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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."
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"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
Of course; one should never let the truth stand in the way of their agenda...
Now this is probably true, but it applies to so many areas, I really can't fault nuclear power for the actions of a few companies.
Great Intellect...
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?
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.
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.
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...
"There are no solutions, only trade-offs." - Thomas Sowell
Nothing is perfectly safe; everything involves risk and negative outcomes. There are plenty of negative consequences of using pure solar energy, not the least of which is the impact of manufacturing the tools to harness it.
"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"
Evidence? Support? Simply saying something is true doesn't make it so.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
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.
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!
Not really, since burying the radioactive "waste" is a huge waste; more than 99% of the energy has yet to be extracted from it. (Which is also why it is so dangerous and long lived.) This "waste" can be burned in fast reactors though, and there is enough to supply them for hundreds of years before any further mining is necessary.
All that needs to be done is build the reactors. General Electric even has a design ready for a commercial reactor, called the S-PRISM. This is modeled after the Integral Fast Reactor, a modern design which addresses all of the concerns about nuclear power.
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.
The enemies of Democracy are
Wow! Your first link makes the "Breeder Reactor" sound just so wonderful.
Unfortunately you omitted to mention that it still produces a waste that is beyond lethal for 25,000 years.
If you care to bring the facts to bear about nuclear energy, mainly what do we now do with the waste as well as the spent facility when all's said and done with ... for the next 25,000 years! The only answer anyone can give, a stupid blank look and shrug, will only indicate complete incompetence and a lack of thinking this one through, so don't bother.
Worse, now the companies that own and operate theses plants are going belly up and walking away from the retired facilities and leaving them for the states, counties and towns to deal with.
Sounds criminal to me. Sure the power was cheep. But the leftovers pose too many new problems that will have to be dealt with for thousands of generations to come. I've never been a fan of nuclear technology. Now my reservations are verified by the incompetence of the corporations, lobbyists, and politicians involved in producing this resulting product.
I remain unconvinced that nuclear technology is worth the trouble, expense, and/or effort.
I have a much better idea, lets invest some effort in harnessing the power of the sun and call it a day.
Instead of this exercise in stupidity.
"Suppose you were an idiot...and suppose you were a member of Congress...but I repeat myself." Mark Twain
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?
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.
Because a nuclear reactor doesn't last forever. The steel and concrete (and the steel reinforcing structure inside the concrete) absorb a lot of neutrons over the years, and that weakens them. Now, you could replace it all, but that costs as much as (or more than) building a new reactor in a new location and shutting the old one down (especially when you consider the changes in technology over the life of the reactor).
Now, in some cases, it may be possible to build a new reactor on an existing site next to the old one, but that is touchy (lots of heavy construction == lots of shaking of the ground == sometimes cracked walls in nearby structures). That would save on upkeep for the shut-down reactor, as things like the security and technical staff can be shared between facilities.
Even fusion produces neutrons that will limit the life of the reactor (if someone could ever build a net-power-producing one).
The last few years alone have shown great strides in truly clean energy production (not to be confused with the often mistaken for clean clean-now-hide-the-dirt-til-later energy production, like nuclear).
You mean like solar? No I guess that's more of a hide-the-mercury-chromium-PVC-silicon tetrachloride-waste-post-production-"now-it's-clean"-hide-the-disposal-of-EOL-panels-til-later kind of clean energy. Or are you talking about those practically-useless-residential-wind turbines? OR maybe the hugely-devastating-to-the-aquatic-ecosystem-hydroelectric-plants?
There are dozens, if not hundreds, of new ways to get to this clean energy... smart people keep mixing it up and it really is quite amazing.
Really? Name one form of "clean" energy. The problem is more like stupid people keep believing marketing BS about what "clean" energy is. There was a time when nuclear actually had a similar vibe as solar does now. Then over time the truth came out about the storage life of the waste and the possible dangers. Now it's become the pariah of clean energy. There are some seriously underplayed issues with solar panel production and disposal. If you think there are no issues with the byproducts from the composites that are used for wind-turbines then you are fooling yourself.
Its only a matter of time, and time calculated in decades (not the nuclear standard of calculating time in millennia), before one, or my guess, many new clean energy alternatives become not only viable but very profitable. Nuclear energy is just too expensive (when you add up the cost of the R&D, the educations required, and especially 4000-40000 years of waste storage, and last, not least, the whatif disasters like a chernobyl-scale (not chernobyl-like) disaster).
So you predict that magic pixie dust power generation is only decades away? Cool!
Seriously though, I'm not against solar, nuclear, wind, or even fossil fuel energy production. As far as I can tell, all forms of energy production cause some sort of harmful waste or environmental issue in one way or another. Perhaps geothermal being the one with the least problems, however it's not terribly practical other than in Iceland and a few other areas. I think a better approach is to try to maximize the efficiency and lower the toxic byproducts of what is possible while we work on something better and start to get away from the non-renewables. But that's just what I think.
Normally I would not be so blunt but quite frankly you started this one:
a)It is clear you don't understand how the energy produced in a nuclear reactor correlates to the quantity of fission products produced.
b)It is clear you have no idea about what properties breeder reactor waste have and how it compares to regular nuclear waste.
c)It is clear you don't understand how breeder reactors work or what impact the destruction of the transuranics would have on repository capacity and requirements.
For your ( and other's ) information this is how it works:
Nuclear reactors produce energy by splitting nuclei. If they split relatively safe Uranium or the much more toxic and dangerous alpha emitters ( such as neptunium and plutonium ) does not really matter in energy terms since the energy produced in each fission is about the same. As it happens the elements that make nuclear waste storage problematic are all very heavy transuranics that are alpha emitters since these decay with a halflife of a few thousand years. The problem is that even thousands of years from now they produce enough heat to potentially melt the fuel rods if you don't allow sufficient separation between them. It is this heat that limits how much radioactive waste you can store in a given space.
