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

[Sav1or]

Of course, I'm sure there are a million ways of taking care of things like this we haven't thought of yet. But that means money, and that's all going to that black stuff coming out of the ground.

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 The United States has an outdated treaty with Russia that prevents us from doing it.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

[davester666]

This is exactly what happens in the gas business. For decades, gas stations were "independently owned", and when they closed, the owner never would have the money to clean up the site [as gas always winds up leaking into the ground from the tanks and the various lines]. Then the gov't would require a deposit, which was simply forfeited as it was too small to cover cleaning up the site. Finally, they forced the main petroleum industry companies to [whichever 'brand' was on the station] pay for cleaning up the sites. And what to they do...just flatten the buildings, put up a temporary fence around the now-vacant lot, and just pay the now-minimal property tax on the site indefinitely...

Re:Two sides

[Anonymous Coward]

I just wikied around a bit on this subject, it's pretty neat. I'm assuming we're talking fast & fast-breeder reactors, here?
I had seen a bit on the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, previously, and it looked like a pretty awesome solution to our energy needs as well. I think there was a video called Thorium Remux, or something like that.

Re:Two sides

[jd]

Not sure there need be any risks. I see nothing inherently dangerous about nuclear reactors. We know sodium reactors don't go critical even when there's a total coolant failure. The only danger is that sodium and water shouldn't mix, so avoid using water in the reactor if you're using sodium.

Radioactive dust is a major hazard, but since there's no reason to expose the fuel rods to air, there's no reason for there to be radioactive dust.

Radioactive waste is another hazard, but if you reprocess the rods and separate the different radioisotopes, you can reduce the hazard. Unspent uranium can be put into a new fuel rod, a secondary reactor for consuming plutonium shouldn't be hard, several of the other isotopes have uses in industry, some plutonium can be used in nuclear batteries for space missions, and you only need to deal with what's left. Much less space than trying to store the lot - and it's probably a lot safer.

All safety and backup systems should be triply redundant (at least), with redundant systems NOT in the same place as each other. If by the beach or in earthquake zones, redundant systems should also be behind watertight doors and not kept at ground level. (Active earthquake protection is practical these days, but you need somewhere to put the shock absorbers and protection against sheer forces.)

All this adds cost, yes, but so does leaving a reactor unused for 20+ years. I'm fairly confident that the above is a damn sight cheaper.

Re:Two sides

[mug funky]

no need to transport it - build a new gen reactor in situ. might as well use that land for something.

Re:Two sides

[lightknight]

Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Re:Two sides

[jhoegl]

.... were the last words uttered by the person who successfully opened a sustained black hole on earth.

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

[sjames]

In newer sodium designs, the core is in part regulated by it's own thermal expansion. The sodium pool has sufficient area to radiate the heat away safely even if active cooling stops completely.

Fast reactors are fine running on mixed actinides, so the reprocessing is simpler and safer. A side benefit is that the mixed actinide fuel is harder to refine into weapons grade material than it is to produce it from scratch.

Re:Two sides

[burne]

We don't. Not always. Take the German AVR. The, where it comes to beta-radation, most contaminated place in the world. The fuel is partly still in the reactor, because it's jammed in cracks in the bottom of the reactorvessel. It's filled with concrete and labeled 'do not open until 2100' in the hope our great-grandchildren might know what to do with it.

A nice gift to future generations.

Re:Two sides

[Stellian]

Just take the spent fuel and burn it in a newer-gen reactor.

Can you name a single such site ? Could you possibly refer to the generation IV breeder reactors of which no commercial plant was yet built, or is even in the approval phase ?
Most importantly, the authors of generation IV projects planned a 20 years period of basic science research before their projects could become reality, starting with the year 2002. Since little of that research was actually accomplished, it's prudent to say commercial gen IV breeder reactors are decades away.

The Generation IV Roadmap document can be summarized with the statement that the known technological gaps to construct even prototype breeder reactors were enormous at the time when the document was written. These unknowns are addressed with a detailed planning for the required research projects and the associated cost. Only after these problems have been solved a design and construction of expensive prototype breeder reactors can start.
We are now at the end of the year 2009 and almost half the originally planned R&D period is over. Essentially no progress results have been presented and the absence of large funding during the past 8 years gives little condence that even the most basic questions for the entire Generation IV reactors program can be answered during the next few years. Thus, it seems that the Generation IV roadmap is already totally outdated and unrealistic.

Re:Two sides

[Stellian]

We know sodium reactors don't go critical even when there's a total coolant failure.

Yeah, except that coolant spontaneously catches fire when exposed to air, spreading radioactive dust all around. Monju is an expensive failure that showed how sodium fares in practice. Sorry, but in my back yard I will only allow a coolant/moderator that is chemically inert when exposed to air : no graphite, no sodium. It must also not seep into the food chain, so water is out also.
You are only left with lead/tin/bismuth alloys which have sufficiently low absorption cross sections, but relatively high melting points when compared with sodium/watter. Lead coolant has been used on Russian subs so we know it works.

All this adds cost, yes, but so does leaving a reactor unused for 20+ years

Most likely, it's much more expensive to handle hot fuel. As you probably know but some readers might not, freshly depleted fuel is extremely hot, both in the thermal and radioactive sense, and continues to generate about 7% of the nominal output of the reactor. This residual heat caused the Fukushima disaster. So by leaving the reactors on standby a few decades most short lived products have decayed and the clean-up is cheaper and safer.

Re:Two sides

[meerling]

Don't forget that one of the factors that made things worse were the hydrogen explosions that occurred because the water was separating into it's component parts (gaseous hydrogen and oxygen). That's just not going to happen to a sodium reactor.

Re:Two sides

[Joce640k]

Basically: "It was our first attempt and it had localized spots which were hotter than we designed for."

Re:Two sides

[leuk_he]

Wiki article

The most worrysome line in there is "AVR was the basis of the technology licensed to China to build HTR-10"

But keep in mind that this was a research reactor. 10MW is a small reactor. Most Commercial reactors have more power e.g. the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant mentioned in the article is 2000MW. And thus you can expect that the radiation and costs to dismantle are also 200 times higher.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

And is that really so bad? Gas isn't extremely toxic, and bacteria will (slowly) eat it. If keeping the lot fenced ensures safety, and natural decay is the most economic cleanup method (both will depend on local circumstances such as soil types), then the current solution may in fact be the best approach.

Re:Two sides

[ConfusedVorlon]

not quite;

Taxpayers' get the benefit, and taxpayers' children, grandchildren and great grandchildren get the expense of decommissioning and handling the waste.

This is the big problem with nuclear - it's broadly equivalent to taking out a huge loan which will be paid down over the next few thousand years.

Re:Two sides

[Anonymous Coward]

Theoretically, most of the contamination should be contained to a small portion of the site. The massive containment building ought to be cold, and the turbines, and even most of the cooling system. It has to be characterized and tested, to be sure, but contamination should be concentrated in a few, discrete places.

That said, 20 years seems like a perfectly reasonable time to close a reactor. Georgia Tech turned off their 5 MW reactor in 1988, and is only this year doing the terminal characterization in preparation for demolition in the next couple of years.

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

[Genda]

Excuse me, gas isn't toxic? Benzene is a serious carcinogen in fact the entire group of BTEX chemicals are known carcinogens and have known health impacts. Add to that the impact of MTBE (one of the most serious contaminants in ground water today), and gasoline leaks are a serious problem. By the way, though there is some metabolism of gasoline byproduct by some bacteria, it appears that fungus' do the heavy lifting when it comes to soil recovering from petrochemical spills.

Re:Two sides

[DarkOx]

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

You are partly right. The problem will be left to the government and the tax payers. The companies won't go bankrupt though. They are part of the few the proud the rent seekers. You see they will get bailout, because they are vital to public interest or some such reasoning. The executives and bond holders (banks) will get paid, the share holders (your 401K) will be wiped out, you will be expected to go on paying your electric bill and your taxes as if nothing happened.

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

[DarkOx]

Government ownership in the USA won't work either for the same reasons private ownership does not. Politicians will want to buy votes of individuals and industrial concerns a like under billing(taxing) for the true costs. They may even push rate reductions as 'economic stimulus' or other such nonsense. The end result will be the same. Through the life of the plant their will be maintenance problems due to budget deficiency and near the end of the plants life we will discover the trust fund for its clean up has been raided.

Only military projects seem to be able to hang on to their budget commitments in this nation and lately even some of them have seen the chopping block. Just look at Social Security. Left mostly to its own devices it would be solvent, but cuts to contribution, added benefits have left it financially hollow, on the books. That was all to buy votes. Off the books its assets are really government bonds because the CONgress has pulled out the cash and replaced it with the bonds. Now really the SSA is a whole owned subsidiary of the government if you will. Money is fungible within an entity. Its fine to say there is a huge heap of money in the trust fund but really its all got to come from the same general revenue as the money in the trust fund is just IOUs. That means current revenue has to cover the past expense and current operation, you see how that snow balls into a problem. This was all to lower taxes over the short term without giving anything up to cover the lost revenue, and long term the nation is bankrupt even if the SSA isn't. I think there is every reason to believe a federal nuclear power generation program would follow exactly the same pattern.

Re:Two sides

[pedestrian crossing]

You completely ignore the topic, nice!

What do you propose to deal with the ECONOMIC problem of de-commisioning?

Re:Two sides

[f3rret]

.... were the last words uttered by the person who successfully opened a sustained black hole on earth.

Interestingly enough, assuming the black hole was small and contained this probably wouldn't do anything. If the mass is small then the gravitation is small and you don't get any 'sucking' action, it would just sort of sit there being all black and ominous.

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.

Re:Two sides

[Attila Dimedici]

There are a couple of inaccuracies to your post. The first is the inevitable seeping of gas into the ground. There was some of that in the stations with the old style underground tanks. However, those tanks have all been replaced for over a decade now. In addition, the primary thing which seeped into the ground at gas stations was MBTE, a government mandated additive to gasoline (the government no longer mandates adding MBTE to gasoline). The thing about MBTE is that it is highly volatile. As a result, the most efficient way to clean up a site where the ground is contaminated with MBTE is to make sure the dirt is exposed to the air for several years. If, as would be the case with a gas station site, there are areas several feet down with concentrations of MBTE contamination the remedy is to dig down and place venting pipes from those areas to the surface. I believe the time frame for the MBTE to clear out of the soil if it properly vented is about 5 years.

Re:Two sides

[necro81]

Unfortunately, there's a lot more radioactive waste at an old plant than just the spent fuel. Spent fuel is relatively straightforward and, as you say, could eventually have some value in a new reactor architecture. But what do you do with 10,000 tons of broken concrete that's been sprinkled with radioactive isotopes over the years, or rusting pipes and valves that have had radioactive steam flowing through them for decades? Can't convert that to nuclear fuel. This has always been a point the nuclear industry has glossed over.

Re:Two sides

[Stellian]

The idea here is that assuming molten lead or tin starts spewing out of the reactor, it will just sit there, solidify, and remain insoluble in both air and water. An area of a few tens of meters around the reactor will be contaminated. It will not burn with a radioactive graphite fire contaminating a whole continent (Chenobyl), it will unload the contaminated primary cooling water in the ocean (Fukushima), and it will not spontaneously burst into flames when encountering atmospheric oxigen and water, releasing poisonous smoke (Monju). It will not create air-born radioactive dust, and radioactive isotopes will not accumulate in living organisms, such as the case for tritiated water, carbon, potassium, iodine.

