Slashdot Mirror
San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant Dismantling Will Cost $4.4 Billion, Take 20 Years
mdsolar writes with news about the closing of the San Onofre nuclear plant. Dismantling the San Onofre nuclear power plant in Southern California will take two decades and cost $4.4 billion. Southern California Edison on Friday released a road map that calls for decommissioning the twin-reactor plant and restoring the property over two decades, beginning in 2016. U-T San Diego says it could be the most expensive decommissioning in the 70-year history of the nuclear power industry. But Edison CEO Ted Craver says there's already enough money to pay for it. Edison shut down the plant in 2012 after extensive damage was found to tubes carrying radioactive water. It was closed for good last year.
For 2 units, plus a third already shut down one on the site, this is not too bad a cost. Considering the overall lifetime cost of the plant, including D&D, and even though it shut down early, on a cost per kwh basis, it is a good deal for emission free generation.
Unfortunately, many will look at the cost and not have a good perspective / basis for comparison.
Decommissioning costs are still a lot less than it would cost to build the plant now. Letting the plant cool down for a few years makes the process simpler and safer, though the reactor vessel is going to be a challenge.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
The first question that comes to my mind is how much would it cost to just fix the damn pipes?
Make sure you're not assuming that the $4.4B that somebody is going to get is a bug, not a feature. Some people will get extremely rich from this expenditure and that's a powerful motivator.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The money for the reactor's decommissioning comes from surcharges to electrical rates collected while the plant was in operation. This money was earmarked specifically for reactor decommissioning costs, and placed into a trust fund which currently contains about $2.7 billion (the $4.4 billion cost will be accrued over several decades, so interest on the $2.7 billion makes them more equal than the raw numbers suggest). That there is sufficient money despite the reactor shutting down only halfway through its expected lifetime means there's a huge margin for error in these nuclear decommissioning funds. Edison has said if there's any money left over, it'll be refunded to rate payers.
I hope my math is correct: Taking numbers from wikipedia, considering only units 2 and 3: both were in operation for a bit more than 29 years and were producing about 1 GW at full power. Ignoring any production time lost for maintenance (my guess is they would run with a duty cycle of 80-90%), the total amount of produced kWh would be: 29 years * 365 days/year * 24 hours/day * 2 GW = 5e14 Wh = 5e11 kWh. The price for the decommissioning would thus come down to around 4.4e9 $ / 5e11 kWh = 0.0086 $/kWh, so let's round it up to 1 cent per kWh. Average price for electricity in the US seems to be around 0.10 $/kW, so the cost for the decommissioning seems acceptable, though not negligible.
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
The first question that comes to my mind is how much would it cost to just fix the damn pipes?
They would have to replace the entire steam generator. That's been done at a lot of plants, in fact the ones at San O were replaced but defective. A few hundred million. But San O is nearing end of life, shale gas is depressing market prices, and politically California is a hostile environment which has its own costs.
Some of the lost opportunity cost will be borne by the manufacturer of the flawed Steam Generators. But that plant has served well for decades even with an early shutdown.
Or goddamn expensive all the while taking a nice steaming dump on the environment.
They're also stuck storing the fuel on site until the federal government comes up with a spent fuel storage solution.
Or until there is a 4th gen reactor available to consume the old waste as its fuel. The waste of a 4th gen is only dangerous for a few centuries rather than tens of thousands of years. In other words 4th gen converts a 10,000 year problem into a 300 year problem, while generating power from "fuel" that has already been mined, processed, and paid for.
There are no defective pipes as such. The defective components are the thousands of small diameter tubes inside the steam generators, which actually had already been replaced, a project many (actually most) of the older plants have done. Due to a design flaw in the components built for this plant, they were wearing out at an accelerated rate.
"too cheap to meter" certainly was an over enthusiastic optimism with nuclear as it was first being deployed. We all know that, but it doesn't make it a bad deal. I never understood the simpleton argument that this was somehow a failure. I guess its just easy to repeat without making an actual point.
Growing up nearby (Dana Point) the plant was affectionately known as the Dolly Parton museum. I imagine kids today have a more modern and equally inappropriate name. I for one will be sorry to see such a beautiful landmark be torn down. It will certainly make future vacations to the Grand Tetons mountains more poignant. --El
The Danes got it right. Wind is free.