Thus if instead of splitting uranium you recycle and split these heavy transuranics you only end up with comparatively short lived fission products. It is true that the fission products initially has a higher radioativity than the transuranics, but the amount of fission products you get is exactly the same as if you ahd been splitting uranium. Thus by splitting the troublesome transuranics rather than uranium you end up with the same amount of fission products ( for a given amount of energy ), but you don't get any transuranics. I'll repeat that to make sure you got it:
Regardless of reactor design the quantity of fission products is the same for a given quantity of energy. The energy produced is directly proportional to the number of fissions that occur (and consequentially the amount of fission products in the waste. However, while regular reactors produce long lived transuranics that need to be safely stored for thousands of years, breeders only produce the fission products ( the same quantity as regular reactors would produce for the same energy ) and thus their waste reaches the same levels of radioactivity as uranium-ore within approximately 300 years.
Your assertion that the waste becomes more dangerous after recycled in a breeder reactor presumably refers to the fact that the radioactivity of the fission products is higher than that of the actinides. However as I mentioned above the quantity of fission products is no greater than it would have been for uranium. Also many of the fission products are so radioactive that they very rapidly decay to stable compounds that are not troublesome. Some of them have half-lives of minutes or even seconds, and after just a short period of storage they are less radioactive than what the actinides would have been. More importantly however is that the overall heat generation decreases rapidly and since you keep recycling the uranium you reduce the waste volume by almost a factor of 100. Because of these reductions in heat generation and volume, storing all the waste a power plant would produce within the 300 years it takes for breeder waste to decay is quite feasible to do on-site. Or in other words:
A breeder reactor produces so small quantities of waste that it would take much longer to fill the plant's storage facilities than it would take for the waste to decay to safe
"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.
The biggest problem with the reactor at Chernobyl is that the design did not include a concrete vault capable of containing the clouds of debris ejected from the event site.
Yeah, exactly. With the simple expedience of a concrete dome, the Chernobyl disaster would have been substantially smaller, like Three Mile Island was, where nobody died in the immediate aftermath. Three Mile Island, which was the worst-case failure scenario -- coolant failure and all control rods locked out of the core. So the core got too hot and melted and fell into the graphite bed beneath, slowing the reaction and ending the threat. Combined with the containment shell, very little contamination was released into the environment. It was a disaster to be sure, but a small one in the grand scheme of industrial accidents. It was a design that took failure into a account and thus minimized the impact. And designs have only gotten better since then.
Honestly, people act like they still think nuclear reactors can blow up like atom bombs. "Oh my god, humanity is not ready for this power!" Yeah, nuclear weapons maybe we weren't ready for, I think fission reactors to light up our homes are within our acceptable risk level given every other human endeavor ever.
The enemies of Democracy are
The problems with Chernobyl go way past that. Here are a few:
1. Positive void coefficient of reactivity. Once bubbles started forming in the reactor coolant, it sped up the reaction, causing a positive feedback loop. This is, of course, not the case with light water reactors.
2. The SCRAM rods actually sped up the reaction because of their graphite tips. There's a pretty crazy design defect.
3. It was physically possible for those morons to disable the safety systems.
Compare this with a truly modern design like China's HTR-DB modular pebble bed reactors, and the difference is striking. The HTR-DB has a strong negative temperature coefficient of reactivity, so all the feedback loops are very negative. They can actually shut off the cooling systems and the reactor will simply shut off because it's not able to sustain a reaction without active cooling. Overheating inherently kills the reaction. Nice, isn't it?
I've worked as an Operator at a US Power Reactor ( North Anna Power Station in Virginia ) a long time ago. It is a Westinghouse pressurized water reactor and it's a completely different design than Chernobyl. The containment dome is of sufficient volume to maintain integrity during a complete meltdown. It's one of the biggest expenses. ( A description of the construction can be found in the license application in section 2.4.1 page 2-97 ).
The Unit 1 and Unit 2 Containments are Seismic Class I structures that house the reactor and other Nuclear Steam Supply System (NSSS) components for the respective unit. Each Containment consists of a reinforced concrete cylinder with a hemispherical dome and a flat, 10-foot-thick reinforced concrete mat foundation. A waterproof membrane is located below the Containment's structural mat and extends up the Containment wall to ground level.
In fact, it's such a large expense that this particular design keeps the interior of the containment dome at about 9 psia to allow for the expansion of Reactor Coolant during a meltdown in a smaller volume. Meaning a smaller containment dome. It also has the advantage that if there are any leaks, it leaks in, not out. If an accident did happen, the containment dome would probably been sealed and filled with concrete.
So why have nuclear plants? Why all the expense?
When I worked at that plant. Dominion Power ( Then Virginia Power ) had 4 reactors and about 17 coal fired plants and I think 2 natural gas plants. Those 4 reactors could at times supply about 40% of the power for the company's power grid covering almost all of Virginia and the northern part of North Carolina. This was usually at night when energy consumption dropped.
The coal plants also didn't operate at 100% all the time. They altered their power output increasing output during peak demand during the day and late evening and decreasing output as demand dropped during late night and early morning.
I hope you have noticed like I have that the standard operating procedure of the coal fired plants closely mirror what you would expect to see from a solar & battery power plant.
Also, I know how much coal ash is produced in a single day from a coal fired plant. I also know, for the nuclear plant I worked at, only one third of the fuel rods were replaced every 18 months. So, given the choice of fields covered in tons of low level waste or only a few tons of concentrated nastiness, I'd opt for the later because it is far easier to maintain stricter and safer control of it.
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull