuclear is the best option.
I'd risk a %0.00001 chance of dying by cancer sooner living next to a nuclear plant vs. a 1.0% chance of dying in a road collision with a fuel tanker or a 0.05% chance of dying sooner with emphysema by living close to a coal-fired plant. (I made those numbers up by the way; but my order of magnitude is spot-on)
As a person who worked in this industry, understands the economics of it, and has compared the costs of coal/wind/gas/nuclear, I can confidently say that nuclear can be safe and affordable as an energy source if we are committed to safe and conscientious use of it.
(BTW, for a month, I slept next to a nuclear reactor that was approximately 500 feet away from my bunk. My total radiation dose for that trip was less than I'd get in the same time hanging out at Grand Central Terminal (a location that would it to be certified as a functioning nuclear reactor would be out of specification as emitting too great a dose of radiation to those who work there)
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/inter...
Yes the planet's going to be fine, in the sense that a spherical mass will continue to orbit the sun.
But if every species but the cockroach is wiped out from runaway biological ecosystem collapse, is that really "being fine"?
I find myself in conflict with people a lot regarding nuclear online. I used to be one of those LFTR reactor guys but the facts are that nuclear reactors are always some newer, untested design that will require new untested innovations. On the other hand solar has an easily predicted, easily met roadmap to cheap power with existing tech. We know for a fact that solar can power the entire world's needs cheaply for many decades to come, but we are just guessing that the same can be done with nuclear. Why make that bet when we have a sure thing?
Both costs are more or less impossible to establish upfront.
Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:
"...Fast reactors can "burn" long lasting nuclear transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides), turning liabilities into assets. Another major waste component, fission products (FP), would stabilize at a lower level of radioactivity than the original natural uranium ore it was attained from in two to four centuries, rather than tens of thousands of years"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor
How does coal waste compare to that?
"Coal ash – the waste material left after coal is burned – contains arsenic, mercury, lead, and over a dozen other heavy metals, many of them toxic."
http://www.psr.org/environment-and-health/code-black/coal-as...
"The study found that levels of radioactivity in the ash were up to five times higher than in normal soil,"
https://phys.org/news/2015-09-radioactive-contaminants-coal-...
How much coal waste is produced per year?
"According to the American Coal Ash Association's Coal Combustion Product Production & Use Survey Report, nearly 130 million tons of coal ash was generated in 2014."
There will be literal mountains of moderately to highly dangerous rubble.
But I agree; Coal is not the future. Either.
Plus, as you suggest, no-one wants to buy the MOX fuel product because it's more expensive than enriched uranium.
The U.S. effectively estimates zero cost (without looking into the details); that certainly is a bad estimate.
The biggest externality of coal in particular is not carbon emissions but the massive health costs and human suffering.
If fossil fuels were subjected to the same safety requirements as nuclear in terms of preventing public health effects, the cost would increase substantially.
1.) Incredible cost to privately insure a nuclear power plant.
2.) There hasn't been an economy of scale when producing nuclear power plants.
3) Nuclear power technology is running on technology half a century old.
This gives you a couple interesting points to consider:
- Once built, you have reliable baseload power for generations.
- Modernized power plants could be safer, more efficient, and smaller by orders of magnitude.
Demonization of nuclear power prevents improvements to nuclear power. The industry is stuck in the 60's. The real shame is that it's the only technology we have that is really future-friendly: Planetary colonization can't rely on wind, nor solar, and certainly not fossil fuels for power. Nuclear will really be the only option for reliable baseload power to extra-terrestrial colonies.
Many of existing plants were at the time they were built considered to be important for national security (read: nuclear arsenal), which is much of why they're using the fuel they use and have the designs they have.
Civilian nuclear never really materialized in it's own right, which is certainly a shame.
Their study looks at different forms of electricity generation from the perspective of 'costs avoided' (e.g. avoided carbon emissions), net cost of generation (e.g. nameplate vs. actual generation), and total system costs (e.g. grid balancing / stabilising costs). On 'costs avoided', their base-case assumption is a $50 per tonne price on co2 emissions.
The study concludes:
"Assuming that reductions in carbon dioxide emissions are valued at $50 per metric ton and the price of natural gas is not much greater than $16 per million Btu, the net benefits of new nuclear, hydro, and natural gas combined cycle plants far outweigh the net benefits of new wind or solar plants. Wind and solar power are very costly from a social perspective because of their very high capacity cost, their very low capacity factors, and their lack of reliability.
