French Nuclear Industry In Turmoil As Manufacturer Buckles

mdsolar writes with bad news for France and its nuclear industry. "France's nuclear industry is in turmoil after the country's main reactor manufacturer, Areva, reported a loss for 2014 of 4.8 billion euros ($5.3 billion) — more than its entire market value. The government of France, the world's most nuclear dependent country, has a 29% stake in Areva, which is among the biggest global nuclear technology companies. The loss puts its future — and that of France as a leader in nuclear technology — at risk. Energy and Environment Minister Segolene Royal said Wednesday she asked Areva and utility giant Electricite de France to work together on finding solutions, amid reports of a possible merger or other link-up. The government said in a statement that it's working closely with Areva to restructure and secure financing, and would 'take its responsibility as a shareholder' in future decisions about its direction. Areva reported Wednesday 1 billion euros in losses on three major nuclear projects in Finland and France, among other hits. Areva has lost money for years, in part linked to delays on those projects and to a global pullback from nuclear energy since the 2011 Fukushima accident."

Comments

I have said it before

[polar red]

And i will say it again : nuclear power is prohibitively expensive.

Re:I have said it before

[ThatsMyNick]

Nuclear is cheap. Project delays are not cheap in nuclear, or a dam (hydro if you will) or a tunnel or any large scale project. Uncertain political environment is a death knell for large scale projects.

Re:I have said it before

[iserlohn]

That's a simplistic view of the situation. Nuclear translates to specific challenges in design and delivery of facilities due to the dangers of radioactive materials.

Re:I have said it before

[Anonymous Coward]

Those dangers pale to uncertainty and mismanagement caused by political instead of scientific evidence and method based environments.

Other energy sources would be vastly more costly if their waste products weren't already grandfathered in to the public mindset and their true impacts to safety and environmental impact (which is far more spread out than the catastrophic results failures induced by idiocy and insanity cause newer power sources) were actually measured and factored in to the comparison.

Re:I have said it before

[Runaway1956]

Yeah, that's what they're saying over there in Fukishima. "Nuclear is cheap, but this uncertainty is killing us!"

When you begin counting the cost of nuclear, you've got to count ALL the costs. Including, as at Fukishima, basic engineering errors that ultimately cost astronomical amounts years after construction.

Re:I have said it before

[Anonymous Coward]

The fuck it is. It becomes expenssive, when companies like Areva keep fucking things up and they have to be redone.

Re:I have said it before

[Anonymous Coward]

And they're still lower than the costs of fossil fuel based technologies, which is global warming. And they're still lower than the costs of switching over to entirely "renewable" technologies which, in the immediate future, would leave a substantial gap between consumption and generation.

Re:I have said it before

[Rei]

Right. Having the government cover all of your major liabilities, getting to write off massive debts, pass all of your cost overruns onto local consumers without them having a say in the manner, and so on, that's all "paying their own way", right? In nuclear power, the gains have always been privatized while the costs and risks socialized. And it's *still* been very difficult to find investors. Nuclear has always been more popular on K-Street than Wall Street.

Here's a paper going into the various massive ways nuclear has been subsidies. And they still can't bloody manage to stay afloat. It's one of the few industries with a negative growth curve - where technology gets more expensive with time, not cheaper.

Re:I have said it before

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The special demands of finding materials that work adequately in enthusiastically radioactive environments don't help. Some are worse than others; but I don't think that there is anything that appreciates prolonged neutron bombardment. Can make for some very expensive repairs inside the reactor assembly.

Re: I have said it before

[Anonymous Coward]

Then learn to live without technology. In a couple of decades we won't have much choice anyway.

Re:I have said it before

[Bongo]

Well obviously nuclear should merge with banks.

Re:I have said it before

[ThatsMyNick]

There is no uncertainty in nuclear. There is uncertainty in the support for nuclear, and people's perception of nuclear. This is killing nuclear projects, but I doubt it is killing anything else.

Re:I have said it before

[Twinbee]

I thought it was already established that Fukishima used old tech reactors which are a lot more unsafe than the current generation. And they built them in an awful place to boot.

I'm more inclined to think it's red tape that costs the most.

Re:I have said it before

[electrosoccertux]

Yeah, that's what they're saying over there in Fukishima. "Nuclear is cheap, but this uncertainty is killing us!"

When you begin counting the cost of nuclear, you've got to count ALL the costs. Including, as at Fukishima, basic engineering errors that ultimately cost astronomical amounts years after construction.

you mean the basic engineering error where the project manager wouldn't sign off due to the mistake made in concrete formulation so he was fired and a more lenient approver installed in his place?

Re:I have said it before

[itzly]

Every reactor will become old tech in a few decades. And people aren't going to change, so they'll continue to build them in awful places.

Re:I have said it before

[Anonymous Coward]

In Finlands case the political environment has nothing to do with it. There is permission to build it and that's it. The problems come from not understanding Finland actually has very strict safety guides and checks for building nuclear plants, and despite that using sub-par polish, baltian, etc. workers who couldn't even build a common house, let alone nuclear plant. Hence the delays, and huge losses. Basically they were trying to save pennies and end up losing billions.

Re:I have said it before

[Sique]

I doubt it. Both France and UK are quite positive to nuclear (France gets 67% of her electricity from nuclear). And still Areva, a french company, is in turmoil. And UK is planning to build a new nuclear site and is securing 19 billion Euros in subsidies for it - why would they actually need all those subsidies, if nuclear is cheap? And even if the electricity produced is cheap -- the biggest part of the subsidies is the warranted price for the electricity produced of 11 euro-cents per kWh, about double the current market price. Then why's that?

Face it: nuclear is expensive.

Re:I have said it before

[Twinbee]

My point is the current new tech will be a lot safer and therefore far less expensive as they won't need to factor in the cost of hypothetical catastrophes.

Re:I have said it before

[ThatsMyNick]

Nope, France, UK and even Germany were pro nuclear. They havent had support for nuclear in the recent years. Nuclear is not expensive, it requires an upfront investment. 'Subsides' for nuclear are usually just low interest loans, which would more than pay off.

Re:I have said it before

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong! You might be +5 Insightful now, but you'll be modded Troll once the "USA! USA! USA! Number 1!" crowd wake up.

Re:I have said it before

[Anonymous Coward]

You're confusing using large amounts of nuclear with public support for nuclear.

Re:I have said it before

[Rei]

It's not just neutron bombardment either. Your fuel is producing almost every element in the periodic table, anisotropically and varying across time. It's pretty much the worst situation one could come up with from a containment standpoint inside the fuel even before you factor in neutron bombardment.

Then there's the nature of nuclear disasters: they're disasters in slow motion. The upside is that few people usually die from them because there's usually plenty of time to get away. The downside is that they take bloody forever and a king's ransom to clean up, where it's even possible. Picture, for example, an accident at Indian Point that would increase NYC residents' rate of cancer over the next 10 years by two to three orders of magnitude. You could evacuate over days to weeks and it'd have little impact on public health. But you'd be having to pay for the loss and cleanup of New York City. That is, of course, an extreme case, but it's an illustration of the financial challenge faced by an industry that deals with large amounts of chemicals that are incredibly toxic even in the minutest quantities. Screwups can turn out to be REALLY BIG screwups.

Re:I have said it before

[Anonymous Coward]

That's counting ALL the costs, including years after construction AND years after closing the plant, until the waste is no longer radioactive. (Even if it didn't have problems with those other costs, it's that last part that makes it truly prohibitive.)

Re:I have said it before

[Anonymous Coward]

It requires an upfront investment AND an ending investment (after closing the old plants) that's higher than all the upfront investments combined!

Re:I have said it before

[itzly]

That's exactly what they said when they were building the old reactors.

Re:I have said it before

[Registered Coward v2]

Nuclear is cheap. Project delays are not cheap in nuclear, or a dam (hydro if you will) or a tunnel or any large scale project. Uncertain political environment is a death knell for large scale projects.

Another problem is plans are often overly optimistic to make the costs look good and the actual construction varies form the design due to poor project management, which opens up licensing issues and causes further delays driving up costs. The industry is its own worst enemy in many ways.

Re:I have said it before

[Anonymous Coward]

Your average dead-dino oxidization facility emits more radiation into the environment than a nuclear plant, and then you get all the fun heavy metals and dioxins as a bonus.

Re:I have said it before

[Twinbee]

Well as an example, the new thorium reactors don't even need cooling as the reaction is cut off immediately when there's a failure. We do learn and adapt from past mistakes y'know, however long it may take.

Re:I have said it before

[gl4ss]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...

According to Financial Times in December 2014 construction of the Olkiluoto plant has descended into farce as it is currently expected to open nine years late and several billions of euros over budget.[8]

the main problem behind their problems is that they're selling projects at prices they have made up as if cheap movable labor was as efficient as good labor and their prices were not designed for the safety specs necessary AND they didn't even have the fucking design when they were selling it. like, they didn't have the control system designed by the original date the plant was supposed to open. how the fuck do you sell billion dollar projects like that? answer: the french.

should have just bought from the germans.

nothing uncertain about olkiluoto projects political environment except: the fucking french are asking money from Finland from the delays after maxing out the penalties to a level that should bankrupt the company already.

