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Its Nuclear Plant Closed, Maine Town Is Full of Regret
mdsolar writes in with a story about the fallout from a nuclear plant closing on a small town in Maine. "In a wooded area behind a camouflage-clad guard holding an assault rifle, dozens of hulking casks packed with radioactive waste rest on concrete pads — relics of the shuttered nuclear plant that once powered the region and made this fishing town feel rich. In the 17 years since Maine Yankee began dismantling its reactors and shedding its 600 workers, this small, coastal town north of Portland has experienced drastic changes: property taxes have spiked by more than 10 times for the town's 3,700 residents, the number living in poverty has more than doubled as many professionals left, and town services and jobs have been cut. 'I have yet to meet anyone happy that Maine Yankee is gone,' said Laurie Smith, the town manager. 'All these years later, we're still feeling the loss of jobs, the economic downturn, and the huge tax increases.'"
The real issue isn't with Maine Yankee leaving...it's that the members the town thought it would be around forever.
The problem they are experiencing is the same one that most small towns (and some big ones) experience when they tie all their hopes and dreams on one industry instead of using tax revenues generated from that industry to help pull additional industries into their city.
A small town loses a lot when the big business that was there has left.
Not quite sure why it's worth an article, or why it matters that it was a nuclear power plant though.
On one side we have a lot of people talking technology and facts about something that few people understand and can't observe.
On the other we have people who are afraid, on a gut level, about something they don't understand and a deep mistrust towards the technical people. The technical people consider these guys stupid and irrational.
A sane dialogue is a complete nonstarter. They can't even agree about what's sane.
TCAP-Abort
And in North Dakota, the opposite thing is happening. We can't all have everything, we need to select the best and least toxic way to fuel our country's demand for energy and pursue it. The Mainiacs would be screaming twice as loud if the nuclear plant had suffered an event that released even modest levels of radioactivity into their pristine environment. They should be celebrating - they gambled, they won. (Except for the multi billion dollar cleanup, even without a meltdown.)
Except that Nuclear is still the best solution if you are talking about the least toxic, unless you ignore all the fracking, and greenhouse emissions, and other issues that comes with burning carbon fuels. Renewable is not there yet to support the people.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
The modern time is an abomination because economics runs our lives.
Since that's the case, it's prudent to think economically and to never rely on only a couple industries in a town.
If your employment opportunities are (1) nuclear plant or (2) "fishing, I guess" then you're in for a rough ride if either of those shits the bed.
And since economies are both cyclic and random, expect that to happen.
Futurist Traditionalism
Safe nuclear power is not a technical problem. It is a political problem. In Fukushima, the authorities knew the generators were crap. So the debate gets a third angle: do you trust the engineers? Well maybe. But do you trust the politicians?
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Which is far less than the mining or drilling for fossil fuels!
Yes you do, but a little bit of uranium goes a long way. 1kg of uranium produces as much energy as 14 tonnes of coal. That energy equivalency isn't exact, because the uranium has to be refined after mining. I have no figures for how much that adds to the carbon emissions related with producing energy from uranium but it's not a factor of 14000. And despite failures, the uranium IS easier to contain. The pollution from coal or gas can't be contained at all on a commercial scale. It just spews into the air. The issue with nuclear is the intense toxicity and radioactivity of the byproducts. That calls for very careful reactor design with multiple levels of failsafes. With coal, oil and gas we have just assumed it was OK to spew millions of tonnes of crap into the air, but it turns out that it's not OK at all. The Earth can't absorb all that shit without changes to the atmosphere and oceans that affect life all over the planet.
The research that concluded that was based on theoretical calculations.
Empirical data paints quite a different picture. Here's a basic sanity check for you: if it took prohibitively huge amounts of diesel fuel to mine uranium the nuclear plant could not afford to buy uranium and stay competitive with oil-fired plants.
So this Fox News story was idiotic. Solar only works in Germany because it is heavily subsidized. German consumers pay a great deal more for electricity than they would without the solar subsidies. Solar will always be expensive until you figure out a way to create a much less expensive solar infrastructure, such as nano-tech based solar that you paint on a road or a roof. You have to maintain solar arrays and the low power density means large areas are needed for solar capture, and the sun does not shine at night, so you have to solve the energy storage problem too.