Wind and solar can't scale to the levels needed yet. Two or three more decades of R&D and engineering are needed. No matter how much you wish otherwise this will not change. Even Denmark with its enthusiasm and pretty good wind conditions expects another 10 years to go from 30% wind to 50% wind, and expect to be using of North Sea fossil fuels for another 40 years.
Your options for electricity in the near term will largely be nuclear or fossil fuels. The goods and services you consume will largely be produced using electricity from fossil fuels.
Don't be a science and economics denier. Solar and wind are not magic, science and engineering take time.
It's a sort of logical fallacy.
They believe that because not all objectives were met, the whole thing was a complete failure.
some fucking idiotic nerd will defend the abomination that is nuclear power as great for the environment or some shit.
Yeah, like the environmental science nerds at NASA "... researchers estimate nuclear power has prevented more than 1.8 million deaths due to air pollution between 1971 and 2009. Given our fears, the findings are counterintuitive. But they're persuasive ..."
http://motherboard.vice.com/bl...
BTW, you do realize you are every bit the science denier as climate change deniers. Nuclear deniers are no different. They merely form their opinion based on left wing **politics** rather than right wing politics. Neither the climate deniers nor the nuclear deniers are based in science.
4th generation is much more expensive than once through and nuclear power is in decline so the wait will be forever. http://www.vox.com/2014/8/1/59...
Fixating on that one point is an extremely simplistic argument that seeks to ignore the real issues. Nuclear is extremely expensive, and only appears cheap in the US because of massive subsidy.
It's actually so expensive that the UK couldn't find anyone to build new plants, and the only people who were eventually willing demanded special rates well above the normal unit cost of electricity to be guaranteed for the lifetime of the plant. That's on top of all the other subsidies already on offer.
It's also worth pointing out that the $4.4bn and 20 year timescale is not the real cost of decommissioning. They are not returning the land to its original state where it could be redeveloped. They are merely encasing the reactors and leaving them to deal with later at additional cost. It also doesn't include the cost of storing material from the decommissioning process that is contaminated for an indefinite period of time. To give you an idea the UK is doing all that to some reactors that were shut down in the early 90s, costing tens of billions of pounds and estimated to take around 80 years for competition (plus indefinite storage of waste from the process, not including spent fuel).
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
More than half of the Danish electricity cost is tax and their per-capita CO2 emissions are well below the high-income OECD average.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
A quote from the article you linked to:
"We live in a culture where we think every janitor should get a $50 an hour benefit package and university students get sex change operations included in their health care plans, whose $50,000 costs are then paid for by federal student loans and federal taxpayer grants and, soon, federal health care underwriting."
PROTIP: Right-wing rant sites typically don't provide good scientific reporting. Do you imagine they would say "solar PV is wonderful, despite those subsidies and Chinese imports we hate so much"?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
High levels of renewable energy integration are going on now. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
They believe that because not all objectives were met, the whole thing was a complete failure.
Sure, but making it "too cheap to meter" was never an objective. In fact, nobody ever predicted that would happen. The "too cheap to meter" prediction was made by Lewis Strauss in reference to eventual hydrogen fusion power. He was not talking about conventional fission reactors.
To be convincing you'd need to show that nuclear subsidies are completely incomparable to all other energy sources
No. This is wrong. He isn't claiming that nuclear is the WORST, just that it is bad. To show that nuclear doesn't make sense, he only has to show that ONE other option is cheaper, better for the environment, and has a similar load profile. Gas+CCS almost certainly meets that criteria. In many locations, wind is already cheaper than nukes, and the cost of wind energy is falling, while the costs of nukes is rising, as we realize that early designs took dangerous shortcuts, and decommissioning costs exceed projections.
things like Solar have had far larger subsidies to offset costs.
I think the solar subsidies are dumb, but at least in theory, they are designed to promote the industry while technology and manufacturing processes improve. The subsidies are supposed to be temporary. No one expects the nuclear subsidies to ever fade away.
France's overall price of electricity with tax is lower than Denmark's untaxed price, meanwhile emitting >30% less CO2 per capita with a very similar GDP per capita (to within 5%). If we limit our consideration to electricity, France has ~75% lower emissions per MWh generated than Denmark; and over 80% lower than Germany, the renewable powerhouse of the continent. In fact, they have so much zero-CO2 electricity that they can afford to offset the CO2 emissions from many of their neighbors via transmission. Also keep in mind that France has had this CO2 per kWh value for the better part of two decades because its power mix has always been ~70-80% nuclear and ~15% hydro (the rest being filled in with things like gas, hence why this CO2/kWh number isn't a flat zero).
