Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Think of the space probes
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.)
Better not shut down Fukushima!
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
Settlements come and settlements go. That is the nature of the settlement! This has been the nature of settlement since the very beginning.
It does not matter if it is primitive people sleeping around a fire in tents, or a large city of antiquity, or an American town of today. Changing times bring changing economies which bring changes to where people reside.
So why the surprise? Why the dumbfounding? When situations change, people must change. They must move. They must adapt. It is the way of the world; the way it has always been.
So, idiots get scared of "nukular powurr" and close down an electricity factory using the one tech that's actually good at that, and then whine that they're getting poorer? "Let's kill the golden goose just to watch its carcass rot" much?
Awesomesauce. So now we're associating "assault rifles" with nuclear waste. Next week we'll have stories about the need to ban radioactive bullets... (In before DU rounds already exist)
This could be said of any large scale employer leaving a small town, nothing specific to Nucular power.
Out of interest, did the town decide to close down the plant, or was it fundamentally unprofitable?
It sounds like the (sadly not atypical) story of what happens to a company town when the company leaves, more or less regardless of the flavor of company.
The fact that a bunch of nuclear waste casks prevent any redevelopment of that part of the site certainly doesn't help (though, nuclear plants are one of the flavors of facility that are wildly expensive to shut down permanently even if they could get rid of the casks).
They had 17 years to move out. I don't fault the plant closing, If you have that much lead time, I would have gotten out.
This is a story about a facility closing and the town losing jobs, this is not a story that supports Nuclear. If you are want to build nuclear plants to create jobs, the tail is wagging the dog. Supposing, just supposing, the plant had an accident and all those people had to evacuate. Do you think they would have been sad to see it close? Now that would have been a nuclear story.
CM www.cometenergysystems.com Blog: http://caribbeanrenewable.blogspot.com/
the fallout from a nuclear plant closing
Maybe the fallout will cause a mutation in the town's economy.Together with the economic downturn it could be a toxic combination, resulting in an civic apocalypse.
Then there are those of us that do understand, and have a moderate distrust in human ability to foresee everything, and to do adequate safety checks, etc.
Personally, I think nuclear power is A Good Thing. From what has happened so far in the world though, it looks like we need to implement more modern reactor designs to avoid any more radiation leaks from human negligence, or the occasional natural disaster.
which is totally what she said
This is a problem that's more widespread than you'd think. What's the solution? Pushing ahead against the mass of ignorance that's penetrated every facet of society?
At some point, this is going to happen to San Francisco, and the entire so-called Silicon Valley.
While the economy of this region was once diversified, ranging from professional services to software development to computer hardware development to heavy industry, we've seen much of that flee over the years.
These days, the companies and people that remain are nothing compared to the giants of days gone by. They are strangers walking through the ruins of what was once a great civilization. They try to imitate what they see, but they lack the inherent essence of what The Valley was in its heyday.
Some people call it economic stagnation; I prefer to call it rampant hipsterism. That which mattered has been replaced by that which is superficial. Where we once had leaders and innovators, now we have manchildren who wear tight jeans, large glasses, and act with the maturity of toddlers.
When Bill Hewlett was in the room, everyone listened to him, even when he wasn't saying anything. But today, we get to hear self-entitled young men prance around in fedoras, taking photos of everything while subsequently going on about social media and Web 2.0 and Ruby-on-Rails.
If it can happen in Maine, I think it can surely happen in California. The parallels between the two are astounding.
I think of "regret" as something you feel over an action you took (direct or indirect). But this town didn't act to close the plant; in fact the residents were quite happy with the economic boom that came with its operation. So, "Its Nuclear Plant Closed, Maine Town Is Full of Sadness," perhaps?
Contrary to the other posts in this thread...
It's doubtful that the activists who caused the closure actually live in the town; they are likely from out of area, and just uniformly against nuclear power for the sake of being against nuclear power.
From the article, it looks like there isn't a NIMBY in town, and that the town is actually filled with PIMBY's ("Please In My Back Yard").
I have read that nuclear is not really net clean. That the mining and preparation of the nuclear fuel is quite carbon dirty. Not to mention the enormous costs of the structures and transportation of the fuel and whatever.
The amount of money we have spent on Nuclear was a waste compared to much greater advances we could have made in solar to achieve the same output.
Seriously, it's a FISHING town. Fishing towns everywhere have suffered, not to mention the whole American economy and how many towns are going belly up. Stop trying to use their plight as defense for nuclear power.
LOL democrats. The only thing they love better than oppressive taxes is being racist while doing it.
