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Decommissioning San Onofre Nuclear Plant May Take Decades
gkndivebum writes "Southern California Edison has elected to decommission the San Onofre nuclear plant after a failed effort to upgrade the steam generation system. 'Nuclear economics' is the reason stated for the proposed decommissioning. Other utilities operating nuclear power plants in the US likely face similar decisions when it comes to weighing the costs of upgrading older facilities. Allowing the reactors to remain in 'safe storage' for a period of up to 60 years will allow for radioactive decay and lower radiation exposure for the workers performing the demolition."
From certain doom now. Just let them deal with it.
Distance, Shielding, and Time.
Why not use all three?
for 50 years, the federal government has taxed nuclear fuel to build a permanent waste depository. where is it?
weasels.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I'm sure the Chinese would buy it, Cuba or Syria or any of the hundreds of countries America has wronged. here's a dirty bomb just for the taking or a smart one with very little effort.
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
I have knowledge of this matter and I know it's crap. This is about negotiating with a supplier and throwing a tantrum. They have decided to cut off their nose to spite their face.
(If this sounds like a lot of opinion, it is...but I do have some knowledge on this matter. Once things are final, I'll be happy to share exactly what I know.)
For the moment, until things change, nuclear power is the only source that provides enough to keep things going without buring stuff and putting it into the air and everywhere. Already nuclear power has saved countless lives as they have safely displaced the amount of coal and gas to burn. Without nuclear power, the net carbon footprint of hybrid cars would be less than barely a net improvement over pure gasoline. Wind, solar, geothermal and others are not able to make it happen.
Anti-nuke people haven't been paying attention. But just about any way you look at it, nuclear wins. Sure it requires a great deal of care to handle it safely, but we've been doing nuclear in the US for a very long time with a pretty excellent record.
It disappoints me that greedy business interests are behaving this way. Until we have something better than nuclear, we need to keep nuclear going. (Shut them all down once we've got something better. It's not like I'm in love with the tech, but it's just so much better than burning stuff.)
Other utilities operating nuclear power plants in the US likely face similar decisions when it comes to weighing the costs of upgrading older facilities.
Yeah, my country unfortunately has a 60,000% idiot tax. We get massive amounts of food poisoning because people fear irradiated food. We pollute so badly that we've managed to kill large lakes and entire biomes in Africa because we're burning fossil fuel as our primary energy source when we were the ones that first created nuclear power. 4% of my fellow countrymen believe that shape-shifting reptiles are trying to control the government through political manipulation... another 7% "aren't sure". And we're reporting record numbers of people joining the Flat Earth Society, and have one of the lowest rates of acceptance in the theory of evolution of any industrialized country on Earth.
In short, we're morons. That's why nuclear power is so expensive here, and why we're letting these plants rot... it's stupid, pathetic, moronic fear of technology, science, and progress. And it's killing the planet. Literally. We are literally dying of stupidity.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I thought the point of such extensive containment structures was that they would never be destroyed? Just remove the fuel and any equipment that isn't cemented into the structure and leave the rest. I imagine the general thought-lines behind a lot of nuclear plants was to simply to continue to build new reactors as the old ones had to be decommissioned and continue to use the same generators, transmission equipment & facilities with incremental upgrades over the years. But I think I see why they're going the decommissioning route with this one, even if it was economic to build some new reactors this plant is sandwiched between the Pacific and a major highway. The reactor structures themselves are not more than 400' from the ocean, at least on the face of it this place is another Fukushima under the wrong circumstances.
Hybrid cards, with the exception of the nascent plug-in variety, have nothing to do with central power generation. They are about capturing waste energy otherwise lost in braking. I think you meant to say electric cars.
Nuclear proponents are always running around yelling wind and solar pawer can't compete on a per KW basis. Well, not if you skim off the profits and leave the cleanup to taxpayers!
