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."

Comments

Re:Weird

[Chris Burke]

It has less polution, but the polution is still radioactive.

I have shocking news for you: Your granite counter top is radioactive! OH NOES.

It has less change of a meltdown, but if that meltdown occurs, and it will, it's no difference from chernobyle, except this one wil be bigger.

Yeah. Because it's not like the Chernobyl disaster had anything to do with the design of the reactor (ignoring that even with that horrible design it took ridiculous amounts of human stupidity to make it happen since I'm assuming that's what you're assuming will always happen). It's not like you can design a reactor so that it can't meltdown, or can't meltdown in such a way that it explodes and blows its containment. It's not like the next and only other major nuclear accident was far smaller than Chernobyl. And it's not like we learned anything from that with regards to reactor design... For example self-regulating designs where the reactor getting too hot means the reaction will slow down. Nope, that doesn't exist.

No, no matter what, meltdowns are inevitable, and will be bigger than previous ones, because... why, again?

We really are not ready for this kind of power as mankind. Once we find a solution for the radioactive waste we will be.

Solution: Re-use it until it is no longer useful as a radioactive fuel of any kind, meaning it is no longer particularly radioactive and thus not a particular danger. Then stick it in the ground without having to worry about security or stability since it's neither useful nor particularly dangerous. Yes the half-life will be really long, but half-life is inversely proportional to radioactivity which is entirely the point.

So, I guess we're ready! Bring on the nuclear reactors!

Till that time... there is always the sun.

Yeah we're a long way from producing all our energy from the sun (directly anyway). I'm all for more of it, including solar-powered microwave satellites. Oh but wait, surely there's no way to design one such that it doesn't fry people on the ground in a swatch of destruction!

Still a shame someone flagged me as flamebait instead of discussing our different views. Cause flamebait i Was not.

Indeed that was an unfair mod, and they were almost certainly using it as a surrogate for "-1, uninformed paranoia" which doesn't exist for good reason.

Re:You don't get better by not doing

[sketerpot]

I've got news for you, buddy: someone has come up with a solution to the waste problem. It's called a liquid fluoride thorium reactor (PDF warning!) and it's not being embraced with open arms despite its elegance and practicality. It's a reactor that takes thorium (more abundant than uranium) as fuel, continuously refuels and reprocesses its fuel, and is about 100 times more fuel-efficient than existing nuclear reactors. Here's the really fun part: the waste, of which it produces very little, becomes exponentially less radioactive over time, becoming safe to handle with bare hands in about 300 years -- not hundreds of thousands of years. And it produces medical isotopes continuously, which is a nice bonus. And it's passively safe and self-regulating, so the reactor core itself doesn't really even need human supervision. Prototypes were tested successfully. (There are other reactors with similar advantages, by the way, so we don't necessarily have to use this particular solution. There's more.)

Energy companies won't develop them because of the large financial risk and paranoid regulatory environment and lack of a clear payoff. Governments won't step in because any nuclear reactor is seen as evil by the green fanatics and seen as threatening by the coal companies.