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
What they do is make people dependent, once they make people addictive, people never get out of it without such pain.
You can see it anywhere, nuclear plants, US bases, waste disposal plants...
""I'll take a little radiation if I can get a job" - Working people have been fu&*ed over for so long in this country, those are the kinds of decisions people are forced to make" George Carlin - Jammin' in New York.
The same problem applies in all activism scenarios, whether we're discussing nuclear power, fracking, education, human rights, politics or war.
On the one side, you have all the people who cry for an absolute stop to the activity in question, and the other side will be pushing for the absolute requirement to do whatever it is. The two extremes dominate the debate, and anyone not in an extreme is derided as not being dedicated to the particular cause. Both sides are full of PhD-holding experts in tangentially-related fields, who are certain that some particular report from several years ago is the definitive truth of the matter - and anyone unfamiliar with that particular work isn't qualified to hold an opinion.
Of course, since neither side will entertain the other's perspective, they certainly don't bother comparing notes or discussing compromises. Whenever the other side does attempt any concession, it's just an obvious ruse, since the other side is so much more argumentative and outright evil. The only solution is to fight, with all our power and budget, to stir up grassroots support for our cause, and resist all the opposition's efforts to infiltrate and undermine our endeavor.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
I suspect that there's at least one other variable: There is a large universe of things that the techies say are safe and doable, if done according to their advice. However, by the time the plan actually gets executed, it is fairly common to discover that... certain liberties were taken... (in fairness to the techies, often against their advice) in some of the expensive-and-boring-safety-features parts of the plan. This leads to a rather smaller universe of things that techies say are safe and doable and which are implemented safely in practice.
Anybody who actually thinks that techies don't know stuff about the world, and science is, like, a social construct, man! is probably a fool.
Anyone who is strongly suspicious that, while the techies do indeed have the knowing and the doing of many things, they may not have the good of the locals at heart (never mind the bean counters and suits at HQ), is just a reasonable student of history.
A pure irrational fear of technology is one thing. The agreement that, yes, technology is powerful; but proposals involving the deployment of power are... not history's most glorious chapter... is much harder to argue with.
Except Nuclear is not the best solution if you're talking about the least toxic.
And where the fuck do you keep getting this idea that Renewable is not there yet to support the people? Only to the extent that NO power generation is there to support the people is that true.
We don't have enough installed capacity of renewable power to support the people. We don't have enough gas installed capacity to support the people. We don't have enough coal, nuclear, gerbil or alien technology installed capacity to support the people.
There is, however, ABSOLUTELY NO REASON why enough renewables to support the people WITH CURRENT TECHNOLOGY is not possible.
We have to built it.
Which ignorant dickheads yelling "Renewables can't suppor us!!!" are trying to stop happening.
I'm a strong supporter of nuclear power, but I believe that the 'stupid and irrational' people actually bring insights into important issues that are often overlooked by technical folk. And this article raises thought-provoking issues that I've never heard acknowledged in the media by any nuclear expert.
Any conceivable nuclear safety regime requires plant employees to act with honesty, integrity and procedural rigour. But what happens to honesty and integrity when the future economic prosperity of your family, friends and community depend on the answer? You will be under huge internal, personal pressure to downplay risks, underestimate costs, cut corners to save money, cover up poor practice, lie to inspectors and rebut any conceivable negative news item.
Technologists are human. No matter how rational they appear, the answers they provide us with are always subject to considerable personal and emotional bias and must be regarded with an appropriate level of scepticism.
I'm already seeing lots of posts about how "ignorant environmentalists" caused the plant to close. From the article:
"Officials at the plant, which is owned by a consortium of utility companies in New England, blamed the difficult economics of running the plant, which had maintenance issues and required expensive work"
And:
"But the plant faced serious allegations of safety violations and falsifying records around the time it was closed, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Agency investigators found Maine Yankee relied on inadequate computer analyses to demonstrate the adequacy of its emergency core cooling system; “willfully provided inaccurate information” to the NRC about its ability to vent steam during an accident; and provided falsified records of safety-related equipment.
“Many of these violations and underlying causes were longstanding and appeared to be caused by ineffective engineering analyses,” NRC officials wrote to Maine Yankee shortly after the plant closed.
They added that Maine Yankee “was a facility in which pressure to be a low-cost performer led to practices which over-relied on judgment, discouraged problem reporting, and accepted low standards of performance.”"