While lead is a neurotoxin, we know how to work with it, and there are already hundreds of thousands tons of lead in circulation due to it's use in lead-acid batteries around the world.

Re:Two sides

[petermgreen]

Solar just passed the $1 per watt milestone

Is that watt of installed capacity or watt of average output?

Re:Two sides

[nitehawk214]

Only military projects seem to be able to hang on to their budget commitments in this nation...

What the...

Re:Two sides

[petermgreen]

The diagrams i've seen of sodium reactors show a heat exchanger between sodium and water. Water reacts exothermically with sodium to produce hydrogen (and sodium hydroxide). If air is present then the hydrogen will probablly just burn straight away but if air is not present (as afaict it wouldn't be in a failed heat exchanger) then afaict it will just build up until it finds a way to escape.

Re:Two sides

[delt0r]

You clearly no nothing about nuclear physics and have no idea what you are talking about. The spent fuel is by far the biggest problem, by many orders of magnitude, both in longevity of the radiation and the intensity. The structure is a low grade nuclear waste, and is safe in fairly short time frames, has low radioactivity and most of that activity is over very quickly (ie less than a year). Furthermore this is typically in forms that are much harder to get into the environment and much easier to keep biologically unavailable.

The only time the "containment" structure gets difficult to deal with is in the core meltdown situation, because then it is covered in *spend fuel*.

Re:Two sides

[delt0r]

It is $1 per brochure watt*.

* Actual peak panel output varies by location. Please call one of our friendly representatives for a full quote.

Re:Two sides

[delt0r]

I don't know where this truthiness has come from, but its false. By far the worst part of clean up is what to do with the spent fuel. It is by far the most radioactive my orders of magnitude and is the hardest to deal with chemically as well. To top things off it is by far the longest lived radioactive waste as well. Keep in mind that most of the spent fuel for the life time of the reactor is on site. The cladding is the only other thing that gets close since it is covered in spent fuel.

In comparison the activated structure is reasonably easy to deal with, fairly mildly radioactive and fairly short lived. There are other chemical considerations that also make it far easier to deal with. Spent fuel and uranium are not sprinkled all over the plant you know.

Re:Two sides

[squidflakes]

That's almost never the case. A buddy of mine is a maintenance foreman for a nuke plant, and we talk about this a lot. There are tons of places that get hot where you'd never expect it. The power turbines are constantly being pulled apart and the blades inspected, as the neutron flux from the reactor makes the metal brittle much faster. Even the employee cafeteria and control room, two places that have the most shielding in the entire plant are weekly checked and scrubbed, as the chairs, benches, tables, and food prep equipment starts to get radioactive over time.

While it is all low level radiation, it can build up. Doubly so if you pile all of that stuff together for disposal.

Re:Two sides

[squidflakes]

The topsoil after a shale project may look beautiful, but the ground water is still unbelievably fucked. A couple of communities in Pennsylvania still have tap water that you can light on fire, but the land used for fracking looks pristine.

Also, if you take a core soil sample from those areas, you'll get a nice top layer of rich soil that isn't native to the area, a clay cap, more than likely some sort of thin buffer layer of chalk, talc, or some other very basic and cheap mineral, and then the local dirt and rock that is sterile and saturated with a stew of the same horrible crap you find in drilling mud.

Re:Two sides

[squidflakes]

If you see nothing inherently dangerous about a nuclear reactor, then I would suggest that you aren't fully educated on the subject. You also don't seem to understand how the business of building a power plant for profit nearly forces the company that is taking the responsibility to cut out all of those unnecessary costs like triple redundancy and water-tight doors. Really, if it weren't for government subsidies, nuclear plants probably wouldn't ever get built. The costs on even a small plant are staggering, and anything that a company can do to reduce the up-front costs reduces the time to profitability, which we all know, is the only goal.

Re:Two sides

[jd]

There is no fundamental requirement to use water in the heat exchange process. Water is convenient, as it takes an enormous amount of heat to raise it one degree Celsius, but there are other options. Given that the article is concerned with the hidden decommission costs at the end of the lifetime, it seems reasonable enough to consider the initial outlay to be a very small part of the total cost. Given that, it also seems reasonable enough to consider whether you can simply get away with using a greater volume of some inferior (from a heat exchange standpoint) liquid per unit time in order to be able to get the same amount of usable work out of the heat at the end.

If you can show that indeed you can, then the diagrams you've seen aren't important since you would then know that the water can be replaced with something that is not going to react with the sodium.

However, perhaps you end up deciding that water does indeed need to be used. Can it be used safely? Well, heat exchangers don't need to be thin or a single block. They simply need to be efficient. They also need to be easy to monitor and maintain, so that cracks can be rapidly detected and fixed whilst trivial - regardless of where in the structure they form - rather than being so cumbersome to repair that operators have every incentive to wait until they become a major threat. That means they need to be thick enough to be able to provide a very high level of structural integrity under normal operating conditions no matter what part of the heat exchanger you have to replace.

Normal operating conditions? Yes. Even though you probably wouldn't want to have the system running when doing maintenance, you would want it designed to be resilient enough that you actually could.

However, I've already mentioned that I'm stipulating triple redundancy as a minimum for any truly safe design, so you've two complete replacement heat exchange systems that are offline at any given time. You find a crack in the one in use, you switch to one of the backups and then conduct the repairs. If there's a crisis during maintenance, that still gives you an alternative backup - you can either switch to it OR use both to halve the stresses experienced by either.

Of course, that sort of "load balancing" might be what you want anyway - design each heat exchange system to handle the full load and then split the actual load across all three to minimize stresses. If one needs to go offline, the pressure gradient is then somewhat shallower for your backups than it would be if you were to go from zero to max in one step.

Ok, let's take the worst-case scenario - a catastrophic crack develops as a result of a magnitude elebenty earthquake. Is it possible to handle this scenario?

It depends somewhat on the volume of hydrogen we're talking. For moderate amounts per unit of time, I'd have said yes. You want a reservoir that has an oxygen-free "air gap" (any exceptionally heavy inert gas will do) where the hydrogen can be outgassed into and float above. You then either want a way to be able to perform a controlled burn OR have a catalyst that can safely lock it up.

For large amounts, it's more of a problem. You could, of course, have a "lung" similar to the one used in Biosphere 2, where hydrogen was vented into it. So long as you didn't exceed its capacity, it would give you a way to contain hydrogen with a much lower risk of a Fukushima-style detonation.

Very large amounts, well in excess of what you can contain by these methods, would certainly be possible in a disaster if all the heat exchangers and backups suffered simultaneous structural failure. Which is certainly possible in a major earthquake. What then? Well, the obvious answer to that is to have the heat exchangers placed a significant distance from the reactor core. If an explosion cannot damage the core (because of distance) and the core can be shut down safely in the event of a coolant failure, then you've eliminated that issue.

I'm not saying anyone would actually design or build a reactor around these concepts, merely that they could and that if they did then it would meet the objections raised to that design.

Re:Two sides

[jd]

Uhhh, covered that by talking about the industrial uses of the waste isotopes. Anything that can be recycled economically would both offset decommissioning costs (by bringing in money) and reduce those costs (you don't have to pay for multi-millenia storage of something you're selling).

Re:Two sides

[jd]

Hey, who said anything about "business"? Are you accusing me of being one of those capitalist types? I should hope that in the last 16-17 years of posting here, I've totally disabused people of such a notion.

Sorry, but power generation is a necessary public service and should NOT be done "for profit". It should be done to allow society to function cheaply and efficiently, which means it has to be done from a far more socialist standpoint. Business' only business in power generation should be to ensure that the absence of direct market forces does not lead to laziness or sloppiness.

(Every philosophy has its place, but mission-critical services where disasters are spectacular, deadly and have far-reaching impacts should NOT be subject to trying to wring every last dime out of them.)

Re:Two sides

[Anonymous Coward]

Like socialism (which never really succeeded anywhere), the combination of capitalism (using limited liability corporations) and nuclear energy is a great idea on paper. However without oversight and regulation just like mining companies the take out the profit while it last and leave the mess for government to clean up.

Free market ideology in the US is hampering that necessary oversight and regulation. It is a matter of political will on the one hand and recognizing the nature of companies on the other hand. Companies are efficient because of their relentless drive for profit disregarding all other considerations. Psychopaths amoral but not necessarily immoral. It is the nature of the beast. The US fails to recognize that. A kind of ideological blindness giving these psychopaths free reign inevitably resulting in a big mess.

Re:Two sides

[gawbl]

1) The government mandated "oxygenate," not MTBE. Ethanol also satisfied the mandate.

2) Gasoline has been leaking into the environment for decades; it wasn't a problem because gas and water don't mix. MTBE loves water, and they're very difficult to separate once mixed:

http://www.epa.gov/otaq/mtbe/clean.htm

I'm not a chemist, but "5 years" sounds very optimistic to me.

3) Oxygenate (MTBE or Ethanol) is pointless because it doesn't lessen smog, when used in modern cars; the O2 sensor compensates, richening the mixture and lowering mileage, and the smog output doesn't change.

stuart

Re:Two sides

[pedestrian crossing]

Oh yeah, the centrifuge thing. Yeah, right. Show me some numbers that that's even going to come close to covering decommissioning costs of the plant, not to mention the operating/decommissioning cost of the contaminated centrifuge...

Re:Two sides

[squidflakes]

I think we're getting off on the wrong foot here.

First off, I'm not accusing you of being anything other than uninformed about the dangerous nature of controlled fission reactions and the even more dangerous nature of the companies that build them.

I am in complete agreement with you about the need for power generation to be a public service. I think deregulation of the power industry was one of the worst things to come out of the deregulation craze because you have plants that are operating for-profit that suck up government subsidies AND lobby the government for fewer regulations so they can cut corners while claiming public lands for "right-of-way" without paying far market value for the land, like any regular company would.

The way it works now only encourages massive corruption, regulatory capture, and a shocking disregard for safety. Though, I suppose it could be worse and we could have a situation like the Japanese do with TECPO that combines the worst traits of a corporate owned power generation facility with entrenched and corrupt government interests.

Re:Two sides

[Johann Lau]

Being sloppy and greedy isn't among the risks that are unavoidable, not by any stretch.

Re:Two sides

[MrKaos]

Basically: "It was our first attempt and it had localized spots which were hotter than we designed for."

No, actually it was the second attempt. From memory, the first attempt failed as well and is in a similar situation.

Re:Two sides

[MrKaos]

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.

I presume you are referring to burner type reactors. If the material technology was available to build such a reactor the might be feasible. Since it isn't at the end of the lifespan of such a reactor, if built using conventional materials technology, would present an even more difficult problem to deal with because the radionuclides in such a reactor would be far more radioactive than existing reactor technology.

It's all about the reactors potential lifespan.

Re:Two sides

[kestasjk]

All energy sources have their disadvantages. We can't afford to say "nuclear isn't perfect so we can't use it" because the alternatives (for base load generation) are likely worse.

Re:Two sides

[kestasjk]

Can you name a single such site ?

Generation 4 reactors are by definition still in the research phase. Gen III (and III+) are being rolled out now (which are safer and cheaper but not radically different in terms of fuel).

Is the concern that it won't actually turn out to be feasible? The science is pretty irrefutable; many experimental fast reactors were built in the nuclear honeymoon period.