Re:I have said it before

[Runaway1956]

Old tech, new tech - I specifically mentioned obvious flaws in engineering. Specifically, some people had their heads up their asses, and decided to locate those reactors close enough to the shore that a moderately sized tsunami could flood them. No matter the tech level, if the tech is left exposed to the elements, a catastrophe can render that technology useless, or worse.

Engineers are supposed to be intelligent people, right? WTF did they put those plants so close to the water? What would it have cost to build the very same plants only fifty feet higher, just a little further inland? Remember, the earthquakes didn't do the damage here - it was the flooding that caused almost all the problems!

Re:I have said it before

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

That is true. My comment was(in retrospect, very poorly explained) narrowly focused on an issue I heard a lot of complaining about from people operating reactors in the US(PWRs, if my memory serves): between stray hydrogen from the water in the primary coolant loop and massive neutron flux, a combination of hydrogen embrittlement and neutron damage had a way of pushing even very classy alloys into serious risk of developing cracks; and properly servicing internal parts wasn't something you did lightly, since you'd have to substantially lower output power or take the reactor offline while doing so(and when you've got that much capital equipment sitting idle, team balance sheet is not happy).

None of these stories ended catastrophically, or even dramatically, nothing even approached leaving the containment vessels; but the complaint was that speccing materials for use inside the reactor was even less fun than handling plumbing for chemical plants, refineries, and the like.

An engineering challenge, it's what engineers do; but not good for cost cutting.

Re:I have said it before

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt it. Both France and UK are quite positive to nuclear (France gets 67% of her electricity from nuclear). And still Areva, a french company, is in turmoil. And UK is planning to build a new nuclear site and is securing 19 billion Euros in subsidies for it - why would they actually need all those subsidies, if nuclear is cheap? And even if the electricity produced is cheap -- the biggest part of the subsidies is the warranted price for the electricity produced of 11 euro-cents per kWh, about double the current market price. Then why's that?

Face it: nuclear is expensive.

Most of the losses come not from Areva's core business but from various adventures the former management engaged in (most of them for ego-boosting reasons): trying to build a reactor in Finland without its usual parters, getting swindled when buying uranium mines (again, to bypass it's usual parters), and investing heavily in renewables because it's cool.

Re:I have said it before

[serviscope_minor]

Right. Having the government cover all of your major liabilities, getting to write off massive debts, pass all of your cost overruns onto local consumers without them having a say in the manner, and so on, that's all "paying their own way", right?

No, but the costs are accounted for. In other words someone has figured out all the costs and you can point to them and see $verylargenumber.

Where is the same for the truly astonishing quantities of coal pollution?

In that case, no one bothers covering the liability and pollution. No one counts for the radioactive waste dumped into the air. No one counts the health problems and so on and so on.

In nuclear power, the gains have always been privatized while the costs and risks socialized.

Which is totally different from coal and oil where the profits are privatised and the environmental costs and/or wars required to prop it up are taken straight from the taxpayers.

Here's a paper going into the various massive ways nuclear has been subsidies.

Yeah but you're still ignoring all the actual (Iraq war) and effective (free pass on environmental costs) subsidies that the other industries get.

Re:I have said it before

[dunkelfalke]

In case of the new British power plant there are not only upfront investments, there is also a guarantee for the power price that is twice the going rate and this guarantee is extended for the whole lifetime of the power plant and will be adjusted for inflation over that time.

Re:I have said it before

[serviscope_minor]

That's exactly what they said when they were building the old reactors.

And from a tech point it's entirely true. In this case it's the politics killing it.

No one wants (politically) to build new nuclear plants. No one wants to build coal plants either. Enough people don't want renewables blotting large areas of the landscape. The energy has to come from somewhere so those old, dirty coal plants and well-past-their-retire-date, old and less safe than new tech nuclear plants keep getting extension after extension because people really don't want blackouts.

The problem here is all politics, not technology.

Re:I have said it before

[Rei]

All of Areva's renewables investments combined are less than 10% of their business. And they're performing far better than their core nuclear business. I find it amazing that you argue that they shouldn't have invested in the few projects they're involved in that are actually paying off.

Re:I have said it before

[tehcyder]

Nuclear is cheap. Project delays are not cheap in nuclear, or a dam (hydro if you will) or a tunnel or any large scale project. Uncertain political environment is a death knell for large scale projects.

Whether you like it or not, energy production is an inherently political subject., and for better or worse, in a democracy the politicians have to take account of public opinion.

It was all a lot easier in the USSR, where there was no criticism of Chernobyl from the happy locals.

Re:I have said it before

[tehcyder]

Nuclear is not expensive, it requires an upfront investment.

And of course, you usually get the public/government to pay for the downstream costs like storage of waste and de-commissioning.

If only it wasn't for those pesky Health and Safety rules, it would be a licence to print money.

Re:I have said it before

[tehcyder]

Most of the losses come not from Areva's core business but from various adventures the former management engaged in (most of them for ego-boosting reasons): trying to build a reactor in Finland without its usual parters, getting swindled when buying uranium mines (again, to bypass it's usual parters), and investing heavily in renewables because it's cool.

tl;dr it's someone else's fault

Re:I have said it before

[tehcyder]

My point is the current new tech will be a lot safer and therefore far less expensive as they won't need to factor in the cost of hypothetical catastrophes.

Welcome to Westworld.

Re:I have said it before

[tehcyder]

And i will say it again : nuclear power is prohibitively expensive.

Compared to what? It's one of the very, very few industries that doesn't get a truly massive subsidy in terms of having its externalities paid for by someone else and never put on the books.

Doesn't? Are you trying to be funny?

The nuclear power industry depends absolutely on government underwriting the unquantified future costs of disposal/storage of radioactive waste and decommissioning power stations.

If you wanted a poster boy for "having its externalities paid for by someone else and never put on the books" a smiling Nuclear Power Baby would be it.

Re:I have said it before

[tehcyder]

You are creating a false dichotomy between clean, cheap nuclear and dirty, evil coal/gas.

Most opponents of nuclear power aren't particularly keen on fossil fuel power stations either, you know.

The only long term hope is fusion power, but realistically that's at least a couple of generations away.

Re:I have said it before

[serviscope_minor]

Oh and double reply.

Everything (nuclear included) is seemed to expect to just ignore the deaths caused in the process of electricity generation, and the cost of those is completely socalised as always.

The main thing in this case is that nuclear has by far the lowest deaths per kWh of any form of electricity generation. The thing is we use a *lot* of energy. An unimaginably huge amount, and nuclear fuel is really incredibly energy dense.

You either need truly vast scale construction to gather enough solar and wind to be useful (construction is dangerous) or truly vast gathering of fuel to make coal, oil and gas work (and those are dangerous). In the latter case, there's also the vast quantities of byproducts produced as a result of the vast quantities in.

  For nuclear, you have the relatively small generating stations like fossil fuels and a relatively small gathering of fuel. So, despite the occasional mega-scale clusterfuck like Chernobyl it's still the safest form of electricity.

Re:I have said it before

[serviscope_minor]

You are creating a false dichotomy between clean, cheap nuclear and dirty, evil coal/gas.

Well, it's not really that false. Currently there's not the manufacturing capacity in the world to make enough windfarms or solar farms and besides there are many countries (such as the UK) which simply couldn't survive off renewables no matter how many we built.

Most opponents of nuclear power aren't particularly keen on fossil fuel power stations either, you know.

Yep, bue they're even less keen on blackouts.

The only long term hope is fusion power, but realistically that's at least a couple of generations away.

At the current funding rate it's probably never going to arrive. I don't believe it's one of thos "always 50 years away things" in general, but it needs 10x the funding to have it in a reasonable amount of time. I don't believe that will happen, sadly because there's even less political will for funding fusion properly than there is for building nuclear plants.

Re:I have said it before

[Maury Markowitz]

> Nuclear is cheap.

Nuclear is expensive. http://www.lazard.com/PDF/Levelized%20Cost%20of%20Energy%20-%20Version%208.0.pdf Look at page 11.

> Project delays are not cheap in nuclear, or a dam (hydro if you will) or a tunnel

Too true. But it is also true that reactor construction has a history of going overbudget on average by two times, making it one of the most consistently bad investments in history.

> Uncertain political environment is a death knell for large scale projects

Also very true. Which is why wind and solar are the fastest growing sources of power in history: a large wind farm can go from napkin sketch to pumping electrons in 18 months. Residential PV can be completely installed in 2 weeks. Arranging financing for these projects is akin to arranging a car loan. The $30 billion needed for 5 years for a reactor? Not so easy.

Re:I have said it before

[Anonymous Coward]

new thorium reactors? lol where do I find these, next to the cold fusion store or the store selling 80% efficent solar panels?

Re:I have said it before

[tindur]

So the next reactor will be Russian. *shivers* Not joking *shivers*

Re:I have said it before

[AchilleTalon]

Nuclear power is less expensive than wind farms, solar panel fields and large hydro-electricity projects. Coal, natural gas and oil are less expensive and they are the main reason why the nuclear power industry is struggling these days. You obviously don't know anything about the electricity industry in the world. It is a shame people marked your comment as insightful while it is not.