For example, adjusting U.S. solar and wind capacity factors to take account of lack of reliability, we estimate that it would take 7.30 MW of solar capacity, costing roughly four times as much per MW to produce the same electrical output with the same degree of reliability as a baseload gas combined cycle plant. It requires an investment of approximately $29 million in utility-scale solar capacity to produce the same output with the same reliability as a $1 million investment in gas combined cycle. Reductions in the price of solar photovoltaic panels have reduced costs for utility-scale solar plants, but photovoltaic panels account for only a fraction of the cost of a solar plant. Thus such price reductions are unlikely to make solar power competitive with other electricity technologies without government subsidies.
Wind plants are far more economical in reducing emissions than solar plants, but much less economical than hydro, nuclear and gas combined cycle plants. Wind plants can operate at a capacity factor of 30 percent or more and cost about twice as much per MW to build as a gas combined cycle plant. Taking account of the lack of wind reliability, it takes an investment of approximately $10 million in wind plants to produce the same amount of electricity with the same reliability as a $1 million investment in gas combined cycle plants."
And here are my calculations on German solar and wind capacity factors (they're awful): https://gist.github.com/anonymous/f1a6d064890d67fbfc98d66dbd...
Not that anyone here will care about any of this. This issue has pretty much become a matter of blind religious fear & faith.
So if anything, they're equally terrible in that regard.
That isn't true. There are externalities for both, but the externalities for carbon are far greater. The above statement is like saying: No houses are free to buy; therefore all houses are equally costly.
That's rather sweeping, don't you think? If anything, my statement might be an oversimplification. But untrue? I wouldn't be surprised if they were of a similar order of magnitude. Like houses (Michael Jackson's mansion and similar outliers excluded).
> the externalities for carbon are far greater
Do you have numbers to back that up? (I don't).
But keep in mind that it's not yet clear how expensive it will be to de-construct reactors and store nuclear waste for millenia. Just that it's going to be very, very expensive. And probably footed by the taxpayer.
Ding ding ding. This is always the caveat tucked away in nuclear discussions. "It will be fine, as long as everything is going fine." Things don't always go fine. When they don't go fine at a coal plant, things are bad, but they are recoverable; they can be cleaned up, and that land can be repurposed, even if its prior purpose is no longer feasible due to structural changes or pollution. There is no permanent, decades-long exclusion zone.
>I'd risk a %0.00001 chance of dying by cancer sooner living next to a nuclear plant vs. a 1.0% chance of dying in a road collision with a fuel tanker or a 0.05% chance of dying sooner with emphysema by living close to a coal-fired plant. (I made those numbers up by the way; but my order of magnitude is spot-on)
Not going to nitpick your made-up numbers, but the difference is that this is a bigger thing "than I want to take this risk". This is taking the risk that the area become a nuclear wasteland (from radiation, not explosion) for the next 100 years, an area that no person can enter without risking their immediate health just by being present. If you get too close to the hotspots without the right gear and monitoring, you will die quickly.
Are other things dirty? Do other things have tradeoffs and downsides? Is there even some risk that nearby property will be damaged or destroyed? Sure. I'm not trying to say that other industrial accidents are no big deal. But nuclear is the only thing that can, almost instantly, take a big chunk of land and permanently and irrevocably irradiate it for 100 years (and, that's just the most severe risk with nuclear power generation; there are others that haven't been discussed).
You can say that greenhouse gasses have the same potential non-local impact, which is fine, but quite the inverse of nuclear power, greenhouse gas emissions take decades to effect this impact and are measurable and controllable. We know it's coming and can do things to stop it.
As far as I know, the most catastrophic failure at a conventional plant would impact local air quality temporarily. The most catastrophic failure at a nuclear plant can impact everything about the surrounding area (for loose values of "surrounding"; Chernobyl created a 1000 sq mile no-go zone) for generations. Those failures can and do happen overnight.
Chernobyl happened. Fukushima happened. If a similar incident happened at the plant just north of NYC, the evacuation zone would include hundreds of thousands or millions of people.