Is the concern that they won't be used because it's cheaper to use high-grade fuel? That's a more legitimate concern, because fuel is so cheap, but if waste storage becomes too expensive that may tip the scale the other way.

Re:Two sides

[kestasjk]

Fukushima had a total coolant failure, and didn't go critical, but it was certainly dangerous.

It is dangerous, but constructing hydroelectric dams, mining coal, porting LNG, etc, etc is dangerous too. Big energy is dangerous.

The question is how many people died? None as far as we know, from this incident. You can talk about statistical future cancer deaths etc, but even with those (~70, IIRC) nuclear is relatively very safe. The difference is a coal mine collapse in China, or someone dying of pneumonia from dust, isn't a newsworthy event.

Holding nuclear's design (e.g. reactor safety margins) to a higher safety standard makes perfect sense, but holding nuclear's track record (e.g. total deaths/year) to a higher safety standard doesn't make sense.

Re:Two sides

[dch24]

Yup.

But we're talking about the US here, so that usually ends up being stamped "un-economical" and the investors might actually sign off on the alternative: selling the spent fuel (thus being freed from a huge risk), so the spent fuel is bought by a separate company that actually thinks it can profit from buying it.

In other words, the economy is routing around the damage caused by US regulations.

Re:Two sides

[dch24]

A little homework is all you need.

The low-grade radioactive byproducts have short half-lives. They still need to be held on-site for the time it takes to reach a safe level of radioactivity.

The same stuff that is radioactive for millenia is the same stuff that is useful to new generation reactors, so ship that off-site.

Re:Two sides

[fluffy99]

A little homework is all you need.

The low-grade radioactive byproducts have short half-lives. They still need to be held on-site for the time it takes to reach a safe level of radioactivity.

The same stuff that is radioactive for millenia is the same stuff that is useful to new generation reactors, so ship that off-site.

Shorter half lives still don't make it instantly easy to dispose of. They're still cleaning up Hanford for example.

Re:Two sides

[fluffy99]

Interesting read. Claims that 30% of the decommisioning cost is getting rid of the low level waste.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/13/idUS178883596820110613

Re:Two sides

[Stellian]

The concern is that Gen III reactors don't have the actinide burning capacity the GP alludes to. They run on LEU or MOX and will generate much of the same long lived waste we currently don't know - in a political sense - how to get rid of. In time they will raise similar decommissioning problems.
Bottom line, reactors that can burn spent fuel on a large scale are still decades away, thus they are inconsequential to the decommissioning going on today. You can of course reprocess spent fuel and form new fuel pellets - with the proliferation and ecological risks that process involves. Actinide accumulation prevents you to do that too many times.

Re:Two sides

[Coren22]

You do realize that in developed nations the population growth is negative? Are you going to be the one to tell an African nation that they need to reduce birth rate? Are you going to be the one to appear racist to save the world?

Re:Two sides

[ConfusedVorlon]

a) We _could_ afford to do that if we wanted
b) That isn't generally the argument used. It tends to run more along the lines of "nuclear is dangerous and expensive in the long run, so we shouldn't use it"

I'm not expert on the arguments, but knocking down an argument which isn't used (b) with a statement that isn't true (a) doesn't really demonstrate anything.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Or we can give it over to the gov who ... oh wait they dont have the money either... hm well thats a problem...

Re:Unlikely

[Anonymous Coward]

who cares if they have money if they have power. Money is really just an abstraction of power/useful work. If the government actually handled the power grid, it should never actually cost more than it could get.

Re:Unlikely

[Formalin]

Of course, why pay for clean-up?

Much better to ride that "retirement fund" as a golden parachute for yourself, and externalise the actual costs onto the backs of taxpayers (and become the next superfund site).

Re:Unlikely

[Stan92057]

yep your right this is how we lost manufacturing in the USA also. We are all taxed..heavily for the repairs to roads and bridges only to have our politicians rape the coffers so now we don't have the funds to repair our Bridges because they need it but have to wait until a bridge falls down to get it fixed.

Re:Unlikely

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. The government really has no shortage of money, but even if it did, it's got plenty of authority.

Who would I rather trust, a corporation that'll dissolve when it become inconvenient, or a government that intends to last at least long enough to represent my grandchildren?

Re:Unlikely

[tmosley]

Excellent. Let's bring back press-gangs for nuclear clean-up. Also, anything else our wise leaders can think of, including labor for their pals in industry.

Instead, let's get rid of the dumb regulations stopping us from building breeder reactors and let the operators of those reactors FIGHT WITH EACH OTHER for the rights to get to all that "waste", with the end result being that they pay for clean-up and quite a bit more.

Re:Unlikely

[symbolset]

Or maybe just repurpose the sites for an appropriate use. Can you say "paintball arena"?

Re:Unlikely

[inviolet]

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.

Yep.

It's situations like this, and the revelation of how costs were cut on Fukushima's seawall by omitting the datapoint of the big tsunami in the 1800s, that made me realize something that shocked me:

Nuclear power is perfectly safe, ideal, and awesome... but nuclear power built by humans is NOT. As a species we are short-sighted venal lying scammers, so there are many glorious technologies (nanotech anyone?) that become liabilities in our hands.

Re:Unlikely

[hairyfeet]

Or they'll just do what the NG wildcatters do in my state which is "the shell game' and goes like this: Set up a corp to own ALL the things you find valuable, mineral rights, hell even the office furniture and then LEASE them to yourself through a shell corp, will call them shitcorp or shitc for short. then when you get in trouble for dumping or causing a quake or what have you and people and the businesses you screwed come looking to sue you burn shitc and then simple make a NEW shell corp called...oh we'll say shitd. Since all the things worth having were never owned by shitc in the first place there is nothing to sue for, unless you want some shitc office stationary or something, and they walk away with the profits and just do the same shell game all over again.

If you want proof why the entire corporate system is just fucking evil now its shit like the above, they have screwed countless people in my home state by doing that trick which lets them have ZERO responsibilities folks, they don't have to worry about pollution or tearing shit up or destroying the land because its all 100% consequence free! No how many do you think are gonna care about what they do to the environment if it costs them absolutely nothing if they ignore the rules and hundreds of thousands if not millions to follow them?

Re:Unlikely

[swalve]

You do know that roads require maintenance and repair, right? That brand new road is going to be a pothole filled moonscape in 50 years, and will need to be completely reconstructed. Should everyone pay for that, or just the users?

Re:Unlikely

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on your logic we shouldn't ever build anything. I'm just going to sell all my material possessions, dig a hole and lie in it because fuck it. Why bother? We're all huge fuck-ups anyway.

Oh, wait. Maybe we aren't?

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

[TubeSteak]

Mquote>Instead, let's get rid of the dumb regulations stopping us from building breeder reactors ...

Regulations have nothing to do with it.
In 1977, President Carter issued an executive order banning the reprocessing of nuclear fuel.
Three Republicans (including Saint Reagan) and two Democrats have seen fit to continue Carter's policy.

If you have a problem with the status quo, take it up with Obama or one of the Republican Presidential candidates.

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.

Re:Unlikely

[sjames]

Unless you are part of some sort of self-sufficient commune, you use the roads, that's how your food gets delivered.

Besides that, vehicle registration fees are supposed to cover road repairs.

Re:Unlikely

[sjames]

That is actually closer to the truth. The whole decommissioning process gets a lot safer and easier if you let the hotter waste decay for a half life or two in situ.

Re:Unlikely

[meerling]

Assuming it isn't eaten away by trying to defend against the continual assault of spurious lawsuits from anti-nuclear groups just like has been happening during most if not all of the time the reactor was in 'use'.

Re:Unlikely

[meerling]

Maybe because as part of a national infrastructure everyone benefits from it, even if they don't personally use it.

Re:Unlikely

[vipw]

I don't drive a car but I definitely benefit from having roads. The obvious tax to raise revenue for public goods and services is a progressive income tax. More taxes lowers the efficiency of tax collection.

Re:Unlikely

[ozmanjusri]

Assuming it isn't eaten away by trying to defend against the continual assault of spurious lawsuits from anti-nuclear groups

Can you link to any examples?

Re:Unlikely

[AmiMoJo]

TFA is not talking about nuclear fuel waste, it is talking about the reactor site itself. You can't use the old reactor components as fuel in another reactor, and even if you could you would still have to dispose of the highly radioactive left over materials at the end of it.

The limit is supposed to be 40 years for clean-up in the US. However, that only requires that the worst bits be entombed in a protective concrete shell on site, meaning the land can't be re-used and has to be maintained indefinitely. In the UK we require full site clean-up, but for our reactors closed in the late 80s it is projected to take 80+ years to complete.

Interestingly Fukushima is going for full clean-up within 40 years, so I guess it is a question of money. Also, clean-up for breeder reactors and thorium reactors is more costly and difficult than current designs.

Re:Unlikely

[dcollins]

Well put.

I'm also convinced that this is also the resolution to the Fermi Paradox: Intelligent species wipe themselves out with technology.

Re:Unlikely

[Compaqt]

The difference being that those other things, like bridges and buildings, if they collapse have an immediate affect, not 4000 miles around and 10k years into the future.

Re:Unlikely

[Anonymous Coward]

Eliezer Yudkowsky occasionally uses the following tale to demonstrate why you shouldn't unwittingly trust a nonhuman process to make nice, friendly humanlike decisions.

A group of researchers were doing an experiment in group selection and evolution. They seperated insects into strictly isolated groups, and only bred from the groups that met their criteria of low population after a certain time. They were hoping to demonstrate that under conditions where it made sense to breed slowly, evolution would make these insects produce fewer offspring. That, to them, seemed like the obvious solution.

Evolution didn't have a humanlike viewpoint on the matter. The insects evolved to lower their population by eating their own offspring. As time went by, and the selective pressure that the experimenters put on increased, they got better at it - choosing to eat the female offspring of others in their group by preference.

Anybody saying that free market capitalism can solve problems is absolutely correct. Anybody saying that free market capitalism will reliably find nice, acceptable solutions in just the same way that some infinitely wise impartial human would do, is talking complete shit.

Re:Unlikely

[type40]

Hell, shitty construction contractors have been doing that for years.
Hank's Construction becomes Hank & Sons after a botched kitchen.
Same ass hole, new business cards.

Re:Unlikely

[drinkypoo]

Actually, what makes the most sense is to tax road users based on their vehicle weight, contact patch area, and mileage, because that determines how much damage you do to the road. Of course, WHERE you drive is also relevant, but you can't track that without location-logging GPS.

Re:Unlikely

[DarkOx]

I don't think so. Progressive taxation is fundamentally unfair. A consumption tax with exclusions for basic necessities is much more just. If you exclude a few things like:

un-prepaired foods for human consumption,
rent, or purchase of a primary residence,
rent or purchase of up to one vehicle,
non-luxury clothing (as already defined by the tariff schedule),
fares on public transportation,

you have excepted from taxation all things that lower income people spend a disproportionate amount of their income on; government is therefore not creating drag on them unless and until they start to experience more success. Its fair because rich and poor benefit alike from the exemptions, they are not special hand outs to certain groups. Its proportional because the more you make the more you are going to spend, the more tax you are going to pay and that means you have benefited more from things like roads and public education. Good roads lowered the cost of transportation to bring those products to market, good schools provided a work force to produce them.