Re:I have said it before

[Anonymous Coward]

Errr, you do realize that nuclear reactors need large quantities of water for cooling. All reactors that I know of (and I work for a company with 58 of them in operation et 9 being decommissioned) are on the coast or a large river. If you are on the coast you can even get rid of the cooling towers that are iconic for nuclear reactors and obtain better effeciencies but at the cost of more water.

There is an energy cost of pumping water even 50 feet higher, and considering that we are talking of quantities of water measured in cubic meters per second, this cost can be a relatively large fraction of the total power produced by the reactor. You're better off building a containment wall against flooding and keeping the reactor not too far above the water level.

D.

Re:I have said it before

[Maury Markowitz]

> And they're still lower than the costs of fossil fuel based technologies

Gas plants with CCS cost less than nuclear. Coal with CCS is about the same price.

Re:I have said it before

[Anonymous Coward]

or boring solar power and batteries. these will work fine. solar is already the cheapest power on earth. It will get cheaper. batteries are a decade behind in learning curve.

Re:I have said it before

[AchilleTalon]

There is less death due to the nuclear power industry and operation than any other power generation industry. Still uninformed comment marked insightful while it is just propaganda.

Re:I have said it before

[Mr D from 63]

AREVA's losses have more to do with poor investments in African mining operations than to do with the Olkiluoto setbacks, as well as other poor investment decisions they appear to have made over the last 10 years.Olkiluoto is a big chunk as well, but its not the majority of their debt problems.

And as far as Olkiluoto, they were simply unprepared to pull off that first of a kind project by themselves, and the Finish supply and regulatory elements faltered as well, a perfect storm of problems. But this is more poor execution than a technology issue. Other plants, including the EPR plants in China, are being completed on a reasonable schedule, more driven by money than anything else.

Re:I have said it before

[Maury Markowitz]

> Nuclear is not expensive, it requires an upfront investment

LOLZ.

You understand that the vast majority of the LCoE from nuclear is the payments on the construction loans, right? And, so, if it requires an upfront investment, that is, by definition, going to make it expensive.

*How* expensive is another question. That is clearly answered by the 11 Euro/kWh price. In other words "youch, expensive!"

Re:I have said it before

[Mr D from 63]

Another problem is plans are often overly optimistic to make the costs look good and the actual construction varies form the design due to poor project management, which opens up licensing issues and causes further delays driving up costs. The industry is its own worst enemy in many ways.

Very true.

Re:I have said it before

[Maury Markowitz]

> Most of the losses come not from Areva's core business

You're joking right?! Every reactor they are building is over-budget and draining the company's coffers.

> trying to build a reactor in Finland without its usual parters

They're building them in France with their usual partners, and they're just as much a disaster as Finland.

> getting swindled when buying uranium mines

So, bad management. Which is precisely what you want running a company that makes nuclear reactors.

> investing heavily in renewables because it's cool

And profitable, for most everyone else at least. Did Areva *actually* loose money in renewables? I'm not so sure you actually have numbers on that. But it's worse if its true.

Re:I have said it before

[Runaway1956]

I'm not aware of any coal disaster that has rendered an area the size of a state or province uninhabitable.

https://www.google.com/maps/d/...

Re:I have said it before

[TheRaven64]

You're better off building a containment wall against flooding and keeping the reactor not too far above the water level.

That's fine too. The problem is building neither. The other problem is not fixing the design that was known to cause hydrogen build-up and explosions that breach containment in any problem scenario.

Re:I have said it before

[AlecC]

Is there a working large scale CCS project to demonstrate the truth of those facts? The only working project I know of are demonstration scale.

Re:I have said it before

[CrimsonAvenger]

WTF did they put those plants so close to the water? What would it have cost to build the very same plants only fifty feet higher, just a little further inland?

If I were guessing (and I am), I'd guess that the Japanese didn't want the plant anywhere near where people actually lived, so they put it as far away as feasible. Which happened to be on the coast.

Note that a quick check of maps shows that the plant was about as far from the surrounding towns as it was possible to be - inland would have put it closer to several towns.

Yes, sometimes fear of a thing can cause more problems than the thing itself....

Re:I have said it before

[Mr D from 63]

Nobody denies a large nuclear plant costs huge sums of money to build. But you have to understand the scale of energy production that they are capable of to know that even the increased cost projections are still a good deal. The issue is the lengthy payback period and initial funding. It is something only a few companies can take on themselves without help. The risk of building the first few new designs comes to play as well.

As for warranted prices of energy, what are those being set our for renewables? If you are against them for nuclear then are you also against them for all types of power?

If you calculate total subsidy on a lifetime per KWh generated basis, you will find that the help nuclear is getting pales in comparison to what solar and wind are getting.

Re:I have said it before

[TheRaven64]

Nuclear is expensive. http://www.lazard.com/PDF/Leve... Look at page 11.

Page 11 is talking about capital cost. The figure for nuclear is $7,591/kW, which is a lot more than some (although not the highest). But how does that work out over the lifetime of the plant? Assuming 100% uptime, that's 8,760kWh in the first year, so that's less than $0.90/kWh. If the plant is operating for 20 years, then that's around 4/kWh. Most nuclear plants are built with a 40-60 year expected lifespan, which makes the capital cost negligible over the lifetime of the plant.

The correct page to look at is Page 2, which gives the unsubsidised cost of electricity from all of the generating mechanisms. Nuclear is $124/MWh - that's lower than all of the other fuel sources in their 'conventional' bucket that have a little representative diamond listed (coal doesn't, and has a range that extends both above and below nuclear). Only Gas Combined Cycle is cheaper on average, and that's only when excluding most of the costs. Only utility-scale PV comes out cheaper overall, and you also need to add in storage costs if you want to use PV for a significant amount of grid supply.

Re:I have said it before

[Mr D from 63]

The good thing about nuclear investment is much of the money stays at home. For solar, a big percentage goes straight to Chine. Also, nuclear plants generate thousands of high paying jobs over their lifetime, providing a social economic return not found in most renewables. The total 'societal economic return' of nuclear is much higher than renewables, which themselves must ride on the backs of conventional generation to be successful.

Re:I have said it before

[SomeoneFromBelgium]

The only long term hope is fusion power, but realistically that's at least a couple of generations away.

No. If we would invest into fusion like we invest in fission or better even oil, fusion can be with us much sooner.
ITER is a step in the good direction, certainly. And even with the current funding (nothing to sneeze at but nothing like a 'manhatten like effort') a DEMO plant is foreseen that would actually produce current in 2040 (25 years from now - so less than one generation).

With addititional funding this could be accelerated, since the major challenges of ITER are engineering (materials, stablility, remote handling...) rather than fundamental science.

Re:I have said it before

[Wootery]

You have no idea what you're talking about. Pollution and mining accidents from coal kill far more people than nuclear accidents do.

Re:I have said it before

[Runaway1956]

Doesn't matter how much water they need. The nuclear plant produces more than enough power to pump water to any elevation on earth. You don't even NEED nuclear energy - some back-up generators will do that much.

You put the damned things above any projected flood level, with a margin of error to boot. If the river's highest recorded flood level was 20 feet, you put the frigging plant up at 50 feet, or more. If the highest recorded tsunami on the coastal plain was 15 feet, you make sure to build your plant well above that 15 foot elevation - say 30 feet, or better yet, 50 feet.

That means that you can't build in the Virginia Beach area? So what - just a few miles inland, you WILL find elevations that exceed 50 feet, very safe from any potential flooding.

Fukishima? You're telling me that they couldn't have pumped water a mile, or six miles, or even twenty miles inland, to some location where the reactors would have been safe from the tsunamis?

Imagine that. How do they get water in the Salton Sea for irrigation? Interesting read here - with the answer to my question in the very last paragraph.

http://www.desertusa.com/citie...

Re:I have said it before

[Runaway1956]

Good observation - but the engineers should have been astute enough to realize that Japan has historically experienced tsunamis that have flooded those areas. The engineers should have put the brakes to any construction efforts taking place in those locations, based on that fact alone.

Re:I have said it before

[Runaway1956]

Uh-huh. Read my statement again. Is there a region of the world in which mankind can no longer live, due to some coal-related disaster? I am unaware of any such region.

Re:I have said it before

[Anonymous Coward]

The exclusion area is less than 1000 km^2, and much of it is open to tourists. This is the size of a city or rural township, not a state or province.

Re:I have said it before

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the uranium has to come from somewhere. France doesn't have the uranium itself and took it from their colonies. Now the colonies are gone, they still use the same mines and investments are still the same as during the colonial time. That is also one of the problems with nuclear plants. Do you remember how fast France reacted to Jihad warriors in Mali? And how passive they are towards Jihadi's in for example Nigeria? Well, that's because of the presence of French uranium mines in Mali. The military operations are also a cost that is often forgotten by pro nuclear activists.

Re:I have said it before

[LWATCDR]

Yeah another win for Coal, Fracked gas, and Climate change.

Re:I have said it before

[Trailer Trash]

And i will say it again : nuclear power is prohibitively expensive.

Let me guess - you're also against coal because global warming. Am I right?

Re:I have said it before

[fnj]

If you study even high school economics for a single term, you will find that you can't just divide initial cost by operating lifetime to amortize it. There is this little thing called TIME VALUE OF MONEY. A few percent per year, carried over 40-60 years, really adds up.