>...I am not an expert but many seem to consider the increased handling risk related to the toxicity and activity of plutonium and other products,
I agree that nuclear waste needs to be handled carefully.
>...especially considering terrorism, and also the risk for weaponizing the enriched plutonium.
There is very little terrorism risk from nuclear waste. The weight, size and danger of high level waste means it would be beyond the capability of terrorist group to take advantage of it. Other sources of power have much, much more of a risk from terrorism.
>....also the risk for weaponizing the enriched plutonium.
None of the nuclear states got their start by using nuclear waste from a commercial reactor. This wasn't a coincidence - it is much easier to get nuclear fuel by using a special purpose reactor or enriching uranium.
They don't have the "nuclear" tag scaring people away, but modern batteries and capacitors are still very dangerous and have a lot of environmental hazards to go along with them.
[0]: http://www.powermag.com/let-gravity-store-the-energy/ [1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/energy-storage-hi...
Yes.
> but modern batteries and capacitors are still very dangerous and have a lot of environmental hazards to go along with them.
This is just absurd compared to handling nuclear fuel and waste.
https://electrek.co/2016/12/19/tesla-fire-powerpack-test-saf...
"Tesla set fire to a Powerpack to test its safety features – the results are impressive"
there was talk in this thread about how the engineers that designed the systems in use are the ones servicing them and have been for 20-30 years or so.
The costs of creating and staffing a secure storage facility would not be trivial, but then, nothing else about energy production is.
The main concern with facilities like WIPP isn't so much security against dedicated assaults, but keeping future subliterate humans from stumbling across the material for the next 10,000 years or so. Antarctica solves that problem nicely. No one who isn't equipped to deal with hazardous technology is ever going to visit Antarctica.
The economic value of nuclear waste is basically zero, so you only really have to worry about theft for purposes like terrorism. And even if somebody does break into your secure facility, it's hard to imagine an easy way for them to get significant amounts of material out. Seems to me that you wouldn't have to try very hard to make a storage facility more secure than the nuclear plants themselves. Probably the biggest obstacles would be political, not technical.
That's a pretty big worry. This stuff is super dirty and in the wrong hands could cause a lot of problems. Unlike a pressure cooker bomb which either kills you, maims you, or doesn't do anything to you, a radioactive bomb might kill you anywhere from now to twenty years from now and everyone exposed to it will be left wondering when their number comes up.
The smarter thing is to come up with better ways of reburning the fuel and storing it long-term on-site at the reactor which is already a secure facility. The total amount is small. They don't need tons of space to deal with it. The less you move this stuff around the better.
The risks there are more Fukishima in nature where if they lose power (at a power plant!) then they need some mechanism to circulate water in the cooling tanks to prevent a boil-off.
I feel obligated to point out that this also applies to things like lead paint, mercury (got any CFL bulbs?), red meat, burnt toast, gasoline vapors, asbestos, new car smell, and sunlight.
Nuclear waste is dangerous, but not outrageously so. It's treated with a deference far beyond what's given to other stuff that kills us regularly.
1) you can not look at Germany in isolation. You need to take into account the import/export market. Decommissioning nuclear plants at a faster schedule substantially altered that, which affected other countries dependency on fossil fuels.
2) Germany is to their credit aggressively trying to get rid of its fossil fuel dependency, but the decommissioning of nuclear meant they needed to offset a significant shortfall. To the extent that hole was plugged by new clean energy capacity, that meant delaying decommissioning of far more lethal coal plants.
Until fossil fuels is at 0, decommissioning nuclear is bad policy.
https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/news/2016/germa...
As I said before: Until there is 0 fossil fuels, taking nuclear offline kills people by delaying fossil decommissioning.
"...Nearly every major river in the Southeast has one or more unlined, leaking pits on its banks filled with water and holding coal ash from power plants. Containing millions of tons of toxin-laden waste, these pits are unlined and have leaked arsenic, mercury, thallium, selenium, and other contaminants into the rivers and the underlying groundwater for decades. "
https://www.southernenvironment.org/cases-and-projects/coal-...
Fine, it'll be an underground mountain :-)
> [...]compared to coal waste[...]Containing millions of tons of toxin-laden waste[...]
Holy shit, I had never even considered ash. It just never crossed my mind somehow. Thanks for bringing this to my attention.
It doesn't make me any less opposed to nuclear energy, but you've given me one more reason to be against coal plants (as if there weren't enough already).
