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Funds Dwindle To Dismantle Old Nuclear Plants
Hugh Pickens writes "The Associated Press reports that the companies who own almost half the nation's nuclear reactors are not setting aside enough money to dismantle the reactors, so many plants may sit idle for decades, posing safety and security risks as a result. The shortfalls in funding have been caused by huge losses in the stock market that have devastated the companies' savings and by the soaring costs of decommissioning. Owners of 19 nuclear plants have won approval to idle their reactors for as long as 60 years, presumably enough time to allow investments to recover and eventually pay for dismantling the plants and removing radioactive material. But mothballing nuclear reactors or shutting them down inadequately presents the risk that radioactive waste could leak from abandoned plants into ground water or be released into the air, and spent nuclear fuel rods could be stolen by terrorists. The NRC has contacted 18 nuclear power plants to clarify how the companies will address the recent economic downturn's effects on funds to decommission reactors in the future, but some analysts worry the utility companies that own nuclear plants might not even exist in six decades."
This really is just plain weird. In a world where we all know that radioactive energy brings with it unsolvable polution. In a world where they tells us that is ok and not true, in a world where in one of the best and most secure countries in the world just last week had to admit they were leaking radiactive material (germany) a company that has made many, many millions from selling this unsafe energy, now gets a very good deal? Let me guess, if we trace back all the ownsers of said company, somewhere in that spaghetti of companies there is a company that has spend big time on this US president or the former US president. This just ain't happening without some very powerfull people getting paid in powerfull cash.
Why not let the government bail them out? That is what the government does, right?
We were touring the research reactor. The topic came up of how many students were majoring in Nuclear Engineering (or maybe it was just a specialization; not sure if it was actually a major). It was noted that there was exactly ONE student. Some people thought it was a strange major, since no plants were being built. Somebody else gave their $0.02 that the guy would be very much in demand--experts would be needed to dismantle plants.
I wonder what that guy is doing now.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Why is this treated any different then a gas station?
Gas stations have to put a certain amount in escrow to allow for digging up the storage vessels and decontaminating. Why don't nuclear reactors have to set aside the money before they're even allowed to build?
A single dipole switch changes between commissioned and decommissioned mode. It shouldn't take that much more money in labor. I smell a rat.
There's no reason there has to be radioactive waste stockpiled at these sites.
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/06/23/nuclear-power-going-fast/
Lease the plants, specifically the plant's basements. In an year or two the required payment will more than pay off the costs, proving be quite a substantial investment for everyone. While some will be quick to argue that such an act would leave the subterranean structures flooded with geeks oozing from radiation, the Army will soon discover that it has enough material to bottle up and send straight to Communist Russia.
The NRC should require the company to hold in trust sufficient funding to dismantle a plant in the event of the company going under, or to take out an insurance policy to guard against this event.
We have family friends who own a franchised gas station. Well they wanted to do some upgrades which meant new tanks; they purchased an old mostly hard case store. Well to make a long story short.
You cannot out pace the ability of feel good but short sighted politicians to impose fees/levies that simply make some business unsustainable. In other words, their best option was to rotate each store into a sub type structure and then let the subs who were burdened by feel good laws to bankrupt.
See, if they wanted to just keep the existing problems, like possible leakage, they were all fine and dandy. If they wanted to keep old pumps (still retrofitted with reclamation nozzles) they could. It was actually their audacity to fix things that sunk them. In the end they determined that they failed to do adequate research.
The original owner? Totally scot free - see he blew it by buying more than he could sustain an his properties were auctioned and such.
I would not doubt that the original planned cost to decommission a plant is far far from what it actually cost today with all the new laws, local, state, and federal.
The real question that we should all be asking is, why when we have a great example of "global warming approved" generation, one that many in Europe embrace, are we still held hostage by the green whackos out of California. Don't deny it, these freaks for whom no compromise exist because of their own internal factions end up leaving us with messes that are far worse that what they proclaim to protect us from.
We have the technology and man power to be free of relying on factional areas of the world for power yet we go out of our way to make any solution a miserable mess.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
With the demise of Yucca Mountain, the spent fuel [Radioactive Waste], which the US Government is supposed to accept, will remain stored on-site for the forseeable future.
Is everyone sure this is all about money and nothing to do with allowing activated products in the reactors to die down to an acceptable radioactive level for workers to go in and start ripping things apart?
We really are not ready for this kind of power as mankind. Once we find a solution for the radioactive waste we will be. Till that time... there is always the sun..
I once tried to write a python script. Instead of doing what I wanted it crashed my computer. I've decided I'm not ready for the power of programming. Once I'm a good programmer, I might try writing code again.