You also have to count insurance. Even if it is partially or wholly subsidized by the government, SOMEBODY is paying. The worst disaster (leaving aside normal environmental pollution) that could possibly happen at a coal or oil or gas or solar plant is pretty much limited to the plant premises. I'll grant you that hydropower is capable of making vast areas wasteland and killing untold thousands if a big dam bursts. Otherwise, nuclear has a downside potentially thousands of times more devastating than the others. Insurance, fairly accounted, has to cover this.

It would take me hours to decide if the study you reference really accounts for all costs. Just at a glance, it LOOKS like they are properly accounting for amortization, but I see no mention of insurance. I do see the notation for nuclear: "does not reflect decommissioning costs or potential economic impact of federal loan guarantees or other subsidies".

Re: I have said it before

[Anonymous Coward]

They won't be satisfied until your family is huddled in the dark, shivering with cold, and completely impoverished.

You can take my reactor from my hot glowing hands!!!

Re:I have said it before

[LWATCDR]

Exactly what is the cost of all the engineering fails after the Tsunami? I suggest starting with the sea wall.

Re:I have said it before

[Anonymous Coward]

they built the sea wall... they just didn't count on the earthquake subsiding the whole region making the sea wall much lower than it was planned to be.

Re:I have said it before

[Runaway1956]

I stand corrected. I thought the exclusion zone was larger than that - at least the size of Delaware. So - roughly half the size of Rhode Island. Thank you, AC.

Re:I have said it before

[Anonymous Coward]

Nigeria is not a French-speaking country.

France has enough problems trying to help former colonies with which it has understandings than doing UK's work in the commonwealth

Re:I have said it before

[Anonymous Coward]

And what kind of reactor do you think this French company is building right now? And how is your statement of 'far less expensive' an explanation for the massive losses on this construction?

Re:I have said it before

[jythie]

It all depends on who pays the costs. Could you imagine if the coal industry was actually charged for all the costs they incur? There are whole regions that have been abandoned in the US and mining operations can render huge areas uninhabitable due to groundwater contamination. But they do not pick up the tab for that, it is generally spread out between the fed and local people. The nuclear industry is held to higher standards of responsiblity, but that is about it.

Re: I have said it before

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, we do have a choice. It's called nuclear. Get used to it because it's the only real solution to energy generation.

Re:I have said it before

[Applehu Akbar]

"nuclear power is prohibitively expensive."

This is precisely the opposition's strategy. They couldn't defeat nuclear on science, and when the great meltdown finally happened, the effect on the environment away from the plants was too small to be measured, so their plan now is to make it too expensive by imposing as many artificial delays as their legal teams can manage.

Look to China, which is the one rich nation not so encumbered, for the nuclear technology of the future.

Re:I have said it before

[Anonymous Coward]

It's unfortunate that people can just gloss over the amount of radiation produced by burning coal and that coal seam fires can render locations uninhabitable for decades. OTOH, those fires lead to rather interesting entertainment, like Silent Hill.

Re:I have said it before

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I mean, who ever thought of making solar in the US? Damn commies that's who! We want nuclear jobs. Mr D says thousands. Heck, I bet there are 10's of thousands in Fukushima at a minimum, probably more. God knows, if we can create energy without needing to employ thousands of people in perpetuity and utilizing the current energy source in the process, its simply not worth pursuing. I want my money to stay local and at home after all, like Fukushima. Duh.

Re:I have said it before

[Applehu Akbar]

"That's exactly what they said when they were building the old reactors."

And compared to the imported coal they replaced, they were right. Every generation of power tech is safer than its predecessors.

Re:I have said it before

[Applehu Akbar]

Our local nuke, Palo Verde, uses dry desert air as a heat sink, and cranks out power for 2 cents/KWh. There are a lot of dry places that could use reactors like this.

Re:I have said it before

[dj245]

And i will say it again : nuclear power is prohibitively expensive.

And all the other ways of making electricity are prohibitively expensive too. In 2003, Calpine had a multi billion dollar lawsuit against Siemens and GE for a large number of gas turbines. GE and Siemens' F-series gas turbines were laughably defective at launch and the Siemens units, in particular, had a tendency to completely self-destruct under rather easy to achieve conditions.

Heavy industrial equipment is expensive. Fuel for power plants is expensive too. It just happens that the machines are so large and powerful that the cost is divided hundreds of thousands, or even millions of ways among all the customers.

Re:I have said it before

[houghi]

They should just let the banks loan the money. If they fail, nothing bad happens because they are too big to fail

Re:I have said it before

[drinkypoo]

you mean the basic engineering error where the project manager wouldn't sign off due to the mistake made in concrete formulation so he was fired and a more lenient approver installed in his place?

How about the basic engineering error of siting a reactor somewhere even ancient Japanese could have told you was a mistake? How about the basic engineering error of not protecting your on-site backup power, which is mandatory for maintenance? How about the basic engineering error of storing spent fuel rods on top of reactors? All of those are more significant than the formulation of the concrete.

Re:I have said it before

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, there are. Several in fact.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_seam_fire
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania

Re:I have said it before

[Runaway1956]

Which regions in the US have been rendered uninhabitable? Sounds to me like you've had to much Kool-Aid. I mentioned in an earlier post that I grew up in coal-cracker country. I am unaware of ANY regions in the US where man cannot live today because of coal contamination. I grew up drinking water from a well drilled into coal and limestone. I don't glow in the dark or anything. Come on, man, stop making things up. Coal is a naturally occurring compound, found all over the world. It's not THAT dangerous, unless you throw yourself into a furnace after the coal has been lit.

Re:I have said it before

[dj245]

Right. Having the government cover all of your major liabilities, getting to write off massive debts, pass all of your cost overruns onto local consumers without them having a say in the manner, and so on, that's all "paying their own way", right? In nuclear power, the gains have always been privatized while the costs and risks socialized. And it's *still* been very difficult to find investors. Nuclear has always been more popular on K-Street than Wall Street.

Here's a paper going into the various massive ways nuclear has been subsidies. And they still can't bloody manage to stay afloat. It's one of the few industries with a negative growth curve - where technology gets more expensive with time, not cheaper.

The US government collects about $750 million in fees each year for nuclear waste disposal. Utilities have paid these fees for decades. The fund has 25 billion dollars in it. "Actions by both Congress and the Executive Branch have made the money in the fund effectively inaccessible to serving its original purpose." When it comes time to retire plants, utilities are forced to store the waste on their sites at their cost.

And consumers do have a choice in the matter. They are welcome to go off the grid. Electricity in the US is among the cheapest in the world, while also being one of the safest for workers and the environment. There is always room for improvement but electricity in Japan and Europe costs 2-4 times as much, and electricity production in poorer countries is often very unsafe for workers and the environment. The US does a fairly decent job at providing safe, reliable electricity at a low cost.

Re: I have said it before

[Anonymous Coward]

At least elevate the damn emergency generators rather than putting them in the basement.

Re:I have said it before

[Maury Markowitz]

> Is there a working large scale CCS project to demonstrate the truth of those facts?

It's right beside the nuclear reactor that didn't go overbudget. Sorry, couldn't resist.

But more directly, there are a number of very large plants, and a whole lot under construction. I was surprised to learn this after all the years of inaction. Prices to date have been on the order of 0.01/kWh LCoE, which is in-line with the estimates in the document I posted.

Re:I have said it before

[mrchaotica]

Nuclear is expensive precisely because huge amounts of money are spent attempting to appease anti-nuclear nutjobs like yourself. If the engineers were allowed to simply get on with building the damn things instead of being mired in decades of frivolous lawsuits every single time, then it really would be cheap!

Re:I have said it before

[Maury Markowitz]

> But you have to understand the scale of energy production that they are capable of

Of course you do, it's called CF. And when you divide CAPEX by CF you get a rough estimate of the cost of the power in question. So let's do that.

Wind turbines here in Ontario have CF's on the order of 30%. CAPEX is around $1.50/W. So that's 1.5 / .3 = $5 effective CAPEX.

Darlington B was low-balled at $8.25/W and would have a CF around 90%. So that's 8.25 / .9 = $9.17 effective CAPEX

So even though I have to built three units of wind for every unit of nuke, it's still half as expensive. And that's why they cancelled Darlington B.

Re:I have said it before

[mrchaotica]

You say that as if the downstream costs of coal-fired plants aren't externalized too. Nuclear waste cleanup costs are dwarfed by the costs of global warming!

Re: I have said it before

[Anonymous Coward]

What about you get over your tech fetishism and start considering that maybe mankind does not really need all of that anyway? What about we learn to accept that progress has its limits and that we reached them?

Re:I have said it before

[ArsonSmith]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

Re:I have said it before

[serviscope_minor]

That's exactly what they said when they were building the old reactors.

Yes? I'm not sure what your point is. Nuclear energy is the safest form of energy in terms of deaths per TWh generated. I don't think it's a stretch to claim the newer reactors are also safer than the older ones, though due to the incredibly low number of incidents there are not a lot of statistics.

Re:I have said it before

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like solar and wind to me.

Re:I have said it before

[Eunuchswear]

the main problem behind their problems is that they're selling projects at prices they have made up as if cheap movable labor was as efficient as good labor and their prices were not designed for the safety specs necessary AND they didn't even have the fucking design when they were selling it. like, they didn't have the control system designed by the original date the plant was supposed to open. how the fuck do you sell billion dollar projects like that? answer: the french.