Take the total lifetime cost ( including what is usually shifted onto us after the investors skeedaddle with the profits ) and divide that by KW's produced.
Hogwash! Nuclear power is too expensive to be sustainable.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
I felt a vibration ah ah aah
Nuclear technology has progressed by leaps and bounds since this plant was designed. Why not build a new Gen3 plant at the same site? People were already used to a nuke plant so shoehorning a new one it would be easier politically.
for 50 years, the federal government has taxed nuclear fuel to build a permanent waste depository. where is it?
As much as I love blasting on our danged ole federal gummint, on this one I have to blame the NIMBY asshats in Nevada. You see, the Feds identified a pretty damned good place in Yucca Mountain. The place is geologically pretty stable, made of solid rock, and has a crazy low water table. Oh, and it's about 100 miles away from civilization, which in this case means Las Vegas.
The feds spent decades fighting the locals to get this done, until Obama finally capitulated to the NIMBYs as fronted by Sen. Harry Reid, killing the project and leaving a total lack of long term storage. Quid pro quo for something, no doubt.
as if there were any other kind
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
PRISM is the cloud. we know who you are, and we will send for you when we have room. be quiet now, and stay on topic.
There is a growing technical debt with nuclear decommissioning. Debts can turn into bubbles, I wonder if it is the case here. Do we really know how much power is needed to decommission a nuclear power plant? How many years of the plant's production is it worth?
Camped at San Onofre several times duing my early teens. Beautiful beach but the reactor was creepy.
-- Jimtown Kelly
Sealing the cooling pool won't solve the problem of dissipating heat. The cooling pools are actively cooled for a reason. Storing high level waste in a vessel whose temperature and pressure are increasing would be extremely hazardous.
I believe in making the world safe for our children, but not our children's children, because I don't think children should be having sex. -Jack Handey
what they did was instead of replacing the steam generator piping according to original designs after decades of wear they hired a company to design a new system. The game as they manipulated the cost so it was just under the NRC trigger value which would have resulted in a NRC engineering review. And guess what, the design was flawed and the new pipes wore in just a few months. From what I read there was never any talk of going back to the original design but instead fought the NRC and local/State regulators to let them do patch fixes and run at a lower power level.
The really scary part is how they worked around the system to try and get changes made and then fought everyone calling them on the trickery. They should be taken over and shareholders given gov bonds in place of the stock instead of letting them continue running a public utility.
Wow ! What a Californication Jobs program ! Everybody gets to fuck and everybody fucked.
Har de Har Har
Thanks to fracking, natural gas is cheap, and unfortunately will probably remain so for a while. Yeah, it "only" emits about half as much CO2 as burning coal, which is like saying I'm "only" kicking you in the head once today, instead of twice.
A sealed radiator in a car dissipates heat without losing water mass. I never said fixed pressure or fixed temperature. When you are too stupid to comprehend how to have a sealed system with pressure relief and a heat exchanger, I can't be expected to explain all the basics. There's too much you don't understand.
Learn to love Alaska
Well then, I suppose it wouldn't matter that even one fuel rod generates magnitudes more energy and heat than an engine. Or that releasing pressure (in this case, steam) would reduce the water content. Or that the steam released would be radioactive. You think these guys are scrubs or something? You think they wouldn't do this if it was actually possible, seeing as how that would be way cheaper than a conventional cooling pool?
Do you have any common sense at all?
How many AGW scaremongers promote nuclear?
The reason I don't believe any of the "worst-case" scenarios about AGW is PRECISELY because so many of the groups and individuals promoting those ideas are anti-nuclear.
You can't have it both ways. Either AGW is the end of civilization unless we adopt nuclear energy with moon-shot like efforts, or the whole AGW thing is crap, in terms of being a significant problem.
So, until the vast majority of AGW worst-case scenario promoters are in the streets BEGGING for nuclear energy I will feel free to ignore them.