The best part is the system become simple, and is nearly impossible to cheat! No more goofy separate rules for capital gains, NO you pay sales tax on the sale price of the security when you buy it, no ifs ands or buts, there is not tax at sale time, the new owner will be paying that. The long complex filing process will be gone! Most people would not have to file at all most years. Places like grocery and clothing stores would simply not collect tax on excluded items in the first place. Situations like if you bought a first vehicle and sold you existing you than you'd file a simple form form to be reimbursed.

Re:Unlikely

[DarkOx]

Capitalism as an economic system never stated you have a fundamental right to externalize costs and generally avoid responsibility for your actions. The problem is capitalism its one of implementation. The corporate vale needs to be more permeable; capitalism would work better and be more equitable if it were.

If you as an owner knew you were GOING to be held personally responsible for the clean up it would be in your self interest not to make such a mess. When shitc goes bankrupt and leaves a superfund site you simply assess shitc owners for the clean up costs according to the number of shares or equity they had in the business at the time it folded. Yes the entire costs, whatever shitc could not pay has to come out of their other personal assets.

Re:Unlikely

[tmosley]

Uhhh, yeah. The government says you can't do it. That is pretty much the definition of regulation.

Re:Unlikely

[vipw]

Fine in theory, but it does a lot to encourage a barter economy. A well functioning government needs about 40% of the economy, and that's just too much of a "discount" to pass up.

Re:Unlikely

[swalve]

And the food-truck drivers pay the tolls, which gets passed along to the consumers.

Re:Unlikely

[umghhh]

based on GP's logic we should try (we did) and learn from mistakes (we did not). The problem with nuclear is not even how bad the plumbers are or how evil owning corporations are but that complicated technology that is difficult to contain if things go wrong (take years to find out what was going on in broken nuclear reactors - ever wondered why?) and if they indeed go wrong then the price to pay in terms of evacuations & clean up etc is so enormous that even countries like Japan have problems with it. The again come people claiming that fluid metal reactors are a great solution because they are secure - well if radioactive elements carrying sodium comes in contact with air then of course everything is well or is it? This is just an example of what usually happens when solution to one problem is found - another set of problems come and these can cause as great havoc as the original problem. As stated before - the problem is that it the the ever so low risk is always there and the results are so dramatic that almost no country in the world can afford this to happen. By pushing the problem away we may have a good life now. This is possible because low probability of event. If things go bad in really bad way then you do what? This is not a question of risk - risk is something that may happen but it does not have to. Accidents happen whatever precautions. AT some point we (humans) may be forced to live with some level low of radioactive pollution whatever consequences because there will be simply no other way. Risk taking is good - it allows for progress. We know consequences now so we should possibly look for alternatives no0t only for electricity production but also consumption of less energy in more efficient way as well as many other solutions in different areas. Well of course w can take risk too for what I care. Probability is on my side - these are my and possibly your kids (if you ever leave the cellar) that may be paying the price.

Re:Unlikely

[swalve]

I was arguing for privatization of roads, I'm against the privatization of things the government should be doing. But for some roads, a toll makes more sense.

Re:Unlikely

[swalve]

Dammit. I WASN'T arguing for.... sorry.

Re:Unlikely

[doom]

"However, that only requires that the worst bits be entombed in a protective concrete shell on site, meaning the land can't be re-used and has to be maintained indefinitely."

Yeah, actually I was going to mention that if all you care about is safety, you shut down the plant, pull the fuel, and put a lock on the gate. If you want to be *really* safe, you'd fill the containment with concrete, so even people who won't read the warning signs on the gate can't get near the hot stuff until it's not hot any more.

The nuclear decomissioning problem is really more psychological than anything else: it makes people feel better to cut them up and move them around.

Re:Unlikely

[sjames]

So, why don't we go the cheaper route and cut out the private profit made on a public investment?

Re:Unlikely

[sjames]

Trucks pay considerably more because they actually cause the most wear on the roads. Of course the paying for roads thing could just be an excuse for an otherwise completely unjustifiable set of laws about vehicle registration.

Re:Unlikely

[redneckmother]

And what exactly is the half life of the nastier stuph? Even after one half life, some of the isotopes are still dangerous.

Re:Unlikely

[blindseer]

I believe it's more a matter of land than money. The USA and the UK have more of it than Japan. A site the size of a nuclear power plant will not be missed in the USA for the next 100 years. The UK does have a bit of a land shortage but not near as much as the mountainous islands of Japan.

When it comes to the highly radioactive "waste" you speak of I've found that if it's radioactive then it is fuel. The more radioactive the more valuable it becomes. If it cannot be used in a traditional fission reactor then it's valuable in a radio thermal reactor. If for some reason it's not suitable for either then there tends to be a medical, industrial, or scientific use for it. Because of the stupid radioactive materials laws we have the processing of this stuff has become very expensive. It's cheaper to dig the rarefied stuff out of the ground and concentrate it than go through all the paperwork to get the already concentrated stuff out of spent fuel rods.

The government expects these companies to take this extremely valuable material and pay to drop it in a hole in the ground. With so much recycling going on for other materials, and the increasing costs of mining, there is rarely anything any more that is truly "waste". We got people digging through trash for discarded aluminum foil, cans, and cookware. This is for one of the most common elements on this planet. We do this because there is a lot of value in a material that has already been refined.

Another aspect of this issue is the laws that have prevented the building of new nuclear power reactors. The land may be unsuitable for a school yard or playground but it is certainly suitable for another nuclear power plant. A lot of the issues of radioactivity should be moot at that point since the area would continue to be maintained by those knowledgeable of the proper handling of radioactive materials.

Re:Unlikely

[redneckmother]

To fully appreciate the risks, I recommend "Normal Accidents" by Charles Perrow.

Re:Unlikely

[blindseer]

I agree. Dig a big hole on site. Take all the stuff you don't need any more but is too radioactive to move and drop it in the hole. Pour a thick, flat, massive, hunk of concrete on top of it. Use that sturdy base for your next new replacement reactor. With the large amounts of land that surround these nuclear power plants for security this process could probably be repeated several times before you'd have to go around and dig up one of those concrete slabs to make another hole to dump in the radioactive junk from a previous reactor. By that time a century or more would have passed and the radioactivity will be a small fraction of what it was when it was buried and therefore no longer a hazard.

If for some reason the material is still radioactive after sitting in concrete for a century then what you have is not "waste" but is fuel for your next reactor.

Re:Unlikely

[Johann Lau]

WTF? That's nuts. What was the reason/excuse for that?

Re:Unlikely

[hairyfeet]

Well that is like saying communism would be perfect if they simply implemented it as was designed but IRL both systems have been corrupted. Your theory just doesn't hold because IRL there are NO "owners" of ShitC, its just a bunch of employees of this mythical corp that can be burned on a second's notice. Thanks to the way laws of incorporation have been set up the system rewards such behavior since they can have much lower costs than the competition due to the fact there is ZERO risk for them. I have seen this happen several times, they run up huge bills and make a big mess and then if anyone comes looking to sue the corp is burned and the next day the players are all working at ShitD. Since the only "assets" ShitC has is the stationary and any profits are filtered through shell corps there is literally nobody but phantoms to chase after, the whole thing is like a giant three card monty.

Re:Unlikely

[sjames]

I didn't say it was safe to eat after that, just that it is safER. Cs-137 has a 30 year half life, Co 60 about 5 years. Sr 90 about 30 years. Some of the induced radiation in the structure may decay to background levels in that time.

So, we're talking about a rather significant reduction. Note that the long lived things like Pu aren't big contributors to the radiation.

Re:Unlikely

[randyleepublic]

Not just research, but invention proceeding from said research. Guess what? It's already been done. It was brilliantly done 90 years ago. Check my sig for a lead to the identity of the culprit...

Like a wife

[PPH]

They might be expensive to keep around. Until you price a divorce.

Re:Like a wife

[linatux]

Where's "+1 Sad" when you need it?

Re:Like a wife

[KalvinB]

My ex-wife's student loan debt was around $65,000 and I never "made enough" for her and she had no real ambition really to ever work to pay off her debt herself. Which I wouldn't have had much of an issue with if she actually respected how hard I worked and the money I was able to bring in. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with being a highly educated stay at home mom. The divorce cost $30K. The way I look at it, I saved $35K plus life long pain and suffering.

I also walked away with 50/50 custody of our 5 year old daughter, no child support and no alimony. So I also saved $10s of thousands on those areas by spending money on a good lawyer and by self-educating myself to properly handle the personal side of the divorce. It's the stupid shit you do after the divorce process starts that generally gets people in trouble. I also did a lot of work myself so the lawyer had less to do. He was pretty impressed with my fact finding and organizations skills. I didn't waste his time with useless unorganized crap.

So really, the divorce was a bargain.

A spouse should never be a financial or emotional drain.

Re:Like a wife

[AmiMoJo]

Unfortunately you can't just keep a reactor going indefinitely. The parts become irradiated and unmaintainable, so all you can do is monitor their condition and extend the plant's lifetime if they are in good shape.

I suppose you could remove the old reactor and build a new one on the same site, but it takes decades to decommission one and you need somewhere to work and store all the used parts and fuel for processing.

PUC

[ChrisMaple]

Gee, the Public Utility Commissions setting rates wouldn't have anything to do with inadequate money saved, would it?

Re:PUC

[type40]

No, that would be Chrysler.
GM use to just milk the govt taxes breaks and grants, until Wall St. fucked shit up for everyone.

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

[nojayuk]

The UK's older reactors like the Magnox units are being decommissioned on a long-term basis, about 80 years from shutdown to final clearing of the reactor site. The delay is to allow the radioactivity in the core components such as the reactor vessel and primary steam piping to decay to virtually nothing which makes future dismantling easier.

After shutdown the spent fuel is removed and a start is made demolishing non-radioactive parts of the reactor complex such as the turbine halls, control rooms etc. What is left is no real danger to anyone; the reactor containment is sealed off and left to sit with a simple wire fence around it for the next fifty or sixty years before final demolishing of the rest of the reactor is carried out.

I imagine the US reactors are up for similar custodial treatment and the newspaper reports are sensationalistic garbage as they usually are. Some decommissioning is carried out more rapidly here and there in the world but usually because the site is going to be quickly reused to build a new reactor complex on it -- for example the Japanese are in the final stages of decommissioning and dismantling a small Magnox reactor at Tokai about ten years after it shut down but it is on the site of one of their nuclear research and development centres.

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:Collecting interest

[Anonymous Coward]

in the UK the nuclear industry is owned by the government, precisely because they couldn't sell it off once everyone had realised the cost and responsibilties of decomissioning.

in the US the industry is owned by the Corporate-Industrial complex which can lie about such matters until the money runs out. Then the state will be left to clean up. Tax payers pick up the bill in the end whatever the politics.

More worrying is the financial and political incentive to keep these machines running way beyond their expiry dates just to put off the inevitable bankruptcy of shutting them down. Come on, what company is going to keep itself solvent solely to guarantee cleanup funds fifty years hence?

Re:Collecting interest

[jd]

The short half-life stuff tends to be the isotopes with market value in industrial applications. Cleaning these places up might recover enough material to cover the cost of the cleaning plus a bit extra.

Re:Collecting interest

[ShanghaiBill]

It seems unlikely that interest will grow faster than the cost of dismantling increases.

