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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.'"
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.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
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.
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.
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 The United States has an outdated treaty with Russia that prevents us from doing it.
while your knowledge of reactors and economics is spotty, your knowledge of government is uncanny.
Unless you MAKE them do it, they won't.
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.
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.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
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.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
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.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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.
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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.