The OECD average is so high mostly because of heavy polluters like the US, being the about 1/4 of the population of the entire OECD (not just the high-income bracket), but twice the per capita CO2 emissions of, say, Germany.
To preemptively dispense with the "we can't build it fast enough" criticism of nuclear, I again present the example of ... France. They initially started construction in 1974 and finished installing >50 reactors, hitting over 70% of generation capacity, within 15 years. So don't believe the renewable industry talking points of "it can't be done on time". It has been done before and it can be done again. If it had the political and popular will, Denmark could hit its CO2-reduction targets for electricity for 2050 some 20 years earlier.
Funnily enough it is a French-Chinese partnership that is building our new reactors. No British company will touch them. We are handing our basic infrastructure over to companies that have little interest in what is best for the UK and no real stake in what happens to us because they have a guaranteed profit for the lifetime of the plant.
Subsidy isn't always bad in itself, if it leads us somewhere worth going. Nuclear is on the way out though, we should be looking elsewhere.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It's actually so expensive that the UK couldn't find anyone to build new plants, and the only people who were eventually willing demanded special rates well above the normal unit cost of electricity to be guaranteed for the lifetime of the plant. That's on top of all the other subsidies already on offer.
Gas is cheap let's build that. There'll never be aaaaaaaany problem getting gas from the Russians. No sireee. Never mind that local fracking won't supply enough gas.
Nuclear is only the most expensive option when you stubbornly ignore the externalities.
The options are:
1. Renewables (not enough to supply the entire country even using rather optimistic estimates).
2. Coal which is cheap and astonishingly filthy.
3. Gas from Russia.
4. Nuclear.
The thing is the prices are set by the free market. The free market ignores externalities such as pollution and is purely reactive so it never makes a strategically wise choice. Gas is the cheapest option right now, but is not the wisest choice.
This is why we have governments. Left to itself, the free market does not make the best decisions.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I do think that France's build-out of nuclear plants was impressive but your worship of them should be tempered by a couple facts.
First is that as many as 17 of their 58 plants have been knocked offline or scaled back in a single heatwave because of a shortage of water for cooling thereby needing to import from their neighbors to keep the lights on and costing up to $1300 per megawatt hour.
The normal peak power prices are usually below $100 per MW-hr.
A warming climate will lead to this happening more frequently.
Also, they've been caught dumping nuclear waste in Russia. The lie was that it was sent to be separated and re-enriched to be returned but the truth is that 90% never comes back.
Right now, it seems that no one who has a significant build-up of nuclear waste is doing a proper job of managing it. Who knows how much has been dumped in backwater nations or into the oceans. And that's with nuclear providing 12% of global electricity.
What will the waste problem look like if we try to get to 50% in a hurry? Those thorium trolls may be right but it's not likely we'll know for sure before 2030.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
as we realize that early designs took dangerous shortcuts, and decommissioning costs exceed projections.
I think you'll find most wind-farms grossly under-fund decommisioning to a greater extent than Nuclear ever dreamed of getting away with.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Seriously. Listen to the linked audio. Thorium or whatnot will be more difficult to obtain and maintain than Uranium - creating new classes of super-expensive "conflict minerals" - rapidly exhausting sources as expensive, horrible wars are fought.
Yeah. That's flat out bullshit.
Thorium is several orders of magnitude more prevalent in the earth than Uranium. There are a number of fairly large rare-earth mines in the US that are shut down because they're bringing up too much Thorium. This is why China has a lock on rare earths right now. They don't give a shit WHAT they bring up, or what it does. People are cheap and unmonitored dumping is even cheaper.
Additionally, this is why China's got such a hard-on for LFTR
Also, the Thorium yearly tailings brought up by just a few US rare earths mines could power the entire energy needs of the country at current consumption levels for several YEARS.
So there's exactly ZERO "conflict materials" involved. Whoever dreamed this up must pay exactly zero attention to a thing we like to refer to as "reality".