It seems to me that the cost of dismantling will decrease. The core will become less radioactive with time, and 20 or 30 years from now we should be smarter about the process. Robotics should be much more advanced. There will be a larger market for more of the isotopes. Heck, 30 years from now most of the "waste" may be considered a valuable resource.

What is the hurry? It seems like waiting at least a few decades is a good idea.

Re:Collecting interest

[makomk]

The UK's older reactors like the Magnox units are being decommissioned on a long-term basis, about 80 years from shutdown to final clearing of the reactor site. The delay is to allow the radioactivity in the core components such as the reactor vessel and primary steam piping to decay to virtually nothing which makes future dismantling easier.

Actually, there's quite a lot of expensive decommissioning work happening even before the 80 years are up - in fact, it looks like it's going to take over a decade to get each Magnox reactor to the point where all that has to be done is long-term care and monitoring, and that's the accelerated version of the decommissioning program. Older reactors have been taking several decades. (Also, British nuclear power and Magnox were deeply screwed up in many ways and it's far from clear if the Sellafield parts of the Magnox program can safely be decommissioned at all. )

I believe the operators of several UK reactors didn't save up enough money to decommission them over their planned operating lifetime either and ended up getting extensions on the basis that they wouldn't be able to afford to decommission them safely. It looks like the decommissioning costs are overrunning the planned budget already too.

I imagine the US reactors are up for similar custodial treatment and the newspaper reports are sensationalistic garbage as they usually are.

The article seems quite clear - they don't have enough money in the decommissioning accounts to meet the projected decommissioning costs like they promised they would when applying for their licenses, and are hoping that a combination of interest on savings and the decrease in radioactivity will allow them to decommission them in a few decades. Which is risky, because a financial crisis or an increase in the cost of decommissioning over the intervening years could leave them basically dumping the cost on the government.

Standard practice

[Anonymous Coward]

Regardless of money issues, this is a standard practice known as SAFSTOR. The bulk of the radioactivity that makes dismantling a reactor difficult is in isotopes with short half lives, short enough that waiting even just 20 years to dismantle the reactor makes the job far easier and safer. This article sounds like BS to me.

Re:Standard practice

[mspohr]

Like plutonium with a half life of 24,000 years?
Or cesium with an ecologic half life of 240 years?

Re:Standard practice

[Microlith]

Depends on what isotope of plutonium. If you burn the nuclear material through enough stages you're left with Pu-238 which has a half life of 88 years. I don't know of any Cesium isotope that has a half-life of 240 years (and you get to define what an "ecologic half life" is,) the primary concern with nuclear materials is Cs-137, which has a half life of 30 years.

Re:Standard practice

[Michael Woodhams]

The stuff with a half life of 24,000 years is only very mildly radioactive. That is pretty much what "long half life" means. I'd be surprised if that plutonium wasn't more of a chemical hazard than a radioactivity hazard. GP says "the bulk of the radioactivity..." You can't invalidate that statement with examples of minor sources of radioactivity.

Re:Standard practice

[MrNaz]

Please stop calling out idiots on Slashdot. Slashdot wouldn't be Slashdot without them.

Re:Standard practice

[ridley4]

Or bismuth with a half life in the billions of years! Bismuth is a horrible contaminant because it is all over the world (because of the nuclear explosion at Three Mile Island!!!), radioactive, and everyone knows radioactive things were invented in the Manhattan Project, and because it has a long half-life and--
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepto-Bismol

Well, fuck. I'm just going to have to be rational now.

Re:Standard practice

[nospam007]

"Like plutonium with a half life of 24,000 years?"

Some of it. Plutonium 244 takes 80.8 million years.

Did the rules change?

[Karmashock]

It's easy to forget that when these reactors were set up the world was a different place. The "retirement" accounts for these reactors probably assumed a MUCH lower retirement cost. So it's not the fault of the utility if there isn't enough money in the accounts if the rules changed between point A and point B.

Something that is irritating about many regulations is that they're very casually passed sometimes without really considering what the rule actually costs. If these fellows didn't save enough by the standards of the old cost projections then I see no fault with them. This is a situation where the government should probably take responsibility for the costs IF they are in fact responsible for making them go up.

If they never were going to save enough even by the old rules then these utilities are at fault for mismanagement and I'd be fine with squeezing them to pony up the difference.

Regardless, the money required to dismantle these reactors is probably in excess of what the utilities are themselves liable. So the government should probably pay that difference.

I know a lot of people don't like this idea because budgets are getting tight. But when you pass regulations they cost someone money. If the government doesn't want to pay it can always relax the regulation in some circumstances. But short of that it isn't reasonable to change the rules on the utilities and then expect them to make up the difference.

Short of that, the utilities will do what they're already doing... just leaving the money in an account to mature until such time as it can cover dismantling costs.

So those are the options on the ground. Maybe I'm being unfair to someone... this is my impression of the matter.

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:Did the rules change?

[Anonymous Coward]

Libertarian ideology in a nutshell: public risk, private profit. Parent post is an excellent example of this. Private corporations make billions off nuclear plant, then the poor sods can't afford to clean them up properly, so the public should be put on the hook for it. I suppose your next great idea is that we should deregulate all nuclear power generation, eh, you fucking rand-tard? God I envy the Russians, at least they eventually realized that their ideologues were idiots and kicked them out. We appear to be stuck with self styled "atlases" for the rest of eternity, or at least long enough for this country to be shucked down the tubes by them.

Re:Did the rules change?

[FishTankX]

One thing that was noted in the article is that a lot of the power companies HAD sufficient retirement funds, but a large portion of the value of their funds were wiped out in the economic crash of 2008. They mentioned one reactor's retirement fund crashing from $592m to somewhere north of 200m and even now not breaking 300m.

Thus, it's the economic turbulence weathering the vulnerable investments made on the retirement funds. This is not too far from a bunch of seniors who just had their retirement income wiped out, continuing to work after retirement to make up for the shortfall in their supposedly secure retirement funds.

Re:Did the rules change?

[Karmashock]

Who can say. I'm sure that did happen in at least one case. If there is fraud or looting or mismanagement then I would of course agree the company is liable for that.

However, it is also very likely that they did plan for dismantling costs it's just that the costs have gone up radically in recent years because the rules have changed. Do you think the new regulations don't have a price? Who's paying for it? It has to come out of that dismantling fund and if they set it up assuming the old rules then they probably couldn't have enough in it.

The point is that an entirely responsible and honest company could find itself flatfooted if between point A and point B the rules change. They couldn't anticipate that the dismantling costs would double or quadruple.

So in the case of fraud or looting or mismanagment... yes... the company should be squeezed to pay the difference.

However, in instances where the company did save but the rules were changed... either the government should take responsibility for it's own decisions or you should simply accept the reactor sit there for 60 years while the fund gains value as a compromise.

Short of that, you can't make ex post facto regulations and then expect everyone to pay for it. A possible compromise would be to grand father all the reactors that were built prior to the new regulations... .that would be all of them because they're all pretty old.

Its very important in law to be reasonable. When you get unreasonable people stop obeying the law. Criminals don't get away with that because they're typically pretty stupid an a minority. But when laws get unreasonable for everyone then suddenly you find that law loses all it's teeth.

Just be careful... when you make everyone an outlaw you'll find that the outlaws outnumber everyone else.

Re:Did the rules change?

[Karmashock]

ah, in that case they're not at fault. They put their money into AAA investments considered equal to treasury bonds.

If this is the case then no one is at fault besides possibly the rating agencies. And that means the reactors will sit there for years until their funds recover unless someone can figure out a way to finance it that doesn't punish people who ultimately are not at fault.

Re:Did the rules change?

[jgdobak]

Regulation is almost always written by industry representatives to be as beneficial as possible to that industry, see healthcare,mortgage, and automotive industry regulation.

We're willing to yell at some poor uneducated asshole who is homeless because he took on an investment he couldn't afford (apparently he is omniscient)

BUT

When industrialists fuck up in a fashion that may directly impact the health and safety of millions (let alone their finances), you "see no fault with them."

You're a horrible human being, eat shit.

Re:Did the rules change?

[Sycraft-fu]

Yep, same kind of thing happened to my employer's retirement account. I work for a state university so we are all manditorily enrolled in a classic pension plan. The money we pay in is invested, of course. Well since the market went to shit we are short on what we need to cover obligations, so our contributions have gone up. When it recovers, they'll go down. Just how it works. I guess we could invest in nothing but AAA bonds or the like, but of course even with the volatility in general the investment fund means we need to pay in less than we would otherwise. In general the investment is pretty conservative, but the downturn was big, it hit everything.

So unless the power companies were stupid about it, I don't see the problem here. They were doing what is sensible and because of this downturn, now they have to wait longer. We could require that the money is invested only in high grade securities and so on, however we need to be prepared to pay more in that event. Nothing is free.

Re:Did the rules change?

[Osgeld]

so what your saying is, that I the consumer can pay for this because someone made a financial plan and didn't bother to fucking update it since 1958, or I as a taxpayer can pay for this because someone made a financial plan and didn't bother to fucking update it since 1958?

how about the shit for brains that ran the places, pay for their incompetence out of their own? Like I would if I set a retirement plan in stone and expected the entire world to not change a single bit in 50 years?

Re:Did the rules change?

[swalve]

You have defined "conservative", not "libertarian". A libertarian wouldn't ask for the government's help in cleaning it up. They would either be responsible, or sell the property to someone who values it and THEY would clean it up. But that is the fatal flaw of libertarianism: they assume everyone would be as responsible they believe themselves to be. With maybe a nice topping of ignoring the idea of negative value and externalities. In the libertarian paradise, they could sell or abandon the site, and someone would find value in it. But in reality, it is an albatross that would cost a new owner tons of money, even if the price was zero.

Re:Did the rules change?

[swalve]

They need to fire their investment bankers then, because even in my basically untouched 401k, I was back to even within 6-9 months of the bottom of the 2008 crash.

Re:Did the rules change?

[mug funky]

not sure how you read that into GP's post. it seems reasonable that if the goalposts are moved, the person moving them should be held responsible for the movement.

of course, the laws were bound to change along the line as more was learnt about the process. GP is simply stating that the responsible parties for the cleanup include the people that make the rules, should they change them halfway.

Re:Did the rules change?

[dbIII]

It's just the old British Nuclear Fuels (and many others) policy of privitising the profits and socialising the expenses. Without very strict oversight and very strict rules about lobbying/bribing those that do the oversight it's the expected course, whether it's nuclear or not.

Re:Did the rules change?

[Karmashock]

if that's true then I'm all with sticking it to the pigs. Though that blade cuts both ways and if you're honest you'll have to admit the government does sometimes change the rules on people and someone else to pay for it out of their own pockets.

Neither policy should be tolerated. If they're scamming the government then by all means nail them. If the government screwed them then stick it to them instead. Someone else pointed out that "we" pay for the government's mistakes. That's true. Doesn't change who's responsible if the government caused the company to experience some new expense.

Someone also said that the issue is less either of these issues and instead it's just the economic down turn hurting the funds. If that's the case then no one is at fault. It's just a 'shit happens' situation.

Re:Did the rules change?

[Karmashock]

A question might be why they would be required to update it?

Look... if you change the rules. that is if you change the terms of the contract EX POST FACTO then you're responsible for those extra costs. They held up their end of the bargain. They didn't change the rules. The government did. So who's responsible? The party that changed the rules... eg the government.

Don't like that? Don't change the rules.