If we give up nuclear power now we're never going to find a solution. With no nuclear reactors there isn't going to be any incentive. And that doesn't get into the definition of a solution. Yucca mountain and breeder reactors are both solutions, they just weren't acceptable solutions to people such as yourself.
Let's us be honest. You say not now but what that means is not ever.
Aside: I'd much rather live next to a nuclear plant than a coal fired one. If solar becomes economically viable that'd be great too.
What idiot came up with *that* idea?
Hey, we got these huge savings that can help us when we need it. Let's put it into the stock market. Because that one is known for its century-long stability. And the value of our stocks will hold perfectly stable, even in the worst times.
Protip: USE SOME FREAKING REAL GOODS! Gold, silver, countries, or things that go *up* in bad times. (Like bank manager incomes!)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Unless the plants in question are simply too difficult/expensive to upgrade, nobody should be decommissioning any nuclear power plants!
Cripes! Here we are looking at Cap & Tax legislation allegedly attempting to reduce carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants, and they want to decommission power plants that have among the lowest rates of CO2 emission?
Makes one wonder if the goal isn't so much to reduce CO2 emissions as it is to raise the cost of electricity and raise taxes, along with making certain politically-connected people and organizations tons of money from carbon credits while crippling the US private sector to make way for further government takeovers of the US economy.
"I don't want to run car companiH^H^H^H^H^ the nations' power generation."
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
For some background on the Gundersens' work on the Vermont Yankee plant, see this story from the Burlington weekly from a few years ago: http://www.7dvt.com/2007/fission-accomplished
Looks like the nuclear industry looked at the big bank "too big to fail" strategy and liked it. Why bother cleaning up the mess when they can just let the taxpayers pay for the clean-up.
Fuel rods are replaced about every 18 months, and there are already systems in place for dealing with them. I don't imagine they would be the hard part of decommissioning; all the neutron-bombarded steel, lead, and concrete are the problem.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
if only we had a way to reprosses the waste until it has a short half-life~
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
With the current administration and its very obvious ties to the environmentalist and alternative energy lobbies, I am very surprised it took 6 months for scare mongering about nuclear power plants to begin. Nuclear power has already proven to be the safest means of producing large quantities of energy, even if you include the most EXTREME and exaggerated outcomes of all nuclear catastrophes combined (lets even throw in Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Of course, you'd have to include all the people who die in the production of coal or oil over the course of the centuries, but nuclear comes out the winner. We are just unfortunate enough to live in a time where the people in power grew up under the shadow of nuclear annihilation. This child hood trauma has caused the lefty environmentalists to forsake the cleanest possible energy alternative available that allows us to maintain our standards of living. Sure, alternative energy supplies will help increase supply and lower prices eventually, but nuclear is the only way to ween our dependence off of fossil fuels in the short term (20-50 years). I mean, what about global warming?!?! I mean, Climate Change. Look, even if you are a global warming / climate change / or you dont believe in global warming / climate change , or just a skeptic either way, the benefits of nuclear are undeniable. Oh, and I'd be more than happy to have one of those plants in my backyard. Lots of high paying jobs, and a cool landmark on the horizon. Probably cheap electricity as a payoff to locals to boot.
20th century Marxism is not progress...
Owners of 19 nuclear plants have won approval to idle their reactors for as long as 60 years, presumably enough time to allow investments to recover and eventually pay for dismantling the plants and removing radioactive material.
What a ridiculous assertion of motive. That might be what is in the press releases, but the important part is that it is long enough for the current executives and boards of directors to not be adversely affected. With any luck, they'll get big bonuses for successfully kicking the can down the road.
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As the article says, nuclear power plants keep dedicated funds for decomissioning those plants. These funds are in the stock market.
The stock market took a beating.
Greenpeace and other anti-nuke wackos found an opportunity to say idiotic things like:
It's like a sitting time bomb. The notion that you can just walk away from these sites and everything will be hunky-dory is just not true."
Speaking as someone who works at a nuclear power plant, uh, yeah, for various definitions of 'walk away', you can do just that.
If by walk away you mean:
1) Defuel the reactor, offload all fuel into the spent fuel pool.
2) Drain all primary systems of water and process it (A daily occurance at any plant anyway)
3) Maintain enough staffing to secure the facility and watch the THREE relatively small pumps and TWO heat exchangers required to keep the fuel safe until it can be safely stored in a dry cask.
4) Store the dry casks on site until Yucca opens, or they can be re-processed.
(While they will be guarded, these dry casks are not a significant security risk. Terrorists aren't running around with the heavy rigging equipment required to handle these casks, and they most certainly will never control any facility for the hours required to get any nuclear material.)