The carbon emissions cause climate change, which causes human suffering at a scale, as I understand it, far beyond that of the pollution you describe (which is also substantial).
While the dust and radioactivity released by coal plants kills hundreds of thousands of people now, and we can't meaningfully offset it by trading quotas - it's not like having more kids makes up for killing other people.
But as we all know, replacing coal powered plants with safer things (nuclear, solar, wind, tidal) would cost nothing compared to healthcare costs.
Given that the shutdown of nuclear is extremely expensive, and that decommissioning before the planned lifespan also involves massive payouts to the owners and reduced time to amortise cleanup costs etc., the economics also vastly favour keeping them running.
It also ignores the vast healthcare costs involved in dealing with respiratory illnesses - including for children - as a result of coal. Few people fall over dead with no cost of care for respiratory illnesses.
So if your concern in healthcare spending, that's another reason to at a minimum not shut down nuclear plants until all of the coal plants are gone.
Which isotopes? Deadly in what amounts? How many people do you expect our spent fuel will kill over the next ~100 years? ~1000 years? ~100,000 years?
How many people do you expect coal pollution/AGW will kill over the next ~100 years? ~1000 years? How many people will hydro dam disasters kill over the next ~100 years? Because that's the alternative we're looking at.
If you calculate out the total amount of victims for this, it turns out that even if we melt down a nuclear plant in every capital on the planet, solar will still kill more people than nuclear would under those circumstances.
So the reasoning here eludes me: perhaps it's that people don't understand nuclear so it must be bad ? It's how we got to Trump ...
TLDR: public opinion takes an idea. It declares it a bad idea. Comes up with much worse ideas for it's given criteria and enforces conformance to those ideas. Solar and wind both kill more people than nuclear, short term and long term.
We're close to capacity for the world's utilization of hydro. It can only grow ~20% in the next 30 years - which would let it... Take ~10% of coal's contribution to power generation.
Hydro power is generally cheaper then coal. If we could use more of it, we would be.
>...when the spent, toxic fuel going to be deadly for a few hundred thousand years yet.
Right now waste can and should be recycled which would reduce the amount of waste.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste
Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:
"...Fast reactors can "burn" long lasting nuclear transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides), turning liabilities into assets. Another major waste component, fission products (FP), would stabilize at a lower level of radioactivity than the original natural uranium ore it was attained from in two to four centuries, rather than tens of thousands of years"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor
(Funding for the integral fast reactor was killed by Bill Clinton, but there is no reason that the US or some other country couldn't fund this or any of the other 4th gen designs.)
>...That problem is so very far from solved, and it's a massive problem.
Right now nuclear waste is a very manageable problem and relatively soon the waste could be used to produce electricity if we so desire. Considering that no one of the general public has been killed from nuclear waste (and tens of thousands die each year from burning coal) why would someone consider nuclear waste a "massive problem"?
I thought the problem was solved:
1. Dig hole.
2. Put it in hole.
3. Guard hole.
The industry has literally been saying this for more than 50 years.
The practical barrier to reprocessing and burning spent fuel isn't technical or political: it's economic. Fresh Uranium is just too cheap for reprocessed waste to compete.
Yes a breeder reactor was one of the first electricity-generating nuclear power plants, but that doesn't mean we need to rush. We have enough storage capacity for decades before we need to worry about the level of high level waste.
>...Fresh Uranium is just too cheap for reprocessed waste to compete.
At the present time. Even if plans like getting uranium have sea water work out, we might start burning high level at some point just to deal with the high level waste if we run out of room. It makes a lot more sense to burn waste for electricity than to spend millions to bury it in the ground for millennia.
Soon is relative. Nuclear power has only existed for just over 70 years. These things take time, and progress is intensely stagnated because of the fear and regulation involved.
I can imagine some sort of post-apocalyptic copper age religion where the religious brotherhood exist to guard the 'cursed caves', without understanding why. But everyone knows that people who enter the caves either die at the hands of the strangely deformed beasts who live there, or of a mysterious sickness sometime afterwards.
Yeah, I probably played too much D&D as a child :)
The argument that we need to do something about this waste beyond the timeframe of our civilisation is mind boggling to me. This is the only risk we seem to take this seriously - in no other arena can I recall people arguing about what something will look like in 10,000 years. What about war between America and China? >1% chance, massive potential for death and destruction. Who cares if some poor person digs into an old nuclear waste dump in 500 years compared to that?