That's why contracts are written down. So everyone can remember what everyone agreed to in black and white.

A major problem with new regulation is that politicians and their supporters often don't grasp that new legislation has far ranging expenses. They don't care because in their mind it is someone else's problem. However, the buck will be passed around until it comes right back at the consumer or the tax payer.

You always pay for it in the end.

Lets say you get everything you want and you stick it to the evil nuclear power company. Guess how they're going to pay for it? They're going to charge you more for electricity. So you'll pay for anyway.

Mission accomplished?

Trust me... everyone is going to be happier if you find the most reasonable, low cost method of safely disposing of the waste. If you dick around with a lot of things that mostly exist to waste money it will all be passed on to you in your bill or your tax form.

The smart thing is to be efficient. Waste other people's time and money and they'll return the favor. The only people that actually get away with it are the politicians because they're screwing around with other people's money.

Re:Did the rules change?

[Michael Woodhams]

I'm anti-libertarian and I think it was reasonable to call this a troll. It was fine up to the sentence starting "I suppose..."

Re:Did the rules change?

[Karmashock]

Not true actually. It's written instead by whichever interest group is most interested in that industry and has the most power.

That is USUALLY the industry's own lobby. However, the anti nuclear lobby is stronger then the pro nuclear lobby. As evidence, how many nuclear power plants have we built in the last 20 years? Exactly. Anti nuclear lobby is MUCH stronger. And because that lobby is stronger it writes the regulation and not the nuclear industry.

As to being a horrible human being, I don't think you're self aware, introspective, or conscious enough to judge another human being.

I'd tell you to eat shit but that would be cannibalism. ;-p

***BURN***

I win the flame war.

Re:Did the rules change?

[martin-boundary]

It's easy to forget that when these reactors were set up the world was a different place. The "retirement" accounts for these reactors probably assumed a MUCH lower retirement cost. So it's not the fault of the utility if there isn't enough money in the accounts if the rules changed between point A and point B.

On the contrary, the utility is/should be very much responsible for this contingency. This is just like a margin call. When prices and regulations change, it's up to the utility to replenish the coffers *immediately* to guarantee that there are *always* enough funds to cover the final transaction cost.

A planned decommissioning is just another kind of futures contract, so there's no excuse to not use the standard rules of capitalism, especially since the utilities are private for profits.

Re:Did the rules change?

[Karmashock]

So you believe the utility has UNLIMITED liability?

*laughs*

Have fun enforcing that, sport. The buck will be passed. So while you're at it try to make it as expensive as possible.

Enjoy the tax hike. ;-)

Re:Did the rules change?

[rmstar]

One thing that was noted in the article is that a lot of the power companies HAD sufficient retirement funds, but a large portion of the value of their funds were wiped out in the economic crash of 2008. They mentioned one reactor's retirement fund crashing from $592m to somewhere north of 200m and even now not breaking 300m.

Oh, the poor, poor things. Fortunately there is the government, who will step in and pay for decommissioning now with tax money. If we also privatize schooling and kill off social security, there will be enough money to spare for a tax cut. This way, the owners of these companies can find solace by buying some extra sports cars.

Thus, it's the economic turbulence weathering the vulnerable investments made on the retirement funds. This is not too far from a bunch of seniors who just had their retirement income wiped out, continuing to work after retirement to make up for the shortfall in their supposedly secure retirement funds.

Yes, shit happens, that's life. Instead of bitching around we should all pray and be thankful. Its good to know that the safe decommissioning of these reactors was linked to something as reliable as the stock market. Well, it failed, but only a small minded person would see in this type of strategy anything but genius.

Re:Did the rules change?

[CharlieG]

Well, we go one step further - to WHOM is the cleanup valuable? Why shouldn't the people who value the cleanup PAY for the cleanup. The owner can say "I'm happy the way it is, YOU are the one who wants it cleaned, YOU pay to clean it"

Re:Did the rules change?

[martin-boundary]

If you break it, you pay for it.

If you pollute it, you clean it up.

Do you really think it's ok to grab the profits now, and leave a mess for the next 50 years? Who are these business people who think they're owed special treatment? How about we break the corporate veil, post their names and addresses, and see if the public at large really wants to give them special treatment?

Re:Did the rules change?

[AmiMoJo]

So the government should probably pay

In the UK the government does pay much of the cost of clean up. Most reactors were build with public money and then in the early 80s we tried to sell them to private companies. No-one wanted them because of the huge liabilities for things like decommissioning and insurance, so the government said it would subsidize those costs.

Re:Did the rules change?

[drinkypoo]

It's easy to forget that when these reactors were set up the world was a different place.

WHAT? Are you serious? Have you read Anathem too many times? The world is very much the same place as it was when these reactors were built; humans behave selfishly and thus nuclear power is unsafe.

Re:Did the rules change?

[makomk]

Now imagine what will happen if there's another economic crash during the 60+ years between the plants being shut down and the planned start of actual decommissioning work, with no possible way for them to earn more money

Re:Did the rules change?

[necro81]

So it's not the fault of the utility if there isn't enough money in the accounts if the rules changed between point A and point B.

The decommissioning accounts aren't just payed into one time when the plant opens - they are intented to be payed into continuously during the life of the plant. So as the industry came to realize that decommissioning costs are greater than expected, you would think the remaining reactors would be putting more aside for that eventuality. The rules haven't changed, as you put: the purpose of the money has always been to deconstruct the plant in a safe way and return the land to a safe and usable state. The cost of responsibly doing that task may have gone up, but that is as much the fault of the industries imprudent optimism, malfeasance, and general business incompetence as it is any other factor.

Saving to some target amount that's 10-20 years in the future isn't rocket science. What pisses me off about the situation most isn't that the companies have shortchanged their obligations - that's to be expected. What pisses me off is that the NRC and related agencies haven't forced these companies to save on a prescribed schedule that guarantees they'd have the necessary funds by the end of license. From reading the article, it appears most companies have bet on getting a 20-year renewal in order to have enough money. The NRC, public utility commissions, ISOs, even utility investors should not have allowed that to be the factor: you save so as to have enough at the end of license. If you get a renewal, great, you can coast on interest for the next 20 years. If they don't get a renewal, now we are right back to where we have always been with nuclear power: private gain and public loss.

Re:Did the rules change?

[necro81]

Thus, it's the economic turbulence weathering the vulnerable investments made on the retirement funds. This is not too far from a bunch of seniors who just had their retirement income wiped out

Except that, as any retirement planner will tell you, as you approach your target date your asset mix should transition to less risky investments. Why was that Michigan reactor's fund so heavily exposed when they were that close to "retirement"? Individuals make this mistake all the time, but the number crunchers at the utility are supposed to be f$#%ing professionals: what are they doing to earn their paycheck if not executing a responsible plan? Why is it that the same conservatives that harp on about personal responsibility and say "too bad" to that senior and want to dismantle Social Security aren't also eager to sue the shit out of the reactor owner to ensure that the public doesn't get stuck with an old reactor and no cleanup fund?

Re:Did the rules change?

[T Murphy]

Along those lines, I'm curious how much impact there was on operating costs due to Yucca Mountain being cancelled.

Re:Did the rules change?

[dwye]

What were you invested in, passbook accounts at the local Savings & Loan?

Re:Did the rules change?

[swalve]

Just some mutual funds. Whatever the plan picked for me. Lost 38% over three quarters, gained back 41% the next three quarters.

Re:Did the rules change?

[jafac]

well, that's probably true. By the time they get around to dismantling the reactor, who knows how cheap it will be to bribe enough congressmen to get slavery legalized, so that they can simply purchase a small force of slave labor to do the cleanup. These kinds of costs are very difficult to predict this far in the future. Especially with the volatile nature of our regulatory environment vis-a-vis the Citizens United decision, and the recent STOCK bill that was just passed.

Re:Did the rules change?

[Karmashock]

Yes and the amount that they pay into the account is pre-specified.

So what you're saying is that your energy bill should have doubled to account for the large increase in what had to be paid into the decommissioning account?

As to rocket science, I believe they did save to the pre-specified amount. It's just the amount changed. It's not their fault if someone else changed the rules on them.

Re:Did the rules change?

[Karmashock]

Exactly. For one thing, they'll all storing their spent fuel in the basement of the power plants rather then shifting it to a remote storage facility. So decommissioning has to be a larger expense because it includes all the spent fuel that should have been offloaded decades ago.

Re:Did the rules change?

[Karmashock]

Crony capitalism is neither conservative nor libertarian.

It's just corrupt. Look at the Solyndra scandal and the dozens of other examples with "green" companies. Was that libertarian? Nope. Was it conservative? Nope. Was it socialistic? Possibly. Was it corrupt? Yes.

Really, it's just corruption. And I don't think any ideology really is corrupt on purpose.

Re:Did the rules change?

[Karmashock]

They were AAA rated which treasury bonds are not anymore. Just FYI... treasury bonds are now AA rated.

You say they should have put their money where people retiring put their money... well, they did. Which is why at the same time their accounts got nailed lots of retirement accounts were wiped out.

It's bad all around. These people are not wizards. Big firms on wall street went bankrupt. You're expecting a nuclear power company to be better at managing their money then a wall street investment bank? That's like expecting the investment bank to be better at managing a nuclear power plant then the nuclear power company.

Have fun with that.

Re:Did the rules change?

[Karmashock]

that's atypical. Most people lost upwards of ten years of growth.

Re:Did the rules change?

[Karmashock]

I don't know why everyone is so quick to mindlessly attack industries and professions they know nothing about. It's odd. People seem to give people and things they have experience with the benefit of the doubt. And everything they don't know anything about they either assume them to be angels or devils based on some ideological or political tribalism. It's very odd.

Re:Did the rules change?

[Karmashock]

No insurance company would sell it to them. You're proposing UNLIMITED liability. Insurance companies don't sell such things.

Tell you what, what if the power company buys the insurance from the US government. They pay the government a premium. And when costs go up because of government regulation the government can pay for it themselves.

That way while the liability is also limitless the government would have control over it since they were responsible for causing it to go up in the first place.

Re:Did the rules change?

[martin-boundary]

If they followed all the rules as stipulated upon being granted a license to operate a nuclear reactor then they broke nothing.

That's a naive viewpoint. Rules change, countries change. A long term project has to take this into account.

No one accepts limitless liabilities. That you don't seem to grasp this is really rather amusing. Liabilities are defined before hand and are not subject to later change.

Your understanding of business history is extremely weak. Limitation on liability is a very recent phenomenon. Lloyd's of London is a great counterexample of your assertion.

This has been a common legal practice for the last 2000 or so years.

Not even close, and nevermind that legal practices have had very little in common around the world for most of the last 2000 years. There are at least 4 major legal frameworks in common use. The English common law system is spread about the former commonwealth and used (with some changes) in the US. The Roman inspired civil law system is used in most of Europe. The religious system based on Shariah is used in parts of the Middle East. The Russians and Chinese use socialist legal systems.

As to grabbing profit now and leaving a mess for later. Of course it isn't okay. That's why you have to define liabilities beforehand. If you take care of all stated liabilities then you technically didn't leave a mess.

You *cannot* limit liabilities in a long term (50+ years) project. The probability of a major change rendering your calculations moot is so close to 1 as makes no difference.