That's the nuclear definition of 'walk away.' We take our jobs much more seriously than Greenpeace clowns take anything. They're a professional agitation group who currently only exists to generate enough attention to collect enough funds to continue to exist.
You might have to keep some fans running in contaminated areas until they're cleaned up, but compared to actually operating a nuclear power plant, the safe long term shutdown of a plant requires minimal resources.
I love this part too:
Last week, British officials reported on a 2007 leak in a cooling tank at the decommissioned Sizewell-A nuclear plant. If the leak had not been promptly discovered, officials said, nuclear fuel rods could have caught fire and sent airborne radioactive waste along the English coast, harming plant operators or the public.
The job of the people there is to promptly discover these sorts of things. There are loud alarms available to help them with just that. It's not a lucky happenstance that the leak was promptly discovered.
What else?
Sixteen more are being reviewed, and the commission expects to receive 21 more applications in the next several years. To date, the NRC hasn't turned down any license extensions.
In case anyone was wondering, the reason the NRC hasn't turned down any license extension applications is two fold:
1) The standards the plants have to meet are published, and not a secret.
2) The NRC bills maybe $250 a man-hour for the thousands of hours required to review these applications.
No utility is going to pay the NRC millions of dollars to review their application unless they're sure they meet the published NRC standards.
and one more:
Plant operators appear to benefit from NRC rules that don't require them to set aside money to store old nuclear fuel...
because nuclear power plants pay ongoing fees to the federal government to dispose of spent nuclear fuel. $25 billion dollars have been paid so far pursuant to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 and the federal government only has the Yucca Mountain debacle to show for it.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
I currently work for a company that is under contract to decommission the Hanford Site KE Reactor by Sept. 31st, 2011. The money DOE is paying us with? The $1B Obama set aside in the ARRA specifically for this problem. If our company is successful/safe in the decommissioning of this first reactor, we will get contracts for a minimum of 9 more.
The author has an agenda.
Besides, it was in the DESIGN PLAN for the rectors to idle for 75 years after they are shut down, this is so the unspent plutonium has a chance to decay into something more stable. The only reason decommissioning is all of the sudden become a big deal is because of the change in perception of security that has come this decade.
Oh no, another smug armchair nuclear idiot that thinks we are still living in the 1970s before the French put in the work that showed fast breeders are a very expensive and difficult dead end.
I suggest instead looking at the Gen IV reactors - it will take a lot of work instead of just sitting back and being smug but we'll end up with something that actually does the job we want it to do.
Always remember: Nuclear energy generation is the cleanest and least polluting energy source, so this is a non-issue! Ask anyone here on Slashdot, they'll be more than happy to enlighten you. For example, just put the entire site into a breeder reactor and voila!. Not only is it cleaned up and recycled but it generates even more clean nuclear fuel to generate even more energy! Lather, rinse, repeat! Forever!
The government should be running the nuclear plants. It would eliminate problems like this one which are born of the corporate need to 'enhance shareholder value', and keep the people running the plant focused on performance and safety.
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Capitalism is like any other tool in that in the hands of idiots it can be deadly.
When I read articles like this SlashDot entry - or just look around me at America - I can only conclude that our corporate culture's reliance upon "networking" and "interpersonal skills" (i.e., office politics) to select leaders is flawed in that it yields an overabundance of idiots.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
How can the "investments recover" on a project that currently has, and will continue to have, negative revenue? Who is investing in it?
Or do they mean that nuclear plant money is invested in other stocks (which would be irresponsible as hell)?
and the problem will clean itself up
i just hope US citizens don't mind picking up the tab for 10,000 years its not as if they have choice (other than die from radiation poisoning or become a nation of horribly disfigured humans....lets hope obesity isn't a sign)
Hey, I have this machine that boils water for free, and makes money.
If I turn it on.
Which I'm not going to do - instead, I'm determined to dismantle it, but it costs too much to do so. ...
Anyone else not see how fucked up the idea of dismantling nuclear plants is?
When coal is such a no-no that our president has said he wants to "necessarily" bankrupt them with red tape and taxes, why would we de-com any nuclear power plants?
I don't have to tell most of the audience here that it's carbon-free (as if that mattered) and that the waste trail has been cleaned up significantly, as well as being just about the cheapest form of electricity we can find.
And there is ****19**** of them shut down now?
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
Having grown in in Richland, WA, attended Richland High School (home of the Bombers), and worked in the nuclear fuel production industry, I find it alarming that so many people are hilariously ignorant about nuclear power. As a child I actually got to tour the Columbia Generating Station and put my hand in the secondary loop water as it fell down the cooling tower. Nuclear power generation is far safer than any of you have been lead to believe.