I am a strong proponent of nuclear energy. However, the maintenance requirements and potential for catastrophe make it impossible to run a nuclear plant safely and successfully as a for-profit business. As long as we rely on capitalism to provide our energy needs, nuclear will never be successful.
They killed the goose that layed the golden eggs.
The uber-green and anti-nuke activists likely don't live there, and probably consider these folks collateral damage in their larger fight. Ideally, such activists would be up-front about the economic costs of some of their stands. Even beyond this now-impoverished small town, growing economies need affordable energy; that's just an economic fact. High energy costs reverberate through the entire supply chain, and raise the costs of virtually every good-and-service that normal people use.
Everybody wants clean air and water, but some green initiatives come with a serious price-tag.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Did you just get +4 for a "pro-nuke people are objective bastions of scientific truth, while anti-nukers are irrational and ignorant" strawman?
Because the carnival of lies and corruption unfolding at Fukushima these past two years does not jive with that narrative.
The economics of nuclear power are extremely poor. They are price takers, since they cannot power down immediately. And the costs of build these plants are gigantic because they are so big, and take a long time to build (that means you have to take out loans for years before power production starts) - that means tons of debt. There are also big costs when you decommission.
Now compare gas plants and wind. Wind farms, for example, you can start running nearly as soon as you put the first turbine up - the price of power isn't great, because it tends to be produced at night, when the price is low. But the operating costs are close to zero.
Gas isn't as quick to start as wind, and operating costs are higher (because you have to pay for gas). But you can produce whenever desired - i.e. when prices are high, you are producing, when low, you shut down. Moreover, gas is in a glut, so operating costs are really low now.
Everyone is focused on the controversy over nuclear - but the real reason these plants are being shut down and not built is economics.
Tell that to the people of Fukushima, Chernobyl or Sellafield, or several other sites. In theory, it's cleaner, but those pesky humans keep messing up the "near perfect" statistics. I'm not saying wind or carbon is the solution, but Nuclear has proven to be a lot less safe and clean than the statistics promised so far.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
people are afraid that they will not receive proper habitation or compensation when their traditional homes be flooded for the reservoir of hydroelectric plant. I concede that Maine Yankee may not have been clean, but usually people leaving near a nuclear power plant are at risk of reallocation due to a possible accident, while people living near to a area designed for a hydro plant are planned to reallocation (and almost nobody sees the tragedy in this situation). Nuclear power may not be clean, but everything else, even 'renewables', are dirty as well.
Linux is for people who don't mind RTFM.
I'm a technical guy from age ... hm. 5 i think. Been in tech business long time, started professionally when i was 16. Like..work in a IT company doing coding and server management. 28 now.
I'm not hating on nuclear tech. I'm hating on fukushima scenarios and then the world that is totally apathetic towards such scenarios. If the price to pay is to pollute this planet (our home btw) even further and more severe, then yeah.. we need to double think what and how we' doing stuff. Even if there's a remote chance of that happening. It's not about being irrational, it's about "hey... sh.t already happened, and we don''t know how to deal with it properly".
When we learn how to contain it (and i don't mean pouring tons of radioactive water a day into ocean for 20 years or whatever as a proper method of containment) then sure. You can build a nuclear plant in every city and village as far as I'm concerned.
We reached a point in our existence when we need to think how we use our knowledge and tech, not just blindly push forward without thinking about long term consequences. 200 years ago there was nothing we could do to harm our habitat. This is the first time in our existence (known) that we can seriously affect "life" in general, long term.
What an idiotic choice of words. It makes it sound like more anti-nuclear drivel about how radioactive waste is leaking from the closed plant or something. Or that every closed plant instantly becomes Chernobyl. This isn't sim city where plants auto-explode after 50 years.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
And this is what happens when any large employer leaves. At least the environmental types are happy now that the nuclear plant is gone, right? Sure sounds like the area is prospering now that the threat of nuclear meltdown has been removed
There are an enormous number of cases where government cannot find the will to do the right thing because so many people's livelihoods are dependent upon doing the wrong thing. Fixing healthcare, ending the war on drugs, reining in surveillance, saner military and foreign policy, a lot of people stand to loose well paying jobs if these things come to pass. This isn't just come greedy CEO who isn't going to make as huge a profit. Its middle class professionals and skilled workers who will be obsolete because what they do is harmful to the world.
How do we structure plans to do the right thing in a way that deals with this problem? A lot of the political pushback comes because of this issue. Congresspeople need to protect jobs in their districts, even if they are jobs that make the world a worse place. How do we do better while having a plan for the people and communities left behind?