Think about a reactor operating 50 years and letting radiation decay for another 50. In a timespan of 100 years, countries and empires come and go. In the last century, the extremely long lived Austrian Empire was destroyed. The Germans went from a monarchy, to a republic, to a tyranny, to a democracy within 50 years only. The Russians overthrew the Tsar, became a socialist state, and that collapsed within about 70 years. France is in its 5th republic, (that's 5 different constitutions), and three of those occurred in the last century. Hell, there's no guarantee that America will even exist by the end of this century.

We know that people (families) survive centuries, and that's it. If your liability estimates *do not* take into account changes in the rules, then you are either extremely naive, or trying to cheat. Even if the rules don't change (which has zero chance over 100 years), what about stock market crashes? Do you want to be absolved of those as well?

None of this is forever. These contracts and licenses aren't forever. When the contracts are renegotiate you can stipulate new terms. And they will then build those new expenses into their business model. If it turns out that they can't make a profit due to a combination of price caps and high regulation then they simply won't build.

The fact that you don't see this as a problem is exactly where we disagree. It's short term thinking without penalties for abandoning a project. I'm not against abandoning unviable projects, but I am against keeping the profits private and dumping the losses on the state. And that usually happens when government policies encourage private ownership of businesses where the public has an interest. Utilities are one example where the public interest is sufficiently important that they should not be privatized.

Re:Did the rules change?

[Karmashock]

NO ONE will willingly enter into a long term project where you can arbitarily change the rules and make them infinitely liable for whatever enters your head.

So if those are the rules you will accept then everything must happen over your objection.

Or we all sit in the dark while you try to defend the indefensible.

Guess how this is going to break down? The instant the lights go out they're going to ignore you until such time as they go back on. Then a few will forget and mistakenly take you seriously.

Please stop having bad ideas.

Re:Did the rules change?

[martin-boundary]

NO ONE will willingly enter into a long term project where you can arbitarily change the rules and make them infinitely liable for whatever enters your head.

Wrong wrong wrong. People do, people have, and people will. If you can't be bothered reading the link about Lloyds names I provided, there's no point in continuing this discussion.

Re:Did the rules change?

[Karmashock]

There's only no point because you live in a fantasy world were sensible people assume unlimited liability and give you the arbitrary ability to change the terms of the contract at will.

Your fantasy has no bearing on reality.

Wake up.

I sure hope so!

[evilviper]

Hell yeah! Nuclear power plants going for cheap. I'll take one! Surplus ICBM silos are interesting, but have far too many drawbacks. But nuclear power plants? Those things are bigger than a city block, above ground, extremely stable, etc. I'd love to buy one.

For starters, I think I'd start cutting up one of the cooling towers, until it looked like a giant medieval castle, just smooth and round instead of 4 stone walls. Re-enactments of Monty Python's & the Holy Grail are, of course, obligatory.

After that, I'd have to buy as much flesh-tone paint as I can afford. It would take some time, but just think of it... http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_omMU_7Vv1us/S7aqBJUCP_I/AAAAAAAAAIE/HMaftmCYRGM/s1600/san-onofre_songs.jpg">Giant nuclear boobies!

As an added bonus, nuclear power plants always need ample water, so you're guaranteed to get a private lake, river, or beachfront property, no matter which one you buy. They're also universally pretty close to mega population centers, so, while it's likely a nice quiet location, you won't be too far from a major city, unlike many of those silos.

Re:I sure hope so!

[R3d M3rcury]

Link to the giant nuclear boobies.

Heck, maybe you could rent it out for The Abyss II.

Re:I sure hope so!

[swalve]

As an added bonus, nuclear power plants always need ample water, so you're guaranteed to get a private lake, river, or beachfront property, no matter which one you buy.

A fission hole?

FTFY

[Dripdry]

... let them sit like industrial relics for 20 to 60 years or even longer while the owners retire and die so they don't bear any responsibility.

Accrue interest? That's an excuse so think it's basically a lie. They won't EVER accrue enough interest, those monies will lose out to inflation.

These people should be taken to court and jailed, or the companies heavily fined.

Re:FTFY

[FishTankX]

Would you be so hard on the plight of retirees who lost their retirement savings and are forced to some measure of desperation because it's too late for them to make it up?

It says in the article that a lot of the funds earmarked for reactor dismantlement were mangled by the economic crisis, my guess is that they had significant funds in the market, which is usually a sure bet to accrue interest in the long term. Then the stock market crash came, and we all know what happened next.

It is the plight of age, your ability to recover from mistakes made late in your existence is diminished.

wood plastic composite

[wenqiaoyun]

Wow

Clean up is simple

[viperidaenz]

Do it the way 1st world countries deal with e-waste and other heavy metal contaminated waste. Ship it off to a 3rd world country!

Re:Clean up is simple

[NemoinSpace]

or hackensack.

Re:Clean up is simple

[ChipMonk]

But my mother lives in Hackensack!

Re:Clean up is simple

[abednegoyulo]

So does my mother-in-law.

Re:What?!

[Sponge Bath]

the capitalists behind these ventures didn't plan for the future in a manner that was beneficial for all!??!!!

No one asked for benefits for all. It would be nice if they planned in a way that used a portion of revenue to cover liabilities. You know, like a properly run business is supposed to do?

Nuclear energy is not going away. We need to deal these issues honestly and soon.

Re:I seem to remember

[NemoinSpace]

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

Re:I seem to remember

[Formalin]

You're looking at it from the wrong angle. Interest is close to inflation, correct.

However, since wages haven been stagnant for years - and will continue to be - labour will be effectively much cheaper in 50 years!

Re:Is there anyone left that plays things straight

[Farmer Tim]

Nice of you to provide a comprehensive list.

This is just misleading

[Troggie87]

This happens with many places that work with at least moderately radioactive material (not just reactors). What you do is tape the building/site in question off and allow it to sit for 1-2 decades. In that time the radioactivity typically decreases by orders of magnitude from decay. I can't speak to the cost savings, but so long as the site is properly fenced the safety concerns from handling all that waste go down by a lot. It isn't a bad decision in theory, but many small outfits just go "woops, can't pay to clean this up" and stick the EPA with the bill. Which is ackward, because you can't very well require the funds for cleanup up front because it would make buisnesses that use radiation in any significant way (radiopharmaceutical companies, as an example) impossibly expensive to start.

But I suppose the point of this is to attack "evil nuclear," so I'm probably wasting my time even expaining the reality. That seems to be in fashion nowadays, reality be damned.

Re:This is just misleading

[Ken D]

Which is ackward, because you can't very well require the funds for cleanup up front because it would make buisnesses that use radiation in any significant way (radiopharmaceutical companies, as an example) impossibly expensive to start.

Well if you can't pay to clean it up when you start, what makes you think they'll be able to pay to clean it up later? This is why projects should require bonding up front.

It's especially painful in the nuclear energy sector, where licenses are issued for 20 years(?), and the corporations all assume that the plant will operate indefinitely. If you assume the plant will never be decommissioned then you don't have to budget for it. It's not part of your costs, it's not part of the plan. Someone is going to end up paying to decommission the plants, but they don't plan on it to be them.

So why close them?

[scottbomb]

Pardon my ignorance on the subject, but why exactly must they be closed? I did some googling on this very question and couldn't find any straightforward answer.

Re:So why close them?

[Scottingham]

Neutron embrittlement causes the metal casing of the core to lose it's strength. Also, they're old as shit.

More Cores?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not just add more modern cores next to the existing old ones? Prolonged profit from the same site ensures that the old cores will be looked after. Cores really aren't that large, much of the room is the cooling and power grid connections. Those could be re-purposed.

We should seriously start attempting to achieve cores that do not need refueling for decades. The toshiba 4s is the farthest along in testing. It is designed to work continuously for 30 years.

With the benefit of increasingly available super computers needed to model complex interactions of fuel alloys could bring the technology to hundreds, if not 1000s of years of running without need of refueling. Though at that point I suppose it'd be more like 'before wearing out'.

Science fiction? Yeah, now....nothing in what I just wrote violates any of the laws of thermodynamics...so I say possible.

We landed on the moon, didn't we?

Re:THE GOVERNMENT DOESN'T HAVE ANY MONEY!

[Karmashock]

True, which will make the real cost of regulation relevant. When people grasp that passing a given law means money out of their wallet they'll take the situation more seriously.

Adjacent modern cores?

[Scottingham]

Why not just add more modern cores next to the existing old ones? Prolonged profit from the same site ensures that the old cores will be looked after. Cores really aren't that large, much of the room is the cooling and power grid connections. Those could be re-purposed.

We should seriously start attempting to achieve cores that do not need refueling for decades. The toshiba 4s is the farthest along in testing. It is designed to work continuously for 30 years.

With the benefit of increasingly available super computers needed to model complex interactions of fuel alloys we could bring fission technology to hundreds, if not 1000s of years of running without need of refueling. Though at that point I suppose it'd be more like 'before wearing out'.

Science fiction? Yeah, now....nothing in what I just wrote violates any of the laws of thermodynamics...so I say possible.

We landed on the moon, didn't we?

Re:Adjacent modern cores?

[Magada]

Yeah. Nah. You can't re-purpose 50-year-old heat exchangers that have been bathing in hard gamma and neutrons for the duration.

You can't use the same core for 1000 years unless you expect to extract almost no power out of it.

You can design reactor cores that function for 20-30 years then need dismantling, but they're going to be expensive, relatively inefficient (wrt burnup) and dangerous as all fuck to dismantle.

The russkies just dumped theirs into the sea, rather than deal with the headache.

TANSTAAFL, generally speaking.

let them sit while interest accrues

[frovingslosh]

let them sit like industrial relics for 20 to 60 years or even longer while interest accrues

Wow, it's a good thing that interest rates are so high now that they will greatly outpace inflation and make the a reality. Time for the power companies to give themselves another round of bonuses for coming up with this one and making it someone else's problem. Oh, wait ....

Create a religion

[Trax3001BBS]

The question of what to do with everything radioactive was addressed in this area a long time ago.

First and foremost was to get it in the ground, bury it all. The problem comes a few
thousand years in the future when someone wants to dig in the area.

Signs could be unrecognizable after a thousand years, stone monolith defaced or a
language forgotten, line figures that make sense now might not in the future.

One suggestion was to create a religion, A message to pass along to future
generations: "ohmmm do not dig for 10,000 years".

Just one of many suggestions, but my favorite.

Reason for rule changes

[Roger W Moore]

Something that is irritating about many regulations is that they're very casually passed sometimes without really considering what the rule actually costs. If these fellows didn't save enough by the standards of the old cost projections then I see no fault with them.

That might be an irritating factor with many regulations but suppose the reason for the new regulation is well justified by science? For example if a factory was built several decades ago using asbestos and then decommissioned today the costs would be significantly higher than the original projections because, in the interim, we have discovered that asbestos is dangerous. So should a government be expected to pay the increased costs because they passed regulations to require asbestos to be safely removed? It's not their fault that asbestos turned out to be dangerous anymore than it is the company's fault.

I would argue that any increase in decommissioning costs due to regulations changing is a "risk of doing business" and therefore entirely the responsibility of the company who ran the plant. Governments are naturally motivated to keep these risks to a minimum in order to encourage businesses to flourish and keep costs to a minimum for their voters so there is a balance.

Re:Reason for rule changes

[Karmashock]

When a company sets up and agrees to follow all regulations including providing a fund for dismantling the reactor at the end of it's life they have to make assumptions about what that will cost.

if those assumptions are unreasonable and due to things outside of their control the costs are not sufficient to meet dismantling costs then that isn't their fault.