For those that choose to use the Hanford nuclear reservation as a point of argument against nuclear waste, well, you're half right. Almost all of the unfathomably dangerous substances located there are from nuclear WEAPON production.
For the energy needs of the current and future world, our two forseeable tools are nuclear power and hydro-electric. Nobody likes nuclear because of NIMBY syndrome. Nobody likes hydro-electric because it makes entire ecosystems disappear. Yeah, Eastern Washington has one of the largest dams in the nation as well. Coal, natural gas, and oil are only kept alive because economic powers far greater than you or I want to exhaust the supplies before they start splitting atoms.
Could it be that some of those older plants are based upon very early designs, which aren't as economically competitive with other sources of energy, and in particular, other nuclear plants? Maybe those plants had design flaws which didn't necessarily make them *dangerous*, but made them unprofitable? I don't know if that's the case, but my *very basic understanding of economics* says that any business which is making money keeps running, and any business which has been shut down was not making money. Or, maybe they had become too risky in terms of nearing the point of failure? Nothing lasts forever, not even nuclear plants. Nuclear plants which are 50 or 60 years old may be just reaching their natural end-of-life and need to be decommissioned, before they *do* become dangerous?
I don't understand why we *allow* Nuclear power operators to get into such a situation? If anyone wants a license to build a new plant (and this should have been instituted decades ago), why don't we estimate the decomissioning costs, demand like 40 percent up-front as part of the investment to even *get started*, and then every year it's in operation, have part of the revenue go to the 'clean-up fund'? That way, if the company goes under after 30 or 40 years, we've *already got the money* (or at least, a significant part of it). If the plant changes ownership, the obligation 'travels' with the title, so that the new owners keep paying into the fund?
The only potential problems I see with this idea are 1) Estimates are notoriously wrong, usually on the *low* side; you could try to allow for that by 'padding' the estimate, and if there ends up being any surplus left over, it goes back to the owners (that might even give the owners incentives to find ways to keep the decommissioning costs down, if that is at all possible - not sure if they have any control over it, probably not) 2) Much higher than expected inflation causes the clean-up costs in absolute dollar amounts to skyrocket (might be able to offset such costs by, I dunno, storing the money as 'gold' or other precious metals?), 3) The plant has to be decommsioned early, before enough revenue has been generated, maybe because of design flaws or something - but if that happens, the engineering firm that designed and manufactured it (G.E., Honeywell, etc) and was responsible for the flaw should probably be liable (although then we have to deal with the situation where they can't pay or are no longer around; maybe they have to put monies up-front into the pot, into some kind of, I dunno, insurance fund - that is, if nothing goes wrong with the design, they get most of the money back [minus fees by the fund manager, of course])?
TIPS, Treasury Inflation Protected Securities. They are US government securities tied to inflation. As such their purchasing power remains the same. If inflation is high, they pay out more, if there is deflation they actually lose numeric value. Now, you make almost nothing on them, all they really do is protect your funds against inflation, but they do that.
The only risk would be should the US government default on payment. However, the US government has never defaulted on the payment of securities, and they have a hell of a history. Their bonds are considered the safest in the world. Also, in the case the government imploded to the extent of not paying out their obligations, it is probable that they wouldn't care about your reactor either.
There are financial instruments that are extremely secure in terms of holding value. The tradeoff is that they don't tend to gain hardly any value. They just insure that you get money such that it has the same purchasing power of the money you bought them with.
I answered the question posed to me. That's all.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
At a time when we are told we need carbon free energy, they now want to dismantle the safest and most efficient carbon free energy source? Brilliant! Only liberals could come up with something so great! If it actually works, a liberal will destroy it, talk against it, minimize it, do away with it. Like the free market system, adios~~~!
Who is getting funds to dismantle that giant nuclear reactor in the sky that comes up every day bombarding us with radiation until it goes down in the west?
Something to remember is that an ever increasing number of navy ships are 100% nuclear powered. They have one or more reactors and those do everything for the ship. They drive the propellers, they run the generators, etc. This isn't going to decrease, either. The navy likes their nuclear boats because, despite the startup cost, they are cheaper to operate. There is no refueling while under way and indeed on some craft, no refueling ever. The nuclear stockpile in the reactor is sufficient for the operational lifetime of the vessel
that is called externalities and is not limited to nuclear. A lot of chemical site are simply "left" buried or uncleaned for the next tenant. Which is why in such case the free market sucks. The free market dictate that all (chemical and nuclear plant) should not bother a fink to clean up. Only if the governement steps in and FORCE the aforementioned to either spare money for the clean up, or force all shareholder to cough up afterward (good luck with that if the firm disappear). Basically I am not surprised.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
"During the past two years, estimates of dismantling costs have soared by more than $4.6 billion because rising energy and labor costs, while the investment funds that are supposed to pay for shutting plants down have lost $4.4 billion in the battered stock market."