Well, no. The Germans actually.

The EPR is such a fuck up because AREVA made a joint venture with Siemens to design the next generation of reactors, merging the German Konvoi design with the French Framatome designs. The idiots at AREVA forgot the whole lesson of French nuclear history -- build lots of identical plants, making only small evolutionary changes.

The EPR is a bit more powerful (1650MWe) than the 1500MWe N4 reactors, but it was stupid to start with a whole new design 20 years after building the last one.

Re:I have said it before

[AmiMoJo]

Which other energy sources? Coal, sure. Gas, yep. Wind, solar PV, solar thermal, wave, tidal, geothermal, biofuel?

Re:I have said it before

[Mr D from 63]

But it is not CF alone, although that is a very important factor. It is also design life, lifetime O&M, etc. Windmills don't last very long, new nuclear has a 60 year design life extendable to past 80 easily. Nuclear plants need fuel and parts replacement and staffing and regulatory and wast fees. Wind needs backup, there is a significant cost to that. Wind needs added a decentralized transmission infrastructure, a large generator can centralize it, there is a cost to that.

The systemic cost & value is what is most important.

Re:I have said it before

[cheesybagel]

Not really. If you knew the debt a lot of countries have because of wind power (e.g. Spain, Germany) to generate a lot less energy than what France generates with nuclear we wouldn't be having this discussion. France also has the cheapest electricity in Europe and that is one big reason why they still have a manufacturing industry in there.

Areva probably is overdimensioned. France has a lot of installed nuclear power capacity. Areva is scaled for maintaining that capacity. But France is reducing the amount of nuclear reactors they have. Also, like the summary said, they have had a lot of issues with EPR construction in Finland and France. As any new project it was bound to have delays and EPR is among the most complex LWR designs in the market.

Most of the cost in nuclear power plants is the loans to build large structures in concrete and steel. The more delayed a project is the more the loan interest starts piling up. Once generation starts the power plant quickly pays for itself.

Re:I have said it before

[Runaway1956]

Uhhhh, setting the coal on fire doesn't exactly render the region uninhabitable for generations to come. When the fire goes out, it's habitable again. Just like any forest fire, or grass fire, or house fire.

Re:I have said it before

[Anonymous Coward]

And i will say it again : nuclear power is prohibitively expensive.

At first I rejected your statement because there was no actual information to back up your assertion, but now I see that you say you repeated yourself.
I can't imagine a more convincing argument that repeating yourself.
After all, why would anyone say something and then say it again if it weren't true?

However, I've read your post several times now, and I see only a single instance of your saying "nuclear power is prohibitively expensive"
So I'm not convinced that you have actually said "nuclear power is prohibitively expensive" and said again "nuclear power is prohibitively expensive"

Now I'm asking that you provide some links to where you said "nuclear power is prohibitively expensive" in some other post. It needs, of course, to be time stamped before your existing post.
Otherwise, I, and I'm sure others, will have to deny your assertion.

Re:I have said it before

[dave420]

Just as before, you assume your knowledge is supreme without spending a few seconds on Google. Hint: search for "Centralia" and see what you read.

Re:I have said it before

[epine]

When you begin counting the cost of nuclear, you've got to count ALL the costs. Including, as at Fukushima, basic engineering errors that ultimately cost astronomical amounts years after construction.

Do you know what the lead engineer of the GE design team for the original Fukushima reactor drove around town? A 1959 Edsel Ranger.

Certain mistakes were made back then in the heyday of mature industries like OS/360 and the Boeing 707 that we no longer make. Even the outlandish and highly inflated AI claims from the same era (which were held against the entire discipline for 50 years) are now almost becoming reality with deep learning. Times change. Even for AI. Even for nuclear.

Semi-retraction: Although I just made up that bit about the Edsel, I can't actually claim it's a false statement.

Re:I have said it before

[cheesybagel]

You know how many people died at Fukushima due to the nuclear reactor? Zero.

There were large economic costs with people displaced, etc, but if this was a bust dam because of the earthquake and tsunami the cost in terms of lives would be a lot more significant.

Re:I have said it before

[cheesybagel]

Natural gas has highly variable costs. Historically it has typically cost like 2-3x more than either coal or nuclear. Currently there is a glut of natural gas due to shale extraction but don't expect it to last forever. The industry is in a bit of a bubble right now and investment is crashing down.

Re:I have said it before

[Gliscameria]

These aren't fusion reactors, and there's no reason with modern technology to have meltdowns that spray debris all over the place... and you don't build them in heavily populated areas to begin with. We've got Palo Verde way out there as a precaution. This is all over reaction. You're way more likely to die from radiation from the extra fun bits in coal than from an actual nuclear disaster.

Re: I have said it before

[Shakrai]

Then learn to live without technology

I agree! Modern medicine and agriculture is sooooo overrated.

Re:I have said it before

[Runaway1956]

Centralia is a fire. Like any other fire, when the fire is extinguished, the land will be habitable again. You're not making any points here at all. Every year, we have fires that involve national park lands. Would you suggest that national parks are dangerous, and should be outlawed?

Re:I have said it before

[DarkOx]

And they're still lower than the costs of fossil fuel based technologies, which is global warming.

I think this viewpoint is incorrect. Society is pretty good at absorbing slow on going costs, like cancer deaths from burning coal and we actually do a pretty good job at addressing things like global warming. We will find a solution to that problem. It might be higher levies and sea walls or it might be some kind of geo engineering. Either way is a slow change we can adapt to.

A nuclear accident on the other hand is a sudden catastrophe that can destroy large areas. Unlike one of those possibly global warming storms, or an oil spill we don't have good ways to render the affected area safe for human habitation again in the short term. So there is a time value component that simply can't be ignored.

Re:I have said it before

[AmiMoJo]

Right, and when it comes to power generation deaths are the only metric that matters.

Re:I have said it before

[brausch]

Wrong. The hot material in the reactor core, whether thorium, or uranium or any other material, has a lot of stored heat energy which has to go somewhere even when the nuclear reaction stops. It still needs cooling for a long time after it stops producing new heat.

Re:I have said it before

[Runaway1956]

Uh-huh. Not one child has become sick due to elevated levels of poisons associated with a nuclear generator? Right - I'm believing that. Try this article: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/op...

Now, I'm not one to attribute every "stress-related illness" to the nuclear plant, but I'm also aware that elevated levels of radiation and contaminants are probably killing people who may or may not have been the healthiest members of society to start with.

Re:I have said it before

[AmiMoJo]

It's not just politics that keeps old nuclear plants running, it's capitalism. The owners don't want to close a revenue generating plant that will cost tens of billions of replace, and deal with cleaning up the site. They will only close a plant when either something breaks and it costs too much to fix or they are forced to by the regulator.

Nuclear plants need an expiration date on them, and strong legal enforcement of it.

Re:I have said it before

[Anonymous Coward]

If only it wasn't for those pesky Health and Safety rules, it would be a licence to print money.

It's better than that. It's a license to print glow-in-the-dark money.

Re:I have said it before

[cheesybagel]

Ever seen a mountain of coal fly ash?

Re:I have said it before

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell that to the British taxpayer, where the costs to clean up the nuclear waste at the Sellafield power station have just risen to £53 billion. And is 'hoped' to be completed by 2120. Yeah. They really are planning 105 years into the future. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-31725365

Want to know the reason I hate nuclear power with a passion? Because it's corporate wellfare. Private business will run the plant for 30 years, cream off all the profit, and then hand back the oozing radioactive sludge to the state for us taxpayers to clean up. Or go bankrupt and walk away.

The only time I'd support nuclear power is if it were run as a nationalised industry. And fat chance of that happening, with todays corporate plutocracy having superceded true democracy.

Re:I have said it before

[AmiMoJo]

In France, the UK and Germany, as well as in Japan and the US, and China, insurance is heavily subsidised too. No insurer will offer insurance to a nuclear plant because the potential liability is in the hundreds of billions of Euros range, if not more should the absolute worst happen. It's always been that, so the government provides unlimited liability insurance for free.

Re:I have said it before

[dunkelfalke]

ORLY? Just in January two workers died at the Fukushima power plant.

Re:I have said it before

[cheesybagel]

Kingston, Tennessee, USA coal fly ash toxic sludge spill 2008:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:I have said it before

[cheesybagel]

The problem with Fukushima was less the reactor and more the fact that it was in a flooding area. Some reactor designs will be less prone to flooding than this design but flooding is flooding.

Re:I have said it before

[angel'o'sphere]

Actually nuclear power is since decades the most expensive power production we have.
Only "financial" tricks make it look cheap like comparing a 35 year old written of nuclear plant with a brand new coal (or renewable) plant.
The milage in your country may wary.

Re:I have said it before

[Anonymous Coward]

Coal waste products have had far more negative impacts on people than nuclear waste. There are coal ash disasters, mercury and other toxins released into the air, increased mortality near coal plants...

Re:I have said it before

[angel'o'sphere]

Historical gas plants where gas turbines. They where used for peak/balancing power.
Modern gas plants are combined turbines and "boiler" plants.
The cost of such plants has not much to do with the (natural) gas price, it is a technology problem.

