As Nuclear Reactors Age, the Money To Close Them Lags

Harperdog writes "A worrying bit of news about nuclear reactors in the U.S. from the NYT: 'The operators of 20 of the nation's aging nuclear reactors, including some whose licenses expire soon, have not saved nearly enough money for prompt and proper dismantling. If it turns out that they must close, the owners intend to let them sit like industrial relics for 20 to 60 years or even longer while interest accrues in the reactors' retirement accounts.'"

Comments

Two sides

[Sav1or]

Part of me thinks we need to take risks in order to learn about and understand this powerful technology, and part of me doesn't want to mutate...

Re:Two sides

[dch24]

No risk necessary. Just take the spent fuel and burn it in a newer-gen reactor.

Ok, ok, transporting radioactive waste is hazardous. So be careful about that.

Re:Two sides

[Anonymous Coward]

The technology that dch24 mentioned already exists. European nations already do it. The United States has an outdated treaty with Russia that prevents us from doing it.

Re:Two sides

[fluffy99]

No risk necessary. Just take the spent fuel and burn it in a newer-gen reactor.

What about the other large quantity of low-level stuff like the containment chamber, piping, etc. Really the fuel itself is the least of the cleanup problem.

Re:Two sides

[Z00L00K]

You forget the contaminated structure in the reactors. The fuel is a minor issue but the containment is more of a problem.

I suspect that the owners will end up going bankrupt and leave the problem to the government.

Re:Two sides

[Michael Woodhams]

I see nothing inherently dangerous about nuclear reactors. We know sodium reactors don't go critical even when there's a total coolant failure.

Fukushima had a total coolant failure, and didn't go critical, but it was certainly dangerous. And there they had (and used) the option to pump cold water into the primary coolant loop and vent steam from it - an option which wouldn't be available with sodium.

Reprocessing fuel is in itself dangerous: the third worst nuclear accident was at a reprocessing plant. I suspect your analysis of waste reduction through reprocessing is highly optimistic, but I lack the expertise to say for sure.

Re:Two sides

[rtb61]

The owners don't go bankrupt, just think psychopath corporate executives. When a nuclear power station is nearing end of life, they simply split if off as an independent company and sell it to the public based on current income and buried in debt with not of zero money left in the budget but in fact negative tens of millions left in the budget for shutdown.

Reality is the only safe way to do a nuclear power station is to have them totally under government control. Taxpayers pay the bill and taxpayers get the benefit of any positive returns during the life of the nuclear power station because at the end of the day it is taxpayers who will always get lumbered with the loses, while psychopath corporate executives wander of with multi-million dollar bonuses and golden parachutes.

Re:Two sides

[Dodgy G33za]

Government ownership didn't work out too well in the Ukraine.

Like socialism, nuclear is a great idea on paper. But once you get greedy and/or incompetent people involved, and it is pretty inevitable you will, you don't want to be living down wind of one.

If the companies building and profiting from nuclear had to pay the full costs of insurance and decommissioning they would never be built. Come to that, if open cast coal miners or oil shale producers had to pay the full costs of restoring the land solar would probably be cheaper than all alternatives.

Re:Two sides

[TheRaven64]

There are lots of ways of dealing with it. Grind it up finely and centrifuge it to separate out the different elements, for example, so that you've concentrated all of the stuff that's still radioactive. Then use that in medical sterilisation, x-ray machines, radiothermal generators, and betavoltaics. The reason we don't is not that we lack the ability, it's that we lack the economic incentive. Filling it with concrete and leaving it for a hundred years is cheap, and for beta emitters it's total overkill for preventing contamination - we put beta emitters in power supplies for pacemakers and on glowing key fobs these days. Recycling it is going to cost a lot more than the value of the materials you will extract. That said, recycling may be more attractive if you've got a lot of them to process at once, so passing them to the future to handle makes sense.

Re:Two sides

[Genda]

Solar just passed the $1 per watt milestone so in fact it is now cost competitive with oil which is fully subsidized. And since the new cells can be deposited on a flexible plastic substrate, we can now cover all kinds of artifacts and structures with these new inexpensive solar cells. We live in a fantasy. The presumptions upon which our economy functions include infinite natural resources, infinite capacity to recover from prolific environmental abuse, and infinite capacity for the middle class to take the brunt of the fiscal misconduct of the wealthy and powerful.