We can leave this problem to the future. If they have regressed so far that they can't detect nuclear then they have bigger problems than radiation poisoning.
Threats to energy security are so much more of a threat than potentially maybe not being able to figure out how to reprocess spent fuel until it isn't a health hazard.
The nuclear symbol is widely recognized across the planet so the only reason this would be a problem is if every one of the cultures that understands the importance of it is killed off.
This is cherrypicking to make a point. The batteries still contain chemicals which are toxic to life and environment. There will come a time when those batteries are "consumed" and the chemicals within them need to be dealt with in some safe manner. As far as I know, there's no battery technology with any side effects.
Tesla's batteries are well designed and engineered. Batteries before them have exploded, caused fires and loss of life and property. As long as the nuclear plant was also well designed I can say
"I set fire to a nuclear plant to test its safety features. The plant shut down automatically – the results are impressive"
I agree many won't be recycled, but until we snag ourselves and asteroid, we have a finite supply of lithium. People will do their best to not lose something worth money.
1. How much lithium waste will be produced each year by this process? Aren't we talking creating more batteries than we ever have before by several orders of magnitude here? We send most of our ewaste to the third world to be burned currently, this sounds like an ecological disaster.
2. Do you really believe that in 75 years time the United States won't have the ability to safely store or simply hurl 400 million coke cans at the sun? A big project for sure but the reward is virtually unlimited, virtually free energy.
It doesn't matter. It can all be recycled.
> Do you really believe that in 75 years time the United States won't have the ability to safely store or simply hurl 400 million coke cans at the sun?
I don't believe we're competent enough to manage nuclear waste in any form.
It can be, it isn't happening currently: "As of 2017, the recycling of Li-Ion batteries generally does not extract lithium since the many different types of Li-Ion batteries require a different extraction process.[6] Another reason why it isn't being done is because the extraction of lithium from old batteries is 5x more expensive as mined lithium"
Even so when recycled it still creates toxic waste in large quantities. What shall we do with that?
Oh, they will be. But there must be specific structure to communicate this information, otherwise it is assumed "common knowledge" and nobody talks about it until suddenly everybody realizes nobody really knows anything about it because all people that knew it assumed it's obvious and nobody thought to talk about it explicitly and now they're all dead.
> The nuclear symbol is widely recognized across the planet
Now. Will it be in 10K years? Who knows. Try to read works about 15th century life and see how much of that was obvious back then is obvious now.
> if every one of the cultures that understands the importance of it is killed off.
The cultures that exist now won't probably exist in 10K years. Could we pass knowledge through if we took consistent effort - maybe. But the whole point is how to make sure it's a consistent effort over 10K years.
Strangely it seems to be considered a problem by those who are actually working in the field.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/02/how-t...
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/green_room/...
http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picsprog/articles/wipp%20exhibit%...
There were only around 50 deaths directly related to that disaster. Certainly more people died (or will yet die) later due to exposure, but these are only estimates; on one end you may find estimates of "many tens of thousands" (e.g. 200 000 - by Greenpeace, of course), on the other end you may find estimates of around 4000 by WHO.
Also, it is not true you can't safely go there now. In fact you can go there for a vacation trip: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/ukrain... "More than 10,000 tourists now explore the disaster site every year."
The Fukushima disaster killed people, including 2 people who were outside of the walls getting a smoke when the wave hit and died from "sustained blood loss" (apparently they got lifted up, smashed, and there was no way to get help, given that there were thousands such cases along the entire coastline). More people died from food delivery problems following the disaster in Fukushima than are ever going to experience symptoms due to the radiation ...
For nuclear everything, everything, everything is counted. Uranium mining truck crashes into a car leaving the factory (before ever even seeing the mine) ? Nuclear accident.
The rate of solar accidents, on the other hand is the opposite. The thousands of dead resulting from the labour conditions in Chinese solar panel production factories ? Obviously nothing to do with solar ... The thousands who have died from pollution caused by solar panel production ? (solar power may be clean, producing solar panels is VERY dirty). Nothing to do with solar. And so on.
e.g. https://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/02/chinas-solar...