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
San Onofre is being shut down due to intentionally obstructive Federal and California regulation. After the leaks were found in the new equipment, SCE was wrangling with the Japanese supplier (Mitsubishi) of the bad tubes and trying to put together the plan to replace them and bring the plant online, but CA anti-nuke activists, incluing the luddites at FOE lobbied Democrat Senator Boxer and the Obama administration to make it unworkable. SCE (who was paying large amounts of money every month for all their basic costs including the employees) could never get an answer from the federal regulators on WHEN their applications to re-start the plant would even be processed if they spent the money to replace the pipes (this was NOT normal). When you are paying hundreds of millions of dollars to operate a plant that is producing nothing, and government regulators keep delaying giving you a date when you will even be able to dream of using it IF you make it over the increasing number of hurdles politically-motivated people keep throwing up, at some point you "pull the plug" and cut your losses.
Nearly all the inflation in the costs of nuclear power has come from regulations and lawsuits. Had it not been for the Ralph Nader style of crusading legal actions designed to kill things (sue anybody making any technology they cannot prove is perfect... and let's not notice that nobody else, like lawyers, are being held to that standard) we would indeed have very cheap and plantiful electricity thanks, in large part, to nuclear power (which has been stuck with ancient tech for many decades because the regulatory/legal environment makes newer safer more-efficient designs uneconomical TO GET CERTIFIED)
But we only need 210,000 sq miles of solar panels to power the nation, that shouldn't be too difficult we'll just bulldose everything south of the mason-dixon line.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
First is that as many as 17 of their 58 plants have been knocked offline or scaled back in a single heatwave because of a shortage of water for cooling thereby needing to import from their neighbors to keep the lights on and costing up to $1300 per megawatt hour.
This would be true of almost any heat engine-based power plant, regardless of the source of the heating, save for a few very high-temperature systems which can live with air cooling. Also, a 30% reduction in production from an 70-80% resource implies an overall shortfall of ~20% - we know how to bridge those temporary loss gaps with hydro, fossil and other dispatchable short-term backup technology. Wind, meanwhile, experiences periodic 1-2 week long shortfalls of 90% or more, whereas solar famously loses 100% of its output every day and varies by as much as 70-80% in output over the course of the year. Good luck smoothing those curves out.
In short, there are engineering solutions to this problem that are known and understood today.
Also, they've been caught dumping nuclear waste in Russia.
So I looked into this and I can't find any authoritative sources for the claims that this was actual spent fuel instead of just pure uranium. I read there's going to be an investigation. Can you find the results of it? All I can find is Greenpeace bragging about "uncovering" it, but they never said it's spent nuclear fuel. In fact, they explicitly said it's UF6 (uranium hexafluoride), which is a common enrichment feedstock. After enrichment 90% of that is going to be depleted uranium tailings, which cannot be used in thermal reactors (which is why it doesn't make any sense to ship it back to France), but it's still usable as fuel for fast neutron reactors (which is why Russia might want to hold on to it - free fuel, w00t!). It's NOT spent nuclear fuel and certainly not fission products.
The reality of your assertion is that nuclear using technology that drove weapons development is expensive to use. LFTR technology appears magnitudes cheaper from the work I've seen conduced at Oak Ridge. UK problems with nuclear have more to do with maintaining 50-year old technologies. I'm sure the people in India right now building LFTRs aren't losing a penny. LFTRs process the waste from previous systems as fuel. Imagine that.
... The funds to decommission the site are collected during its lifetime as a tax and held in escrow. The operator has to by bonds to ensure cleanup in the event of an accident or shortful due to early shutdown. The point here is that even though they shutdown after only half it's expected lifetime, they've collected enough funds already to handle it even without the bonds to back it up.
Inflation makes it impossible from a practical perspective to pay up front. 4.4 billion 30 years ago would never have happened, and would turn into ridiculously large amounts of money today, and as such, ridiculous over kill.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Yes, because somehow spewing millions of tons of radioactive materials into the atmosphere is better for humanity than having nuclear reactors in place that do not pollute the atmosphere and cause cell mutation on a global level.
Yes, mining and those things does cause emissions. That is also true of Solar PV, for instance. Not only mining of the semiconductor materials, but there is also some nasty chemical processes used in manufacture, then transportation from Asia, delivering on land and so forth. So, you are correct, if you factor in those types of things, no source is emission free.