The flip side of the argument in those in this position take a big gamble. A small town with a sustainable fishing economy expands to support a new nuclear industry that won't be there forever, but never really establishes or expands parallel industries that can survive independently. When nuclear goes, the infrastructure for it is still there, costing money, but the people and taxes to support it are not. In the meantime, its original economy from before the nuclear plant has gone through change and neglect. Its a story that plays out again and again in small formerly industrial towns. The clock turns back, but there is no support for doing that sanely, and so negative feedback loops happen, and as a nation we loose the stomach for change. If we better addressed this issue, maybe more could get done.
In the '70s Boeing shut down the SST project. Seattle reeled in the aftermath, prompting the billboard, "Will the last person to leave Seattle, please, turn off the lights."
Of course, politicians love to make hay by decrying the loss of jobs. Social progress and clear thinking are sidelined by such facile, emotional arguments. Had today's political climate existed 100 years ago, we would still be paying for whale oil price supports.
"property taxes have spiked by more than 10 times for the town's 3,700 residents"
Ahh yes...only a Slashdot Editor would use the term 'fallout' in a story like this. Great idea...no really...
I hear this a lot and I don't understand why everyone assumes this. Has no one ever heard of a thing called "law of conservation of energy?" Yes, it's true that the use of wind and solar don't (directly) create pollution but they remove energy from the surrounding environment. It's not the same threat we're used to but it is still a threat, and one that we don't yet know the long term effects. I'm not saying the wind power is a bad thing, but saying it "pose[s] zero threat to the environment" is false.
Because those residents refuse to participate in local politics they let taxes get raised heavily. Where were all those lazy residents when they were talking about taxes? where were they during the election to vote out the politicians that raised taxes?
Sitting at home bitching about it is what I am betting on. You have no right to bitch about taxes if you don't get off your ass and do something about it.
That said, is the town rural? and has property values plummeted? might be a good town for a Libertarian takeover.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You have to be prepared for large changes by being willing to say "This place is going down and I am moving."
Growing up in the Northwest in the 50s & 60s, wood product mills, companies and machinery for them looked great. However access to faster growing wood in the Southeast and stands of virgin large trees put on the market by the British Columbia government wiped out 3 dozen mills of various types in my home area of Columbia County Oregon and decimated the jobs for well over a decade or so.
There is a tendency to think that what we grow up with is what we will have for our & our children's lives. The fact is we have undergone more changes in lifespan, health and technology in 150 years than in the entire previous history of primates and it is likely to continue and that means destruction of "what I grew up with."
GE's Jack Welch said it right "Change before you have to."
It's a shame we cant reuse the plant with a simpler and/or safer reactor like CANDU or thorium.
Except that you forgot to mention that WHAT KIND of nuclear power! Boiling water reactors, such as the type used at Fukushima are in fact a terrible idea. This has be proven time and again! Heck, in the US there has been so many accecdient!. Do some research on Rocketdyne and Simi Valley. There were 2 or 3 major spills there alone related to the reactor program.
http://www.vcreporter.com/cms/story/detail/rocketdyne_still_hot/9658/
Whereas a molten salt or thorium reactor is far safer and doesn't have the proliferation aspects deal with.
We need jobs. Fuck our grandchildren's health. We want that new bass boat.
^Seriously, I am so sick of hearing that stupid argument. It is very short sighted.
There are so many people here (in Germany) shouting about these Chinese panels and how China is price dumping and we are losing jobs.
Well, who cares??
People forget to mention that all those panels they buy from China....How are they made? With GERMAN production equipment. That's how! The companies that produces these machines in combination with massive increase in solar installers because of the lower cost Chinese panels far exceeds the amount of jobs lost from production companies.
ORLY?
One of the more known German anti-nuclear activists is an engineer who worked for General Dynamics, was a director of the nuclear power department of a German tech company AEG, was the CEO of Interatom (a Siemens daughter that built nuclear reactors) and was responsible for a fast breeder reactor design.
I think that guy knows more about nuclear power than all the atomic playboys on slashdot together.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
I wouldn't worry about Wiscasset, they've got Red's Eats to cause all sorts of fallout on Rt. 1.