Re:I have said it before

[cheesybagel]

Kingston, Tennessee, coal sludge toxic spill (2008).

Re:I have said it before

[cheesybagel]

Coal is a naturally occurring compound. So is uranium. Just because it is 'naturally occuring' it doesn't mean it isn't dangerous you twit.

Coal fly ash is dangerous and toxic.

Re:I have said it before

[angel'o'sphere]

No one in Europe is "pro nuclear".
The plants we have was built in cold war times by cold war politicians against the will of the population.

All european nations are slowly stepping out of nuclear power, even France. Their percentage of nuclear power dropped from like 85% to like 65% meanwhile, and the replacement is: wind and solar. It is just not big news but easy to google.

Re:I have said it before

[cheesybagel]

To a large degree I think the problem is actually lack of practice actually building power plants. So of course the cost and time estimates aren't accurate enough. EPR is a new reactor design.

Re:I have said it before

[angel'o'sphere]

Nuclear plants don't create "thousands" of jobs, solar does.

A nuclear plant is run by a dozen people in three shifts.

Well, and a few security guards and their dogs.

Re:I have said it before

[Runaway1956]

Naturally occurring uranium? Is it really dangerous? Maybe you should check out the enrichment process. How many tons of uranium ore does it take to make one hot reactor core? One more time - I lived on a freaking coal vein. We grew vegetables on top of it. The horses seemed to like it - the colts especially would take a lick of it now and then. Coal. As natural as granite. Uranium? Find me a vein of U238 that can be shoveled directly into a furnace/reactor.

Re:I have said it before

[cheesybagel]

The old French reactor designs, based on a US Westinghouse design, were just fine. It's the EPR design they did with Siemens (a German company) that's too expensive and complicated to build. Add to that a couple of decades not actually building any reactors and it is hardly a surprise that they need to relearn some things all over again. Add to that using a lot of local work in Finland with zilch prior experience building concrete and steel structures to these kinds of specifications and shoddy oversight and this kind of thing happens.

AFAIK the Chinese 3rd generation reactors (Westinghouse AP1000) seem to be mostly on time. The only delay was that the government ordered them to stop construction for a year because they decided to go all over the paperwork again for all new nuclear reactors being build after Fukushima.

Re:I have said it before

[ultranova]

Which other energy sources?

Ones that will keep my computer running even if it happens to be cloudy and calm and my neighbour decides to use a vacuum cleaner.

Wind, solar PV,

Bit players unless there's a near-miraculous breakthrough in battery technology. At which point solar will require lots of land area and wind will likely have unintended side effects - it's removing energy from the weather system, after all - which means endless rounds of complaints.

solar thermal,

Workable, but requires massive plants. Those are not going to happen - someone will always complain.

wave, tidal,

Lots of promises, few deliveries. And again, these will have massive ecological implications even when working properly.

geothermal,

Unworkable at current drilling technology.

biofuel?

Basically solar power with lots of added inefficiencies. Bonus points for having potential to cause famines if it comes down to feeding the poor or feeding your car.

Re:I have said it before

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not cheap, you're a fucking moron.

Re:I have said it before

[cheesybagel]

In the USA nuclear power companies are forced to pay money towards a decommissioning fund. Other countries may do different schemes. And they do pay for insurance schemes as well.

Re:I have said it before

[ultranova]

Coal with CCS is about the same price.

CCS - Carbon Capture and Sequestration? I wonder if you could drive the price down by keeping the carbon dioxide gaseous and feeding it to nearby greenhouses - possibly through a simple pipe. Heck, if you used the greenhouse products as biofuel in the plant you could create a completely closed loop :).

Re:I have said it before

[Mr D from 63]

ignorance, plain and simple.

Re:I have said it before

[Registered Coward v2]

To a large degree I think the problem is actually lack of practice actually building power plants. So of course the cost and time estimates aren't accurate enough. EPR is a new reactor design.

While the design is new we've been building pressure vessel, primary and secondary containments, turbine buildings and cooling towers for a while. While some of the issues can be traced to a new design the industry also tends to get overly optimistic about the cost structure of each new generation.

Re:I have said it before

[jythie]

Setting aside Centralia, pretty much any area down stream of current 'blow the top off a mountain' coal mining operations are uninhabitable or at minimal quite toxic. It ruins the whole watershead of the area. We have similiar problems with other mining operations for things like iron, silver, copper, etc. While we all like having cheap power and metal, it is only cheap because we do not pay for any of the damage done or people sickened, it is simply written off as 'well, it is their fault for being poor and not moving!'

Taking a look at any coal production state, there are dozens of superfund sites that have rendered the region they contain unfit for human habitation.

Getting back to Centralia, it is a bit of a worst case superfund site, the fire is not going to 'go out' in any of our lifetimes. It is also different in that the fumes from national park fires are not toxic, while Centralia should not be entered without breathing equipement.

Re:I have said it before

[jythie]

Yes, natural uranium can be dangerous. People who collect samples generally are careful to keep them shielded and have to be very careful regarding how they touch them and not breath any possible fragments in.

Re:I have said it before

[HornWumpus]

Over the life of a thermal power plant the capital cost of the plant is about 1-2%. The rest is fuel and operations.

Re:I have said it before

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit. It's actually the opposite of this. Most regulators require that a percent of nuclear revenues goes to waste cleanup and decommissioning. The war chest is huge in the US and Canada. No other energy industry is required to pre-pay for decommissioning or waste cleanup, or to be responsible for as much as nuclear is.

This is how is should be: the costs should be included, and all energy industries should be more responsible. That way, the market can help decide what is best for everyone. If you know an industry will create hazardous waste or affect the health of people and quality of land and water, then that should be factored into things.

However, there are no fees for lead or mercury release in coal smoke or slurry, no up-front fees for land-reclamation for large solar or wind, and no fees for methane release in hydro or natural gas industries.

Re:I have said it before

[Anonymous Coward]

It's simplistic to believe that nuclear is reliable. One reason why the industry is in trouble is because it's been unable to produce power enough for France during peak and overproducing when it's not wanted at night. Added to which it keeps stopping because it needs cool water and cannot dump so much heat into the cooling water so as to raise its temperature too high, meaning it has had to be shut down in hot summers or when there's a drought on (therefore not enough water in the rivers).

It's been a problem in France for a decade or more, hidden by government underwriting of the whole sorry episode.

It's not just that nuclear is expensive, it's that it's unreliable, catastrophically so in the case of France which has staked its reputation on producing the majority of its power needs by nuclear power.

Re:I have said it before

[penguinoid]

And i will say it again : nuclear power is prohibitively expensive.

Insane environmentalists are prohibitively expensive. (No insult intended to environmentalists who have done their research before supporting/opposing something.)

Re:I have said it before

[penguinoid]

To clarify, by "insane environmentalists" I mean people who's actions result in a higher proportion of our electricity coming from coal power plants, which in their standard operation kill fish, birds, emit radiation, cause cancer, have a global environmental impact -- and all this on a scale that dwarfs other alternatives. While the insane environmentalists don't think they support coal, what they do is oppose other power generation systems because they're not perfect leaving current coal plants as a necessity to produce the power they opposed alternatives to. Similarly, some insane environmentalists support cost-prohibitive sources of energy and leach funding from other alternatives, which would have reduced our reliance on coal and oil much more effectively.

Re:I have said it before

[penguinoid]

Cheaper to heavily subsidize nuclear, than face the massive cleanup costs when nothing goes wrong at a coal power plant. Do you know a safe way to deal with the massive amounts of radioactive waste that come from those coal plants? How about cleaning up the mercury, the particulates, the CO2? In coal power, the gains have always been privatized while the costs and risks socialized.

Re:I have said it before

[ultranova]

The engineers should have put the brakes to any construction efforts taking place in those locations, based on that fact alone.

They can't. The spirit of the organization employing them does not let them. Their role is to implement the decisions of the leadership and rationalize them. Conforming to their role earns them social capital, and going against costs it. And they can't possibly earn that capital fast enough to pay for keeping a plant blocked for long.

Re:I have said it before

[Anonymous Coward]

" The worst disaster (leaving aside normal environmental pollution) that could possibly happen at a coal or oil or gas or solar plant is pretty much limited to the plant premises"

Yes, leaving off the gigatons of compounds dumped into the atmosphere with proven deleterious effects and statistically confirmed impacts on the life, human, animal, agricultural, property, etc. Also the several incidents regarding coal fly ash storage areas spilling over into neighborhoods destroying homes and polluting natural water courses.

Re:I have said it before

[ultranova]

Uhhhh, setting the coal on fire doesn't exactly render the region uninhabitable for generations to come. When the fire goes out, it's habitable again.

In 250 years, possibly more. After which you get to wait for the ground to return to normal again.

Re: I have said it before

[vadim_t]

What do you mean by tech fetichism? Tech places a huge priority on energy efficiency. Computing is going increasingly mobile, lighting is shifting to LED... all of which is high tech by the way. Do you think old incandescents are better?

Re:I have said it before

[ultranova]

Right, and when it comes to power generation deaths are the only metric that matters.

Well, don't keep us in suspense: what are these important metrics we should sacrifice human lives to improve?