I have read that nuclear is not really net clean. That the mining and preparation of the nuclear fuel is quite carbon dirty.
The anti-nuclear lobby is very vocal. I suggest being careful of your sources, and doing some basic sanity checks. For example: to mine some uranium, you run the mining equipment on diesel fuel. So the cost of uranium is, at a minimum, equal to the cost of the diesel fuel used to produce it. The cost of uranium is only a smallish fraction of the cost of nuclear power (~10%?), while the cost of getting the same amount of power from diesel generators is higher (~150%?). So the CO2 emissions from mining uranium produce, at most, ~1/15 of the CO2 of fossil fuels, and probably a factor of a few less than this.
Okay, there are big error margins on these numbers, but they're enough to convince me that the claims I've seen - that nuclear power produces as much or more CO2 than fossil fuels - are bogus. And, since solar and wind power are so much less energy-dense, I would expect the CO2 emissions from mining silicon/iron/etc for renewable energy infrastructure to be greater than those for nuclear.
Fukushima was a disaster waiting to happen.... just like Chernobyl. Neither plant had any indication of learning from previous experiences in the nuclear power industry and were plain cruddy designs that any newly graduated nuclear engineering student could have designed better. Both plants also required electrical power being supplied to those plants simply to operate.
I'd also point out that even if you treat the designs of these plants as typical (which they aren't, nor are they anything approaching the design of a plant that would be built today) the amount of pollution and I dare say even radioactive debris contamination is far less than what you get from other energy producing activities around the world. No, it isn't perfect and there are some embarrassments in the nuclear power industry that certainly need to be examined with proper engineering reviews and teaching those lessons to the next generation so they can improve and do better.
Still, it is a hell of a lot better to build a nuclear power plant today than it is to build dozens or hundreds of coal/oil/bio-diesel plants which generate electricity. Not only it is technically cheaper (especially if you use standard designs for those plants and not constantly try to re-invent the wheel for each new plant), but the impact on the overall environment is far less for nuclear power plants than it is for any other kind... including solar farms.
A lot of the issues point to bad management by the town planners - there are several mentions of overspending in the article, such as for ladder firetrucks when the town has nothing over 3 storeys high, town water to even the most outlying rural surrounding areas, new sports uniforms every year, etc etc.
Much of the tax burden would be to service some of the debt that was incurred while times were good, or support maintenance on excessively built out infrastructure - otherwise there's no need for tax to be proportionally higher than any other place.
First of all, your memory of how Chernobyl went wrong is off. You should read the account again, it has been extensively researched by now. It was a bad design, absolutely, and the engineers on duty did not understand what they were doing to it when they deliberately ran it at too-low power for too long, but they did not intend a scram. Anyway, we can discount Chernobyl, no one will ever build a reactor like that (alas, there are still Chernobyl-type reactors operating).
I consider myself an environmentalist, so it is a bit annoying to be tainted with the "nuclear is poison" and "DHMO must be banned" brush. I think you give environmentalists too much credit though if you think they could stop nuclear power plants being built practically throughout the world. We have certainly been much less successful when it comes to coal mines and oil rigs, even though those are more harmful. The major difference seems to be that coal and oil is actually profitable whereas modern nuclear power needs more subsidy than even offshore wind power.
Also, I remember arguments from the pro-nuclear side that Japan was an example of how nuclear power could be safe and profitable when it is done right. Well, it turns out it was not done right, and suddenly there is a lot of criticism about how Fukushima was built. Where are the critical articles about German power plants? About French? They were built at the same time, were they really built so much better? Let us see how the French handle a really hot summer where the rivers they use for cooling cannot provide enough water -- they have had that problem before, but at least there was still enough water to cool the reactors after they were shut down.
Smaller nuclear power plants are even less economical, and if a storm hits you have to spread your people thin, trying to handle a bunch of spread-out plants generally located in out-of-the-way areas. That does not seem like an obvious improvement to me.
Luckily it is all academic, only China and Finland are doing significant nuclear expansion, and the ones in Finland have turned out ridiculously expensive so they will not be trying that again. England is waving pound bills around desperately, but no one is biting, despite there being plenty of existing nuclear sites available where NIMBY'ism is a solved problem.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?