I'm from Maine and this situation isn't unique in our state. Maine used to be an industrial powerhouse. At one time it had the largest textile mill in the world. It had many shoe factories. Paper mills. Sardine canneries. Many textile and paper mills were built in small villages or, in the case of a few paper mills, even in remote areas where there were no towns -- they were situated where there were natural falls in the rivers that could be harnessed to power the machinery (and eventually make electricity to power the machinery). Thriving towns grew up around a single industry. Now all the textile mills are gone. Most of the shoe factories are gone. Several paper mills have closed or severely reduced their workforce. There are towns that have outlived their purpose (see Millinocket, ME). Over half of the State's economic activity occurs in the Greater Portland area, yet we have all these small communities scattered around that are vestiges of a manufacturing and natural-resource-based economy and they are bleeding population and are plagued by poverty.
The best way to contain radioactivity is to have it dissolved within chemically stable fluoride salts, rather than meltdown-prone solid fuel rods. The salt is at ambient pressure, is non-reactive, and has zero explosive potential; any leak from the reactor vessel will just freeze solid. Even dropping a bomb on such a plant wouldn't cause a wide dispersal of radiation, and cleanup would be relatively straightforward.
No doubt Fukushima is a mess, but molten salt reactors like LFTR can't create such messes. If you are technically minded, I would encourage you to investigate them, as they solve essentially every issue with conventional nuclear, and offer several further benefits.
Please In My Back Yard.
I would love to get more nuke plants built.
"A deep mistrust of technical people".... That fear is prominent in many facets of American society.. The last American presidential debate all of the Republican candidates were on stage. The question was "Which ones of you believe in Creation"...Every single one raised their hands. Republicans can't trust science because that would mean they have to accept global warming, fracking poisons land and causes earth quakes, the bible is a fable, the basic core tenants of Fox News fall apart. The only way to maintain their belief system is to attach scientists and make others suspicious of them.
People are dumb enough to think nuclear power is dangerous. There was a huge news story about a nuclear plant leaking radiation into the water table a few years ago. You know how much radiation it leaked? Enough over 10 years that if you extrapolated the leak by 10,000 years and concentrated that into one acute dose, you might have some long-term health effects a few decades down the line.
Radiation is a big scary boogieman. It's like fire. Oh my god there's a fire! Well if you stick your face into the charcoal grill, you might have some trouble; but overall it's .. warm, a few feet away... and if you're any appreciable distance off it's not so warm. That warmth won't hurt you. If the thing tips over and sets fire to your house and you're entrapped in the blaze, that's different.
People imagine that "it's warm downwind because a concentrated column of air is blowing my way" is the same as "HELP I'M ON FIRE!!!" They get a little radiation leak, or even a failed plant, and they're like... oh god, contamination, contamination everywhere! But the truth is nothing changes, the minimal amount of radiation exposure is largely untroubling, and everything is fine. Unless it's Tjernobyl spewing liquefied toxic waste everywhere and dumping raw liquid nuclear fuel into the water table and scattering tons and tons and tons of radioactive matter into the air, it's a non-starter.
I mean for god's sake, people in Taiwan living in highly radioactive buildings (1000 times background radiation) show 40% lower incidences of cancer and overall have better health; most studies only manage to conclude that we can't decide if the reduced incidence of ALL TYPES OF CANCER (not Simpson's Paradox; all means each individual type--less leukemia, less lung cancer, less skin cancer, etc.) is because the population is younger or because these are mostly rich upper-middle-class people who lead healthier lifestyles. That's a choice between "no real change" and "These people don't eat garbage and have heard about something called 'jogging'".
A radiation plant with a leak will not expose the local population to 1000 times background radiation. It won't expose them to a short-term 1000x dose or a lifetime of 1000x background radiation. Even a major nuclear disaster, unless the plant fucking explodes, probably won't expose the local population to doses like that--what do you think containment buildings are for? In most cases, a leak that raises alarms and exceeds regulatory guidelines and gets the NRA on their asses will expose the population 100 feet away from the leak to less background radiation than living within 10 miles of a coal plant does. And even then, sometimes it's fucking harmless (all this bullshit over a minor TRITIUM leak?!).
Big bogeyman. Nuclear plants aren't as scary as people want you to believe. Look at the Fukushima disaster--people are talking about the disaster, but not about the actual impact. We've arbitrarily assigned a high impact to this disaster, but is there any real impact at all? Sure. I bet some people get cancer earlier than they would normally. Eventually. We'll see in 30 years.
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Seriously, these plants are ran on old gen I and II technology. they have built up a MASSIVE amount of 'spent fuel', that will sit there for ages while politcians fight over storage.
BUT, a smart move is for yankee and others to buy B&H reactors, and push for thorium reactor as well. These are Gen III+ as well as Gen IV. These can be brought in SAFELY, and replace the current reactors. Then the spent fuel is used in the thorium reactors to burn it up. So, instead of transporting 1000 tonnes of fuel, in about 40 years, they will only need to transport about 100 tonnes of fuel.