Labor costs have risen in the last two years? Really? I thought we were in a recession with nearly 10% unemployment?
Energy costs? Oil is now back down to 2005 levels. Natural gas hasn't been this cheap since 2002.
If those are really their excuses, they should be jumping on the opportunity to decommission NOW, before prices go back up!
And as to them losing money in the stock market - boo hoo. They could have put the funds into inflation protected treasury notes, but they wanted the extra profits to reduce how much they had to pay out. They gambled, they lost, they should have to pay up. If they can't - we have bankruptcy laws just for them (which we should have immediately applied to the banking mess too). Or they could take out a nice fat loan - interest rates are pretty low, I hear.
I'd love to say I can't believe they're getting away with this - but given recent history of forgiving the villains and putting the burden on the taxpayers and individual investors, I just can't muster disbelief any more.
Every feckin-A flying pig craps a ton of radioactive waste. It pollutes baby-robins and wellfare mothers. Only problem is ... most free-flying radioactive crap misses the greens.
That's exactly what I said the other day (and got slammed for) in the "first new nuke plant in US" story that was so widely cheered here.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1310417&cid=28775389
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Just let the decades go by until the next dark ages, the things crumble, and they create incomprehensible magic death zones?
Homer Simpson to do it.
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There is nothing inherently unprofitable about nuclear power. I don't know how the situation with regulation, taxes etc on it is in the US (where I presume you are from) which might make it unprofitable there. Do you have any good sources for this information?
I work in nuclear power in Sweden, and the power companies here drool at the prospect of building a new reactor. And if and when the government allows such an endeavor, it will not be subsidized by tax payer money in any way. There is even a law that a certain amount of money per kWh has to go to a (public) fund that will be used in the future for final storage and such to handle the waste.
I hear this anti-nuclear argument that it is unprofitable all the time. But the simple fact is, that if the profit-driven power companies are willing to completely fund the construction, running, decommisioning of a reactor as well as the waste handling... there must be profit in it.
True, but nukes only get compared to coal on this basis. I never hear of any accidents involving solar or wind, and certainly no deaths.
Apparently some sheep have to move a few feet when they actually put the turbines up.
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I don't understand why we *allow* Nuclear power operators to get into such a situation? If anyone wants a license to build a new plant (and this should have been instituted decades ago), why don't we estimate the decomissioning costs, demand like 40 percent up-front as part of the investment to even *get started*, and then every year it's in operation, have part of the revenue go to the 'clean-up fund'? That way, if the company goes under after 30 or 40 years, we've *already got the money* (or at least, a significant part of it). If the plant changes ownership, the obligation 'travels' with the title, so that the new owners keep paying into the fund?
It would probably be a good idea for such a scheme to exist for any power plant, chemical plant, mine, etc.
There may still be alot of good stuff worth selling as well as the land itself, or the facility itself, these plants are humongous...
they should send an evaluator, to list all the stuff, and then put it up for auction...the rods themselves would be the last things needing transportation, and if you were to say ask the US government if they would come take these, and place them in a safe location, cut them down to small pieces instead of big ones, you could actually try to be creative, no?
I am always wondering if the cost of properly doing something, is equal to the cost of cleaning up after something went wrong?
There will always be certain situations where all nations can lend a hand to help in the disposal of such dangerous goods,no?
The key to realize here is that nuclear decommissioning funds are collected from electric ratepayers (i.e., you, me and everyone we know). When the electricity markets were deregulated in the 1990s, there was a real concern that nuclear plants would not be able to cover the costs of decommissioning. Most state public utility commissions imposed a non-bypassable stranded cost adder to your electric bill. A portion of each electric bill is thus deposited directly into the nuclear decommissioning trust fund. In a way, the fund is very much like a pension obligation. Companies are required to pay into the fund at a level specified by the NRC. When they are short, the company either has to step up its contribution or the state public service commission has to approve a greater contribution from ratepayers. Actually, I thought it was a very positive sign that the NRC has been so public and transparent at pointing out this potential problem.
We've seen this in Vermont. The plant owners under funded the dismantling fund, invested it in high risk investments and lost even more. I doubt they'll ever pay for it. Instead tax payers will be left to foot the bill, even though we didn't benefit from the electricity where I am. Gee. Thanks.