India has been trying to build LFTRs for decades at enormous cost. Ask yourself why no-one in the US is building these wonderful things. Could it be the immense cost and uncertainty about how well and reliably they will work in practice? Nah, blame "environmentalists".
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Why would you ever need to decommission a wind farm? Just replace the turbines when they wear out with newer, more efficient ones.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
France regularly has to import electricity during the summer and winter because it doesn't have enough capacity, often due to plants being forced offline for various reasons. Essentially they use the rest of Europe as variable capacity, and Germany in particular makes a lot of money from that.
I don't know how you can make any claims about the cost of French electricity with a straight face. Clearly the price is heavily subsidized, with the subsidy going to the nuclear energy industry. Like all commercial nuclear power they don't have any real insurance, the government covers it, and their industry has benefited from massive government assistance over the years. The French decided to build a domestic nuclear power industry and did so, but that doesn't mean any other country can do the same unless they ware willing to spend the same amount on it. That's a big ask these days, now the reality of nuclear power is understood much better.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Thorium is also a byproduct of rare earth refining. We can get the thorium we need for free as the electronics business drives more mining of RE elements. Until now it has been considered a useless liability.
Existing stakeholders have put a lot into Uranium and were willing to lobby the Clinton era government to get a Thorium research reactor shut down and hound the head of that project out of the nuclear industry. He dared to suggest that a Thorium reactor would be safer which implied that existing reactors were not safe enough. While that was years ago it seems to be the end of the matter as far as the USA goes.
India was starting mostly from a clean slate and Uranium exports to them were blocked for decades (while they were not blocked to Iraq in the 1980s - funny really), so they had some incentive to use Thorium (plus that's how they got material for their bomb in an unexpected way). Now a lot of places are trying to sell them cheap Uranium so it's uncertain whether they will continue to develop new Thorium based designs, some that look like they can also take expended Uranium fuel rods and use them without any need for reprocessing.
China seems to be ready to try anything they can get.
And this stuff should be more precious than gold, oz for oz. Unfortunately nobody likes working with molten liquid sodium, even the machoest of machoest chemical workers, they balk at the idea of a liquid sodium jet spraying them from a heat exchanger leak. Maintenance is a bitch. But if the best minds, the kinds that are pitted at coming up with the latest ipods and gagdgets, focused on this topic, they could probably come up with some good solution, and the profits to reap are tremendous, as soon as the price of gas hits $5/gal, while the whole thing did not even deserve attention at gas prices of $1/gal out of which most of it back then was taxes, and the crude price was $0.15-0.20/gal, and nowadays it's more like $2-2.50/gal. That's a 10x increase even today, and such 10x things make or break profitability. Helium cooling instead of sodium cooling is not a panacea either, because of lower heat transfer coefficient, and also moderation (so you could use Argon not to moderate, as all Th and U238 reactors require fast neutrons, unlike the U235 ones, the U238 enrichment waste from U235 enrichment is just as precious as the Th waste from mines, or even the U235.), so because of the lower heat transfer and heat carrying capacity you need lots of contact surface area, along the lines of a car radiator shape, and fast gas velocities, and any kind of pluggage in the uniform gas velocity distribution can create local overheating, and local nuclear meltdown, unlike with car radiators, and unlike with liquid sodium immersion where the high heat transfer ability of the liquid molten metal ensures that no voids are left, and no great velocity with highly uniform distribution is required. Molten lead/bismuth eutectic is a bit better than sodium in the getting sprayed all over the place goes, but it melts at higher temperature, and as the Russian submarine experiments prove it, it's a bitch to get flowing and unstuck with an external torch when it freezes. So sodium it is, it's very unsafe if it leaks, but it melts easier, and alloyed as NaK it competes with Hg for low melting point. Maybe the Japs will come up with the nuclear robots, as they are smart, and the most energy dependent on such a technology. Perhaps that's why they had a Fukushima accident, so that, unlike the Germans, which killed their nuclear program in face of a helium gas cooled stacked pyramid of nuclear fuel balls shifting unsafely, the Japanese are supposed to hold the other cheek instead, and bounce back by coming up with robots, that instead of being human companions that looks like anime teenie weenie characters with panties and huge tits and blow out of the water any human female's tongue and lips at the ability to give a sensual blow job, they could focus on something more important to the welfare of their people, and national security, such as designing remote control robots, that piss on being sprayed by liquid sodium, or taking a high total body radiation dose, in fact they get off on bathing in that shit, and keep score on how much total body irradiation their hafnium free zirconium limbs took that day.