These towns should be pushing hard and fast for thorium plants. Now.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The Money System sinks us in the ground then?
For all the engineering problems at Chernobyl, what happened was this: some grad student wanted to run an experiment. The people at the plant told him "no", because it was not a good idea. They were overruled because his father was a big-time Communist in Moscow.
My friend's sister was a high-level engineer at Chernobyl, who unfortunately died of cancer.
So that was just human stupidity more than engineering breaking down.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Getting back to TFA, isn't much of the "dirty" portion of nuclear plants front loaded? If so, you want to keep the plant open as long as possible in order to mitigate this "cost"; not shut it down so quickly. By doing so they did a disservice, in terms of net CO2 output, and helped make Nuclear energy "look" less clean.
The technology is good in theory. (Most power long-term with minimal waste in terms of volume or spread.) But history so far hasn't shown it to be sufficiently idiot-proofed. (Even when highly regulated.) Somebody somewhere always cuts corners because they're too damn cheap, or somebody will do something stupid because operating a plant tends to be boring and monotonous.
It'll probably be some years before a new NRC approved and sufficiently idiot-proofed commercial powerplant is built, so any new reactors in the next few decades will probably belong to the Navy.
You'd have to say that the catching of fish was by aerial bombardment of any place that water was detected.
And this is what's in store for Chalk River/Deep River here in Ontario once NRU is shutdown and decommissioned.
I have read that nuclear is not really net clean.
Basically NO power source is 'net clean'. Even power sources like wind and solar aren't clean or even 'carbon neutral'. Wind requires, on average, massive amounts of concrete and steel for the footings and towers. It actually ends up taking considerably more concrete for an equivalent amount of energy per year. Solar cell manufacture involves nasty amounts of chemical waste.
Nuclear isn't perfectly clean, no, but it produces so much energy in such a compact fashion that it's a real contender for cleanest per energy.
Of course, hydrocarbon based power is so dirty that the differences between nuclear, wind, and solar are basically moot. It's like worrying about the difference between .1 and .2 per X pollution levels and not taking any action about the 100 per X pollution of coal.
While there is considerable variation between individual installs, on a net level coal is easily the dirtiest.
I don't read AC A human right
This is the fate of all nuclear power plants. This one was unsafe and too expensive to fix, but the fuel will run out for all the rest even if somehow they become economic again. Exhaustible resources just have these sorts of problems.
The salts in an MSR are not highly reactive, they are chemically very stable. While 300C water is typical in conventional reactors, an MSR operates around 750C, and as a result is roughly 50% more efficient.
Salts are considered safer, because they are safer. They are not under pressure, have no explosive potential, and trap fission products in solution. If the salts leak in the event of plant damage, they will freeze solid--the radioactivity isn't going anywhere.
I mod you to +6
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
We already know how to properly build the plants to contain the waste.
The question I have for you, though, is since people will continue to demand the same level of energy, how does the pollution from all alternative sources compare to the pollution coming from all nuclear power plants combined?
I think you'll quickly be wishing we had more 3-eyed fish and fewer dead people.
Of course, if there's another option, I'm happy to hear it. Sadly, even windmills and solar panels kill more than nuclear power does.
My point is that the two groups argue in two distinct and incompatible frameworks. Add to that, the techies think the non-techs are irrational while the non-techs think the techies are untrustworthy.
I'm pro nuke, but that's not my point. There is plenty of blame to go around here.
TCAP-Abort
The Post glories in pun-based headlines. Witness today:
Rebooting the reputation of computer legend who helped defeat Hitler
For a story on a posthumous pardon for Alan Turing.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
in my town we had two big industries close down, each around 1k employees, but with good (socialist) town management and good laws (companies essentially have to put up programs for the people they lay off in such cases so they can find new jobs or get a secondary education) the unemployment numbers are as low as ever.
A small town with a sustainable fishing economy expands to support a new nuclear industry that won't be there forever, but never really establishes or expands parallel industries that can survive independently.
Just imagine if they had never cut their own property taxes back to nothing...if they didn't buy new fire trucks every three years...if they didn't rely on one entity for 96% of the tax revenue...if they hadn't spent money like a coke-addled lottery winner...just imagine where they would be...
You're saying that Germany subsidizing solar panels is equivalent to the broken window fallacy?