If you have to wait some 40-60 years for the iodine and some of the cesium and strontium to decay, it means that:
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
Therefore Solar+Wind complement each other.
It's mined. That kills fish and birds and strips the land of all life.
And if you were REALLY worried about the birdies, you'd get all housecats killed.
If you consider that they are allowed to extort massive profits from energy. However, energy is sold europe-wide and therefore the price isn't able to be dictated solely by Germany.
you missed the bit about the heat exchanger. my god, you think all nuclear plants release radioactive steam as a matter of design? that perhaps radioactive water can transfer it's heat to clean running water without touching or mixing with it?
Did anyone else read this as 'San On Fire Nuclear'?
you'd have to build everything in fricking space before they would be happy.
Not when they start thinking about the ground stations. Nobody wants to be near one of those.
Just run power cables down the space elevators. Totally supersedes the need for beamed power deathrays.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Then you'd have a sealed-loop spent fuel cooling pool. What's the point of that?
Of course it is. The question is why does stupidity have such ruthless survival factor?
It's the gaping hole in the theory.
You are right about no room for morons but by your statement; you clearly have not been in nuclear construction.
sauce: wiki Bechtel installed this station head backwards.
That is partly the issue with Yucca mountain. Even current design of dry cask storage is in midst of political and idiotic debate. I'm currently working on one.
Yip and he also arn't familiar with the beauracratic NRC and the the shit that goes on with the contractors.
but, but,.... it's a WHOLE LOT of smug.
Seriously, there is a problem in that a lot of waste is dumped into the ocean, effectively distributing it widely and making that ultimate recycle way harder. Landfills make more sense, but we have a lot of ocean-front cities. All that ocean. So tempting. So free.
You have a plant that has land, cooling, transmission towers, generators, loads of 'spent fuel' and 2 reactors that kind of sux.
Do not get rid of the plant. Get rid of the reactors.
Instead, replace those with thorium reactors, OR GE-PRISM and make use of all that is useful there. While those are working, then pull down the old generators.
With this approach, it keeps electricity, makes it cheaper, deals with 95% of the spent fuel, and provides a profit to the company while they tear down old gen II reactors.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
just because accidents don't always happen doesn't mean they can't
it's also funny how when people read "kill thousands of people" and "nuclear plant" in the same sentence they most likely think i'm referring to some kind of nuclear explosion... these are the people that haven't been in nuclear construction
i could walk into any family home and identify a ream of hazards... i could fill a large book with hazards at a decommissioned nuclear plant, with a decent chapter on radiation
there are plenty of idiots working in all sorts of dangerous environments, and some are never involved in or cause any accidents... this also doesn't mean they can't or won't, or that there are any fewer idiots
dumb luck has no doubt saved large portions of humanity on more than one occasion
All the cooling and none of the radioactive discharge.
Learn to love Alaska
Well then, I suppose it wouldn't matter that even one fuel rod generates magnitudes more energy and heat than an engine.
With a small air heat exchanger (air being a poor medium), and the average engine being in the 100kW range, scaling it up is easy. "Magnitudes more energy and heat" in a spent rod means you are either lying, stupid, or they should be putting spent rods in sealed loop cooling pools, and using the waste heat to power a 1 MW power plant. Ha ha. 1MW from a spent rod.
Again, you are missing the basics. You are using a water to air heat exchanger in the open-pool design you mention, it's just powered through evaporative cooling to heat the air, not conduction, as in a car's radiator.
Learn to love Alaska
I don't want to be anywhere near those anchors... Think what happens when the cable snaps and the tether tries to wrap itself around the planet.
I once heard a radio interview with an anti-nuclear-power protester. He said that if he fried a fish on his stove, and the power came from a nuclear reactor, his fish would be radioactive.
sigh
The radiator in the car requires a pump and, of course, a radiator. I think evaporative cooling (the current method) is the best way to go. If you seal it and pump it you must have the pump working and airflow over the radiator at all times. It is more complicated.