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?

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

I'll continue to consider it in the future.

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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls

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.

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...

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor

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?

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...

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

Here are some example studies of where things could go: http://blog.ucsusa.org/mike-jacobs/suddenly-the-future-is-cl...

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"?

(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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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).

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.

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.

1.) Incredible cost to privately insure a nuclear power plant.

2.) There hasn't been an economy of scale when producing nuclear power plants.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"...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-...

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).

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.

>...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.

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"

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.

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."