That's ridiculous. Germany isn't paying/subsidizing people to break windows or other net-negative value endeavors. They're not even paying people to just keep them working (which some WPA projects in the 1930s effectively did). They're creating wealth. All those solar panels (even ones that are 20 years old) generate power. This is a net positive.
Your analogy is flawed.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
By that measure, they must have closed hundreds of nukes in Detroit, Compton, Burlington NJ etc.
The big issue with Fukushima at the moment is the build up of radioactive water that they do not want to introduce into the ocean / food chain.
If one were to use Electrolysis to separate the radioactive water into Hydrogen and Oxygen, would the Hydrogen and Oxygen also be radioactive? Or would the radioactive matter be condensed?
It may not be the most efficient use of power to convert the amount of water at Fukushima, but it would probably be much easier to manage the waste if it were condensed.
END COMMUNICATION
I suspect that there's at least one other variable: There is a large universe of things that the techies say are safe and doable, if done according to their advice. However, by the time the plan actually gets executed, it is fairly common to discover that... certain liberties were taken... (in fairness to the techies, often against their advice) in some of the expensive-and-boring-safety-features parts of the plan. This leads to a rather smaller universe of things that techies say are safe and doable and which are implemented safely in practice.
Anybody who actually thinks that techies don't know stuff about the world, and science is, like, a social construct, man! is probably a fool.
Anyone who is strongly suspicious that, while the techies do indeed have the knowing and the doing of many things, they may not have the good of the locals at heart (never mind the bean counters and suits at HQ), is just a reasonable student of history.
A pure irrational fear of technology is one thing. The agreement that, yes, technology is powerful; but proposals involving the deployment of power are... not history's most glorious chapter... is much harder to argue with.
I'm not sure it's possible to make a 'perfectly safe' anything. That being said, it's always a tradeoff - the more 'safe' you design something the more it's going to cost, and probably the longer it's going to take to build. So compromises get made (hopefully 'reasonable' ones). There's also maintenance, which can be harder/more-expensive in an environment with radioactive material, nothing about a nuclear plant is really 'cheap' if you are doing it right (in relative terms to say a natgas or coal plant).
And then there's the *potential* if something does go wrong - as in, if a natgas or coal plant goes kaboom, you'll get a big explosion/fire, lots of smoke, but once extinguished the overall impact will be low (probably need demolition/cleanup, but in a year it could be gone and cleaned up). If a nuclear plant goes 'meltdown', like Fukushima or Chernobyl, you wind up with areas no human being can even approach safely, that can't just be 'extinguished' with water or fire-retardent foam spray, and that are quite likely to stay that way for a long long time (as in decades/centuries). So one would think that from a safety perspective a *lot* more should be spent (in attention to detail and monetary terms) on nuclear plant safety than for say a coal plant.
The problem is, that's at direct odds with what the 'bean counters' want, they want to build something as quickly/cheaply as possible to start getting profit$ as soon as possible, and to spend as little as they can on expensive maintenance to ensure the most profit$ ongoing, and when it gets too expensive to make sense anymore, to preferably just walk away as cheaply as possible with no long term costs.
You'll notice what form the complaints take:
'All these years later, we're still feeling the loss of jobs, the economic downturn, and the huge tax increases.'
These are all problems that you would expect any time any sort of industry leaves town. This is nothing specific to nuclear power.
As a side note, it's worth noting that people - when self interest is at stake - will actually miss something that by design makes chemicals that are deadly for thousands of years on end. I would actually call that a problem with our species. We're willing to create eons of poison just for a little immediate benefit. Very short sighted. Especially when "move and get another job" is an option.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Require the board of directors and CEO to live in the plant with their families, and let the market decide.
The article stated, without explanation, that the casks emit radiation into the air. Can anyone provide more information about these incidents? Thanks. From the article: --"..which retains a small staff to maintain its 64 casks of radioactive waste, each of which weighs more than 300,000 pounds, emits temperatures of up to 114 degrees, and releases small amounts of radiation into the air. .."
Greenpeace ran a campaign in Australia (which doesn't have any nuclear power stations) against uranium mining. In the process they vilified the entire industry splitting the atom, not just power but medical / research reactors too.
What they did was take people to lovely pristine countryside and said "look how awesome nature is!"
Then they took the same people to the edge of a uranium mine and said "look how horrible uranium mining is!"
That was it. They didn't take them to a coal mine, they didn't say that one uranium mine could provide the same electricity as 5+ coal mines, they didn't talk CO2, and they definitely did not judge the uranium mine by any of the metrics that were applied to any other form of mineral extraction... just like you didn't in your post.