There is a human tendency when raiding the cookie jar to just keep taking until nothing is left. This week the Cal State University Regents this week voted themselves a 10% increase in pay. This in a time where Universities across the state are being crushed by lack of state funding, teachers are being let go, classes eliminated from the curriculum and students everywhere are crumpling under draconian increases of tuition. Some of the top state CSU executives received raises as large as 22%. They had to close down several campuses for fear of violent protest. This is just one example of people who should be leading by example, instead using their position to take advantage of the public. These people all have salaries in excess of $250,000. You can't tell me that they were so underpaid that they couldn't keep a roof over their heads. I don't have a problem with people getting fair remuneration. Just not on the backs of the rest of society, and please stop at a fair share. Leave a couple cookies for the rest of us.

Unlikely

[ozmanjusri]

They'll just use corrupt business laws and politics to rape the "retirement accounts" for their own benefit. Then they'll leave the dangerous corpses of their businesses as a warning to future generations on the stupidity of trusting your future to lowest-common-denominator businessmen.

Re:Unlikely

[caffemacchiavelli]

I don't think that the kind of species we are is the problem here. Capitalism prides itself on setting good incentives, but some of the real incentives that are created are just destructive and wicked, as is demonstrated nicely in this story. You can't just assume that people using massive amounts of tech and labor for their own self-interest is going to be just fine for everyone, as long as we put a bunch of regulations in place. I'd really like to see more research into alternative economic systems, I feel like it's time to move on to something smarter.

Re:Unlikely

[MrNaz]

Everyone uses a road *somewhere*. Why tax each road user for his particular stretch of road? Why not just tax everyone who uses roads, say through vehicle registration fees, and skip the costs associated with setting up infrastructure to monitor, track and charge each road user's particular use? Roads and other basic infrastructure have alwasy been, and *should* always be, free to all. Regulating use of the basic infrastructure assets of the economy slows down the process of doing just about anything by adding unnecessary management. To illustrate this point with an extreme example, how fast could you travel down the road at night if you had to stop to put a coin into every street light to turn it on as you passed by it? Would you rather not just pay an annual lump sum, even if it meant paying a little more or less than your fair share? To a greater or lesser extent, user-pays for basic infrastructure introduces these inefficiencies, creating frictional resistance to basic human activity.

But don't let these practical considerations stand in the way of fundamentalist privatism.

Collecting interest

[steelscalp]

It seems unlikely that interest will grow faster than the cost of dismantling increases. But, letting the shortest half-life stuff decay will make the task a little less challenging.

Re:Collecting interest

[Anonymous Coward]

That tends to be exactly what happens. In addition, replacement reactors are built on the same site next to decommissioned reactors making any security monitoring costs basically nil.

While it is quite possible to completely dismantle a reactor within 1 year, it is about 100x cheaper to wait 10 years and 1000x cheaper to simply wait 50 years. Unlike with conventional pollutants, nuclear stuff simply ceases to be the problem as a function of time.

Re:Did the rules change?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems to me that the business plan for the building and operating the reactors should have included dismantling. It might have been, but maybe several corporate take overs and mergers raided the fund to fiance the acquisition. Or it was assumed from the beginning that the taxpayers would subsidize the clean up. That would mean just another case of corporate welfare at huge cost to the average American.

Re:I seem to remember

[NemoinSpace]

while your knowledge of reactors and economics is spotty, your knowledge of government is uncanny.

Re:What?!

[__aaltlg1547]

Unless you MAKE them do it, they won't.

Heh

[lightknight]

Their plan is to get the government, and by association the taxpayer, to pay for the shutdown.

There is, however, a flipside to this: should the need for energy suddenly sky-rocket, they will, no doubt, be recommissioned, with special permits to allow their continued operation (to the horror of the people who understand just how badly these reactors need to be replaced). The fun part is that we will then be continuing to run dangerously out of date nuclear power-plants, with all of the original design flaws; the government, with all of its spin, will play up the fact that they are saving the taxpayers billions of dollars in doing so.

Those of us who are proponents of nuclear technology will, of course, facepalm with the force of thousand Arnold Schwarzeneggers at this development. The green lobby, of course, will scream at this continued injustice.