Re:I have said it before

[ChumpusRex2003]

Indeed, most of the issues with the EPR could have been predicted and prevented - it has been a clear example of inept project management. The major problems have been:

• Out of spec concrete: Nuclear grade concrete needs strict porosity control, and very large seamless pours. Conventional concrete formulations and QA techniques (slumping) are not feasible, and advanced formulations blended to strict proportions are needed. The problem is that the contractors they employed to do the concreting lied about their ability to make nuclear grade concrete. When the regulator inspected the site in Finland, they found that the concrete contractors were blending the aggregates and cement without taking into consideration the water adsorbed onto damp materials. As a result the concrete did not meet the porosity specification. The foundation slab had to be relaid.
• Out of spec welding: This was further compounded by the fact that many of the required welds were first-of-a-kind, requiring welding of unique dissimilar metals at unprecedented scales in very difficult configurations, requiring the development of new welding equipment as it became clear during dummy runs, that existing equipment could not achieve the quality required
• Problems with scale: The sheer size of the EPR and volume of concrete and steel for the containment made it difficult to source enough workers of any skill. There were frequent communication problems due to language barriers, and it was difficult to ensure that all staff were kept aware of issues. For example: Areva were unable to source enough welders locally. Welders from as far away as Bulgaria were brought in. However, due to language difficulties and inexperience with the QA required, many welds were not made to adequate quality and had to be remade.
• Overly aggressive construction schedule: The planned construction would have been the fastest construction of a nuclear plant ever, quite a bold claim, considering that hte EPR is also the most complex ever builtstarted.
• Insufficient skilled staff: Construction started before design was complete. In particular, control systems had not completed design and verification. The prime contractor also had insufficient architects and engineers to ensure that all designs had been completed to the level of detail required for construction.
• Failure to validate the supply chain: Construction started before the designers had adequately assessed the global supply chain for parts. There were numerous delays due to excessive lead times for parts which had not been planned for, particularly as many part manufacturers had wound down their facilities due to the death of nuclear plant construction in Europe.

Similar issues, but to a much smaller extent have also cropped up in France on their EPR construction. They've had problems with poor quality welding too, as well as difficulty finding enough competent staff.

Re:I have said it before

[Registered Coward v2]

Excellent points. The US is also experince issues with AP 1000 construction. Part of the problem as you point oit is experience. Many of yhe engineers, architects, skilled trades etc. that built the last generation of plants have retired or moved on so much of the lessons learned will have to be relearned the hard way.

Re:I have said it before

[cowdung]

"Other energy sources would be vastly more costly if their waste products weren't already grandfathered in to the public mindset and their true impacts to safety and environmental impact "

This is actually a very insightful point. Imagine how costly coal would be if its numerous environmental costs were included in calculations (as they are done in nuclear).

Re:I have said it before

[Anonymous Coward]

Mississippi Power's Kemper County plant is an integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) plant, meaning it aims to convert coal to a cleaner-burning gas to comply with environmental regulations. The ambitious project began in 2008 with a price tag of $2.2 billion, but has since ballooned to $6.17 billion.

Re:I have said it before

[mattventura]

I'd rather pay to have a little bit of nuclear waste buried beneath a mountain where it will never be seen again than have stuff burned and pollute the air, have oil spills, and have totally-not-related-to-oil wars. Who pays for all of those things? The public.

Re:I have said it before

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet the German reactors before the EPR were even better than the French reactors.

Re:I have said it before

[orlanz]

Picture, for example, an accident at Indian Point that would increase NYC residents' rate of cancer over the next 10 years by two to three orders of magnitude

You don't need to picture it, nor do you need an accident. Just go live near an active coal power plant.

Re:I have said it before

[angel'o'sphere]

Hint: visit a nuclear plant :)
Ignorant, plain, simple!
Actually: idiot!

Re:I have said it before

[angel'o'sphere]

What has that to do with the topic?

Traditional gas turbine plants where the most expensive plants. Modern combined gas turbine + boiler plants are the most effective ones.

What do you want to say with your numbers?

Re:I have said it before

[Mr D from 63]

I have.

And you have an amazing ability to make ignorant statements and not even realize it. If you had just done the smallest bit of checking, you'd know how stupid your post was. Everyone else here does, so I don't even need to respond anymore....

Re: I have said it before

[Anonymous Coward]

What about you go live in your farm and leave us alone ?

Re: I have said it before

[BlueTrin]

Eat your humble pie, ignorant idiot, don't come back unless it is to correct your post

http://www.edfenergy.com/energ...

Re: I have said it before

[BlueTrin]

Do you have any links or information to back your facts ?

Re:I have said it before

[__aanbvm4272]

"Nuclear is cheap." Where did you get that Idea? The cost of creating fuel and infrastructure is prohibitively expensive. In fact by the time you figure in all the petroleum it takes to construct a reactor, some of them never create a positive return. I speak of Trojan in NW Oregon that was mothballed after it needed a very expensive boiler rebuilt. (The spent fuel is still there.) The cost of finding a place to deposit it has never been achieved here in the USA. Maybe we should just drop all the safety concerns, to make it cheaper??? Or build wind turbines and photovoltaics...YES. And clean coal (with CO2 sequestration) for the reserve hrs. Lets get rid of nuclear power AND weapons too. Oh and grow old timber to replace what we so foolishly destroyed, while we're at it!

Re:I have said it before

[Blaskowicz]

Yet the US manages to build nuclear weapons, nuclear reactors for ships and it operates them.
Have the DOE and NNSA build and operate the civil nuclear plants, then both gains and risks are socialized. (I say that like it's nothing lol. armchair general comment.)

Re:I have said it before

[AmiMoJo]

Well, what metrics do you think make driving worth while at the expense of human lives? If deaths were the only metric cars would be banned.

Re:I have said it before

[angel'o'sphere]

No one builds a wind plant at a place where the "dreaded" 'capacity factor' is only 30%, sorry.

The CF of the nuclear plant you likely don't know either ... or did the plant owner publish it?

No idea why people pull such numbers out of their hat or write that nonsense on wikipedia.

Also: it is polite to use the "correct term" first and introduce the abbreviation afterwards. No idea what a CAPEX, a 'low ball' and an "effective" CAPEX is supposed to mean :D ... but I google around myself, thanx.

Re: I have said it before

[angel'o'sphere]

The parent talked about a _new_ plant and claimed it would create hundreds of new jobs, not about an old existing running plant.

If you build up a new plant very likely many workers who already work "there" or on other plants (maintenance especially) will also work in the new plant, hence it is not a "new job".

The amount of new jobs is very low, regardless if it is just 16 as I "exagerated" or 150. The amount of jobs is in no relation to the subsidizes or size of the plant. The most jobs the plant generates are the jobs during its construction ... which likely vanish later unless the construction companies get good follow up contracts elsewhere.

Re:I have said it before

[Anonymous Coward]

The Boundary Dam Power Station in Saskatchewan is debatably "working-scale". They officially call it "commercial-scale", but it's only 1 of the coal-fired units at a little over 100MW scale, which isn't huge, and it's too soon to know whether it is really viable. It's up-and-running, but long-term performance is what counts.

Re: I have said it before

[mrchaotica]

Sure! And it only took 10 seconds of Googling to find. This book chapter explains how public hysteria forced the NRC to repeatedly tighten regulations, which drastically increased costs not only due to the sheer increase in materials and increased labor to design things to comply (what the author calls "regulatory racheting"), but also the need to repeatedly re-engineer things as the regulations changed mid-construction (what the author calls "regulatory turbulence").

Re:I have said it before

[cheesybagel]

Combined cycle gas generation plants don't mix well with wind and solar. In a grid where a large fraction of the power comes from wind and solar you want to use the gas power plants to cover any renewable production shortfalls so you need to spool the plant up and down frequently. That basically kills any gains you get from using the combined cycle. To get optimum performance with combined cycle you need to run the plant continuously on baseload mode.

Re:I have said it before

[macpacheco]

If the whole nuclear regulatory framework were rolled back to just pre Chernobyl regulations, nuclear reactors would be built at half of their quoted prices, or 80% cheaper than current USA / Europe way over budget projects.
Nuclear doesn't have to be expensive.
It is expensive not due to actual risks, but rather due to perceived risks.
Chernobyl couldn't happen on any western reactor with existing regulations. The vast majority of measures taken after were precipitated, knee jerk reactions took to satisfy public hysteria.
The latest US NRC annual senate hearing there were quite a few regulatory measures that were estimated to cost 1% than it actually costed the nuclear industry.
Fukushima area radiation never got over slight cancer risk level, yet the public was being told a very different story by those that want nuclear to go away.
If instead of reading anti nuclear paranoia websites, you go study nuclear power and radiation facts, you will see that nuclear facts are very reassuring.
There are lots of ultra expensive, totally useless nuclear regulatory measures. Specially those that slow down nuclear construction and other procedures.