It's a question of determining responsibility and fault.

Is their liability for the reactor unlimited? No. It clearly isn't. I mean, that isn't a controversial point. It's a matter of contract that their liability has an exact dollar figure.

So if your policies even if they're scientifically valid happen to cause their expenses to exceed their liabilities they won't actually pay them.

In these matters, you might have to consider contributing public funds to the issue or simply accept that the reactor will sit there until such time as the fund can handle the expense. Or you can adopt a different dismantling procedure that is less expensive.

You literally will be unable to stick it to these guys if they held up their end of the contract. So "ideas" that aren't going to happen in reality because they're about as illegal as feeding radioactive waste to babies... it isn't going to happen.

Re:Reason for rule changes

[Roger W Moore]

Is their liability for the reactor unlimited? No. It clearly isn't. I mean, that isn't a controversial point. It's a matter of contract that their liability has an exact dollar figure.

Contract? Did the US government ask them to build and operate a reactor? If so then I agree with you - you follow the terms of the contract. I was operating under the assumption that they US government had simply permitted a company which wanted to build and run a reactor to do so in much the same way that it would permit a company to build a factory i.e. the company chose to do this because they think they can make money from it not that the government contracted with them to do it.

Re:Reason for rule changes

[Karmashock]

Are you kidding?

Yes... This is especially true of the older reactors that were built before the anti nuclear lobby became so strong.

We basically don't build reactors anymore because that political lobby over powers any attempt to build new reactors.

As to granting licenses... that's a form of contract too.

For example, if I buy a fishing license then I have a right to fish in a given place in stipulated ways... right? What if while I'm out on the lake they come at me with a speed boat and say "new rule, you can only fish blindfolded"... is that legitimate? Lets assume the fishing license was expensive and I sunk considerable capital into fishing on that day. How fair would it be for the government to issue a license and then after I began using it they change the rules prior to it expiring?

I'm sorry if you find this inconvienent but if you issue me a license to fish on that lake and I obey all the rules as stipulated at the time of the issuing. I can fish on that lake without people coming out to harass me.

And if that isn't good enough for you then I want my money back for the license and I want to be compensated for damages resulting from capital investment.

In this case, you can buy the reactor at fair market value and refund the license if that hasn't depreciated already.

Regulations COST something. People throw laws around like it doesn't mean anything. It's fine because it's always someone else's problem or someone else's expense. But if you make the people throwing these laws around or supporting them understand that their little regulation has a price tag then I think they'll be a little more careful about the laws they pass. They might also bother to ask the people in the industry if there are efficient ways to getting to the same place.

Often their are win win solutions that are over looked because the lobbying group is so hostile to the industry that actually think the damage it does is a good thing. That is, they're often seeking BIG WIN and BIG LOSS solutions. That sort of hostility is destructive and only makes people cynical and paranoid. People after all will know that some people really are out to destroy them. And that the system is being used against them.

That's not good for a society because it turns us against each other. We should seek win win solutions. They exist.

Re:Reason for rule changes

[necro81]

if those assumptions are unreasonable and due to things outside of their control the costs are not sufficient to meet dismantling costs then that isn't their fault.

It's not like the retirement fund was established with a single lump sum and then not touched or reviewed for 20 years. The fund is payed into continuously, and every time a new regulation is passed or the license is renewed the decommissioning plan is (or should be) revisited. This is basic risk management, taught at every engineering or business school on the planet. The inputs change, you get new data or requirements, you adjust your plan and mitigations to cover the risk. Fluctuations in market returns are risks that need consideration, too, so I don't buy much into blaming the situation on the 2008 crash. Unless the rules changed in the last 2-3 years before the plant's end-of-life, there was plenty of time to adjust contributions to the decommissioning fund to match the required work. This is especially true considering that public utility commissions get to set rates, utilities often are guaranteed a minimum profit margin, and rates can always be increased when operating costs increase. Saving for an appropriate decommissioning, based on ongoing changes to regulation, is an operating cost, even if the plant owner/operator is too myopic to realize it.

Why aren't all the personal responsibility free-marketeers on Slashdot up in arms about this? The company is playing in the market, they took on the liability to decommission when they built the plant, and failed to responsibly plan for it.

Re:Reason for rule changes

[Roger W Moore]

Lets assume the fishing license was expensive and I sunk considerable capital into fishing on that day. How fair would it be for the government to issue a license and then after I began using it they change the rules prior to it expiring?

Lets take a concrete example should we: the banning of flights in Europe when the Icelandic volcano erupted in 2010. Regulations changed temporarily to protect passenger safety and airlines lost money. Should the EU government have recompensed the airlines? It gave them a license to operate after all? Of course it did not recompense them because it was not its fault that the volcano erupted but the regulation was required because otherwise some airlines would certainly have attempted to fly!

Not all government regulation is politically motivated and bad (although far too much is!). If they change rules on political whims then yes, compensation is due. But changing rules due to a change in circumstances outside their control when action is clearly needed is just tough luck.

Re:Reason for rule changes

[Karmashock]

Horrible example. You're comparing an "act of god" or some natural disaster with a pure regulation change.

Try again.

Re:Reason for rule changes

[Karmashock]

The amount that has to be paid in at intervals however is pre-stipulated as is the final amount that must be in the account adjusted for inflation.

If I say there has to be 1000 USD and then half way through the process I say it has to be 10,000... who is at fault here? Why is it my fault that there isn't 10k in there? I had no way of knowing people would change the rules like that. I was saying to 1k as stated in the initial legislation, license, and other associated contracts. I did my part. The money is there. It's just you want more now. Well, I can build that up in that account... it just will take a long time.

You can either lower the amount you want, you can pony up the difference, or we can all wait.

Those are your options. Act now and we can serve any of these combos with fries and a shake.

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.

Re:THE GOVERNMENT DOESN'T HAVE ANY MONEY!

[mug funky]

either way, it seems the people are footing the bill - in your scenario because decommissioning is included in your cents/kwh, in GP's because the difference wasn't accounted for and must therefore come out of taxes.

Is this what they mean by a 'hot mess"?

[hyades1]

As Nuclear Reactors Age, the Money To Close Them Lags

For many Slashdotters, money is usually what's needed to open lags, not close them.

Re:I seem to remember

[Michael Woodhams]

Yes, but 80% of the cost will go to the senior managers who are paid $1M/hour.

"Too big to fail"?

[tlambert]

"...including some whose licenses expire soon..."

Of course, just because they are up for renewal doesn't mean they are at the end of their useful life, just that a bunch of luddites are fearful of them continuing to supply electricity.

Guess it's time to renew those licenses instead of retiring the reactors, on the condition that all profits go to the retirement fund for the reactor in question?

-- Terry

Re:"Too big to fail"?

[Neil Boekend]

Nuclear reactors have wear in the parts that can't be repaired or even checked. Inside the reactor is a lot of neutron damage, which lowers the structural integrity of the reactor building. Loading new fuel rods into them well after the original designed lifetime keeps the neutron wear up and causes a risk of collapse of the inner containment stucture. When that happens it's a nuclear disaster, although the second containment structure should keep the radioactive dust inside. God forbid something happens to that structure.
Best thing to do with old reactors IMHO is build a new one, and the old one up with concrete. A couple of hundred years will lower the concentration of short-halflife isotopes (the dangerous ones) and make it safe to clean up. Having said that: I don't know every decay path. There may be decay paths that stay dangerous for long times (as in: the decay product has a half life of years, the decay product of that has a halflife of years and so on untill it's long-halflife or even iron (the endgame of fission and fusion)).

Radioactive building

[dutchwhizzman]

You are forgetting you essentially have a very large radioactive building, even if you take the fuel rods out and (re)use them somewhere else. Either encapsulate the building in a thick layer of concrete where it is now, or take it apart with extreme costs to prevent dust escaping. You then have an enormous mount of radioactive building waste. Yes, most of the radioactivity levels will be relatively low, but they would be too high to just dispose of the rubble in a normal way.

The cost would be in either disposing of the rubble, having manned guards and maintenance crews for the building for centuries or a lot of deconstruction and reconstruction to replace the outer structure with an impenetrable concrete shell. Not disposing of the fuel rods, that is relatively cheap compared to what's left after that.

Sodium ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think sodium reactors are a very dangerous technology. Much more dangerous than BWR or PWR.
A sodium fire just can't be extinguished at this scale, and will simply spread all fuel over a continent. This is 1000x more than Fukushima and Tchernobyl combined (which both only spread a small percentage of the fuel)

Re:Sodium ?

[sjames]

I think they will produce nothing but sunshine, lollipops, and unicorns!

As evidence, I cite absolutely nothing!

Just bill the government

[EmagGeek]

After all, government is there to pick up the slack where individuals lack responsibility. That's why we have government retirement, government medical care, and government this and government that for retirees. People aren't responsible enough to save for their own retirement. How can we expect them to be responsible enough to plan to close a reactor?

No one should be surprised !

[Zoxed]

Come on: did you really think that the complete dismantle / clean up / store or fix the very long term waste plan/costing was realistic. No-one knew when the plants were built, and no-one knows now. It was assumed that future generations would pickup the tab and/or find a technical fix. Any retirement accounts were just for show.

Wow. Who knew?

[Jawnn]

Color me totally un-surprised that the nuclear energy industry, and worse, the agency responsible for regulating it, has failed, yet again to properly plan for the safe operation of their plants. This is, in word, bullshit. So let's here from the pro-nuke camp as to what their solution will be for this one. (crickets...)

Re:Wow. Who knew?

[MrKaos]

Color me totally un-surprised that the nuclear energy industry, and worse, the agency responsible for regulating it, has failed, yet again to properly plan for the safe operation of their plants. This is, in word, bullshit. So let's here from the pro-nuke camp as to what their solution will be for this one. (crickets...)

pro-nuke,, more like Nuclear cowboys. It's great how Nuclear Cowboys taint people who want to be Nuclear Free with the "Anti" stigma

"100x cheaper", is that like "100x colder"?

[gumpish]

Expense has measurement units. Heat has measurement units.

Saying something is n times the cost or n times more expensive makes sense.

Saying something is n times the temperature or n times hotter makes sense.

Saying something is n times the speed or n times faster makes sense.

Saying something is n times SLOWER, COLDER or CHEAPER does NOT make sense.

There are no measurement units for slowness, coldness or cheapness.

Re:THE GOVERNMENT DOESN'T HAVE ANY MONEY!

[Karmashock]

exactly there's no way around that.

People keep passing regulation thinking it's free because someone else is paying. They never grasp that the buck gets passed around until the public pays. The public always pays.

Jack up taxes on corporations for example and unemployment goes up.

Look at california... they had a 22 percent decline in state revenue THIS YEAR. Why? They're driving business out of the state and possibly out of the country. Unemployment is going up and they're talking about increasing corporate taxes further. Which will lead to only more revenue decline and more unemployment.

It all costs in the end.

Substitution

[ThatGuy4029]

The Question is why we as a society have not moved to cheaper,less damaging, and possibly stronger thorium reactors.

Re:Too cheap to meter

[Karmashock]

That was before the anti nuclear lobby.

That particular dream died when those yahoos got so powerful.

more informatio

[jeffreya93]

Here you can find more information about the topic: http://technieuws.com/