1) do you really thing Germany has 60GW of interconnects with its neighbors?
2) wind lulls are strongly correlated across wide geographical areas (given that most of Germany's wind power is installed near the norther sea shore and Denmark & Poland are there too a lull there is going to affect them all)
3) separate countries aren't exactly receptive to relying 100% on their neighbors for real-time energy control, as that externalizes a lot of political power
4) one of the largest countries in Europe = "little patch of Germany"
5) "your little cherry picked graph" for a whole country of 80 million people over the course of a year. Riiight.
So is everybody supposed to back up German power production? Does the excess installed capacity get counted against German wind turbine price? Your solution to an unreliable resource of "just buy more of it!" is ludicrous on the face. If your car won't start 2/3 of the time you need it, no problem, just get 3 cars. Of course, it's so simple!
It's possible you meant Thallium 208 (Historic Name: Thorium C, Half-Life: 3 minutes)?
There are two observationally stable byproducts at Tl203 and Tl205. The most stable of the remaining isotopes has a half-life of just under 4 years. Most of the rest are measured in hours, seconds and in some cases, milliseconds. So yes, it's very "hot". But it's extremely short-lived.
Thanks for pointing that out and also much appreciated about not being a dick about it.
I checked my notes at home and they were about Thallium 208. I agree, I want to learn more so I can have a reasoned and measured response. Unfortunately I see the nuclear mod trolls are out in force again.
I have nothing against this type of reactor technology, in principle however I'd like to know more about it's spent fuel byproducts and operational effluents. It is important to understand that if the halflife is three minutes and it's an energetic emmiter, how many daughter product iterations does it got through before it becomes stable an what is the rate of decay? That in itself may pose an even greater threat *because* if it is continually changing just how many micro-nutrient analogues does it present to biology? I'm not going to pretend I know the answer because I am still learning myself, however at least I know that's a question to ask. Another question about a Thorium fuel cycle to uncover is are we just making a new problem. Regardless of that, we still have problems with the Uranium based cycle and they all lead back to the same thing.
The bottom line is that because this whole debate is so polarized, no one talks sense about it anymore. The irony is that if you took a rational look at both sides of the debate you would see that what the anti- and pro- nuclear lobby need is exactly the same thing.
So let's get to the bottom of this whole pro- anti- nuclear bullshit right here.
Pro-Nuclears: want to have new reactor technology developed and deployed, old reactors desposed of responsibly. Is that a fair call?
Anti-nuclear: wants no Nuclear industry at all, but if it has to be there clean it up an make it safer. Is that a fair call?
Answer: What both parties need to have *both* of their goals satisfied is a Geologically Stable Fuel Containment Facility. The original DOE, defense in depth spec. In every country that has Nuclear reactors, in granite to deal with the ground water issues and avoid relying on containment technology.
You are right to want to learn more, doing so gets rid of the ignorance that makes these discussions so vehement and ad hominem. In following the same path I've been fortunate have access to people. The thing is you have to learn not just about the reactor technology, but enrichment, mining, reactor disposal, spent fuel containment, lots of radioisotopes - their energetic properties, toxicity, the micro-nutrients they analogue that causes bio-accumulation in the food chain and what cancers they cause in humans. Then there is the poltics, funding, legislative constructs like Price-Anderson, funding arrangements in the 2005 Energy Bill (for example), it's PR machine, reports into accidents (like Chernobyl, Fukushima), NRC and regulatory operating principles, understanding their reports and the consequences of the metric they report. The effect of the IAEA interdiction orders on WHO organization publications on radiological findings. And still there is more.
It is a mammoth and absolutley awe inspiring industry and technolgy that can either wipe us out as a species or free us as a race if we respect that the danger it poses is geological in effect, requires very long term vision in science to understand and, deep wisdom to control due to human frailty.
What I've learned is though the nuclear industry has some deep structural problems that need to be addressed, I also recognise it's irresponsible for our generation to hand down a radionuclide legacy to our grandchildren's grandchildren... so I find myself ultimately b
My ism, it's full of beliefs.