Fox haters love to keep re-hashing two stories: The one you cited where one on-air news reader goes off-script and displays the same sort of stupidity any newsperson at any network would spew off-prompter (if newsreaders were brain surgeons, they'd be doing brain surgery...) and the phony news story about a Fox station in FL supposedly claiming a right to report untruths (a story that's been repeatedly debunked... the news station was in a labor dispute and saying, in effect, "the content of the news, right or wrong, would have nothing to do with this case..." i.e. they never actually insisted they had a right to lie to the public and even a semi-literate person would learn that by reading the papers from the case)
Tell me, is Obama's claim to have been to 57 states the proof of his honesty/IQ/education? How about the many times he has confused veterans day and memorial day and given a shout-out to all the dead guys in his audience? I guess the way all the non-Fox stations think that every gun is an AK-47 or an AR-15 or a :machine gun" is all we need to know about their reliability...
to presume that any of the things you list is "the wrong thing"????
Nuclear power in the US has been both remarkably reliable and remarkably safe while generating no exhaust gasses of any sort. No person in the history of the American commercial nuclear industry has been harmed even in the famous 3-mile island meltdown. Unlike Chernobyl, US commercial plants have containment buildings. Had the US nuclear industry not been ballasted by decades of delays and uncertainty and BILLIONS of dollars in legal expenses as left-wing group after left-wing group filed lawsuit after lawsuit we would today have several generations newer of better, safer, more-advanced and more-efficient nuclear plants... we COULD have been living in the future our grandparents dreamed of where EVERYTHING (including our cars) was electric, the skies were pure and clean, and electricity was too cheap to meter. Instead, the current administration is using every tool it has to pile burdens onto every source of power that's not wind or solar... they're working to kill the keystone pipeline, kill offshore drilling, block natural gas, kill coal, and they have lengthened the regulatory matters for nuclear plants to such a degree that the power company in Southern California has decided to abandon its nuclear plant because after many months of asking it cannot get a straight answer about how long it will take the government to review the current papers... Oh, and nobody has a solution to where the people of Southern California will get the energy that was expected to come from that plant (lots of daydreams, and conjecture, BUT no actual plan.)
Sometimes the the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
Star Trek warned about dancing with the devil in the pale moonlight.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
Nuclear power isn't harmful. By opposing it you're supporting coal and gas-fired plants that DO actually pollute and cause illness.
other than to be stylish?
It seems most commenters on this thread overlook the severity of Fukushima. It's an uncomfortable reality for techies that tech like nuclear is not really run in a responsible - more expensive - way. In Minnesota the Monticello nuclear plant is the same GE Mk II as Fukushima with the terrible spent fuel chamber design. Fortunately MN has low disaster risks compared to say the uber-dangerous Cal Edison San Onofre plant - but look how even one nuclear accident proves impossible to contain or bring to a close?!
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_Station - imagine if a tsunami had hit this rickety place - it took tons of local pressure to shut it down finally. Nuclear plants sometimes degrade unpredictably like San Onofre did. Meanwhile in Japan, a country world renowned for its robot expertise, has been utterly unable to mobilize a Soviet style Chernobyl like response. Chernobyl popped once and then had a moderate fire, but Fukushima remains in slow meltdown, and if another typhoon or tsunami happens to hit the area just right, the remaining fuel rods could finally go off and metropolitan Tokyo could have to be evacuated. In this country the EPA has radically raised the 'acceptable' levels for radiation, and who knows how many nuclear incidents in the US go unreported??
I agree coal and oil based plants trigger major environmental consequences and natural gas plants drawn from fracking now cause geological & chemical damage. We need to focus on driving down aggregate demand for electricity and patching together intermittent sources (a new water-based heat cylinder idea for example could help w storage and peak, vertical windmills are safer for birds, clever plastic lenses cheapen solar etc), while phasing out catastrophe-prone technologies. In the new SimCity nuclear plants are safe if the workers are educated, if only real life were so easy :P
--hongpong.com
If you do a little digging into the history of reactor design, you find out that there is already a working alternative:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor
The problem is that a LFTR reactor doesn't give you all those great by-products for thermonuclear weapons.
I doubt anyone will read this now but anyway... Those people who were afraid of and attacked the nuclear industry have had a big effect. Switching away from nuclear meant a switch back towards fossil fuels especially coal, not just in America but around the world. Since pollution from burning fossil fuels kills people, the anti-nuclear lobby have actually killed something like 5 million people net around the world since the 1970's, inc maybe 500,000 in the US. How's that for a safety argument?
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..