Re:I have said it before

[macpacheco]

Garbage. Coal is 10000 times more deadly than nuclear power in real numbers. Coal is a continous natural disaster. Nuclear needs a serious accident to maybe kill some people. Coal causes a lot of lung cancer, black lung disease.
Coal is killing 200k people yearly worldwide.
Natural gas kills every year more people than Chernobyl is projected to kill from actual radiation/cancers. Even if you add all the suicides from telling the liquidators they were going to die anyways, that's less than 3 years worth of natural gas deaths.
Remember deep water horizon oil spill / explosion ? That was a natural gas explosion. The ensuing natural disaster was much worse than the actual nuclear part of Fukushima (people forget the Tsunami destroyed the houses).
It gets worse. There is ample evidence low levels of chronic radiation exposure doesn't cause cancer at all. Studies to formally prove that have been sistematicly defunded / cancelled.
I was exposed to radiation levels much higher than Fukushima on a monazite beach for months at end. My mom has been exposed to 10x that. It's not a secluded remote beach, its a crowded popular beach, that gets as crowded as florida's most popular beaches. Its called Guarapari in Brazil. Yes, that beach shown on Pandora's Promise. Just google: praias guarapari lotadas (Guarapari crowded beaches in Portuguese). Radiation levels are so high, one day's worth of exposure in those beaches are forbidden for nuclear workers.
That's just one example of places thousands of people are exposed to levels of ionizing radiation that are considered deadly for anti nuclear radicals.
Denver-CO, Salt Lake City-UT, every high altitude resort, in all of those places people are exposed to 10x more radiation than at sea level. Yet there are no studies that show that the extra radiation leads to higher cancers, but the anti nuclear types are allowed to claim no levels of radiation are safe. The whole logic breaks down every step of the way. Yet they are never convinced by facts, and their response is totally divorced from science. Green Peace has a total budget of above 200 million USD / yr. If they cared to actually prove anything, they could actually do the studies, yet they never to, always resorting to anecdotal evidence.
If we're going to use anecdotal evidence, there is plenty of that pointing to "environmental" groups that attack nuclear power as being funded by coal / natural gas interests. When was the last time you heard of a "sit in" in front of a coal power plant ? But they do it all the time on nuclear stations.

Re:I have said it before

[angel'o'sphere]

That is not correct.
A 'combined cycle gas generation plant' has two stages. The first is a gas turbine, which reacts in the range of 10 - 30 seconds on load changes, and the second stage is the same as any other fossile plant and it reacts in in the range of 5% of its max power per 15 minutes.

Ofc if you run it in base load mode it is max efficient, but that is true for every fossile fuel plant.

Re:I have said it before

[electrosoccertux]

I can't be bothered to read into the details of a situation when it makes my profession look bad

Re:I have said it before

[ultranova]

Right, and when it comes to power generation deaths are the only metric that matters.

Well, don't keep us in suspense: what are these important metrics we should sacrifice human lives to improve?

Well, what metrics do you think make driving worth while at the expense of human lives? If deaths were the only metric cars would be banned.

...You know, it's okay to admit you didn't think your post through. You don't have to fight every debate to the bitter end if you don't have anything sensible to say. And when the subject actually has effects on the real world, perverting logic to "win" is immoral or even outright evil.

Re: I have said it before

[BlueTrin]

It was an interesting read but this was between the 70s and 80s, I wonder if the trend continued. Thank you for the reference.

Re: I have said it before

[mrchaotica]

I'm glad you liked it.

In the 80s, utility companies in the US just gave up on building new nuclear plants entirely. The two reactors currently under construction at Plant Vogtle in Georgia are the first new reactors to be approved in over 30 years. They're currently over budget and behind schedule, but how much of the problem can be attributed to regulatory meddling vs. other causes (such as the fact that the last engineers who could possibly have experience building a reactor in the US have surely long since retired) remains to be seen.

Re:I have said it before

[lucien86]

Per unit of power coal is about 1,000 to 10,000 times more dangerous than nuclear. When that is statistically taken into account both the nuclear regulators and anti-nuclear campaigners are far more dangerous than nuclear itself..

Re:I have said it before

[beastofburdon]

Nuclear power is prohibitively expensive only when you factor in all the international laws designed to keep poor countries targets which cannot defend themselves. When you take away these laws nuclear power becomes quite cheap. You open up many new types of reactors which are much more efficient. The amount of radioactive waste drops to less than 1% of the current requirements. Reactors can be built in a much safer manner, ect., ect...

Bad design, poor execution

[Anonymous Coward]

Almost one fifth of that loss is due to a reactor in Finland which they seem to be unable to complete. The prototype sort of reactor is almost a decade behind schedule and has sucked around ten billion dollars of Finnish tax payers money. The French are incompetent and the Finns just plain silly for going on with this.

Re:Bad design, poor execution

[pijokela]

The reactor was bought with a fixed price contract by a private company called TVO. Areva has not been getting any extra money out of Finland. They are trying to sue the company that bought the reactor, TVO, but that is still ongoing and there is a countersuit too.

So I, as a finnish tax payer, have no direct stake in this. Of course, electricity prices might go down, if the reactor finally came online.

cutting corners

[Anonymous Coward]

They were caught red-handed cutting corners at the Olkiluoto site in Finland. Finns take security very seriously and hence the plant is already years late..

Re:cutting corners

[K. S. Kyosuke]

How much late? Our major nuclear power plant was 12 years late (despite also having just two of the original four reactors). :)

Re:cutting corners

[sodul]

The contract includes fines for delays, and the Finns (no pun intended) have now charged Billions worth of 'late fees' to Areva. Areva promised the moon and can't deliver. It would be great if public projects in the US would include the same sort of strong rules as what the Finns did here. No more overtime and over budget as the norm when building roads and bridges. A project being late would mean that tax payer money would increase instead of dwindling.

Re:cutting corners

[Runaway1956]

I might forgive projects being over time - but being over time should never be rewarded with more money, thus making the project over budget as well.

Hey, I've worked construction for much of my life. If you normally have fifteen rain-days per year, and you budget twenty - that thirty fifth rain-out is REALLY fucking with your schedule!

Stuff happens, and I'll easily accept a highway opening a month late, or a high-rise opening three months late. Just don't PAY THE CONTRACTORS for being late!

Re:cutting corners

[Anonymous Coward]

Incidently, Finland signed for more nuclear plants to be built, this time by Russia

"Finland gives go-ahead to joint nuclear venture with Russia’s Rosatom"
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/05/finland-nuclear-project-russia-rosatom-reactor

Re:cutting corners

[Anonymous Coward]

Also Finnish nuclear safety regulator has been careful. French kinda assumed that the regulations were basically just bunch of text on a page that could be ignored if they felt like it (and any regulatory hurdles could be cleared with backroom dealings and "trust us" hand waving).

Not so. In Finland nuclear plant safety is Serious Business (0 accidents and we'd like to keep it that way) and the people watching over the industry actually do their jobs. French were not pleased to find this out in practice - any shoddy bits they've built (often using cheap foreign labor that may or may not be competent...) that hasn't been up to approved plans & specs has been systematically busted by the inspectors and re-designs/refits haven't exactly been easy or cheap. ...and since everything is built under a fixed price contract with hefty late fees built in, Areva is in deep doo-doo. Especially since they cannot "make a deal" to get out of the situation. Finnish side will happily drive them to bankruptcy, if needed, and squeeze every penny as per the original contract while accepting nothing less than what was contracted for.

Granted, the end result may be an incomplete nuclear power plant that will need a new contract with someone else to finish it...

Re:cutting corners

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. Not exactly trusting the French to deliver anything at this point, so the other bidder (Rosatom) is used for the next project.

Re:cutting corners

[Anonymous Coward]

This. France, as anyone who has actually lived it in will experience, holds some of the most duplicitous hypocrites I've ever had the displeasure of working with. Outwardly they're all culture and meritocracy and honour, but behind closed doors it's all the same bullshit as everywhere else, except with no sense that they're doing anything untoward. It's like they've never left their Revolutionary attitude of Righteous Harm - new Great Terror, same as the old Terror.

(I'm still pissed off at their bullshit freedom-of-speech marches following the Hebro massacre. CH have had more run-ins with the French government than with Islamic nutjobs. Of course the latter are worse in that they use summary execution rather than lawsuits and theats of imprisonment, but they're cut from the same cloth.)

Re:cutting corners

[tehcyder]

They were caught red-handed cutting corners at the Olkiluoto site in Finland. Finns take security very seriously and hence the plant is already years late..

Yet another example of how interfering in the free market just ruins it for everyone.

If the communist Finns had just let the French build a quick and dirty version, they could have sorted out any resulting accidental deaths through the courts, thereby reducing the upfront costs and allowing the shareholders time to extract the profits before they could be wasted on compensation and paying government "safety" inspectors' exorbitant salaries.

Re:cutting corners

[tehcyder]

The contract includes fines for delays, and the Finns (no pun intended)

(and no pun made)

Re:cutting corners

[dj245]

The contract includes fines for delays, and the Finns (no pun intended) have now charged Billions worth of 'late fees' to Areva. Areva promised the moon and can't deliver. It would be great if public projects in the US would include the same sort of strong rules as what the Finns did here. No more overtime and over budget as the norm when building roads and bridges. A project being late would mean that tax payer money would increase instead of dwindling.

Most large utility contracts do have such clauses. They are called liquidated damages or "LDs". In new gas turbine , steam turbine, and wind turbine contracts, there are late fees for drawing and documentation, usually around $500-2,000 per day per document. Then there are late delivery LDs, which vary depending on the equipment but $50,000-100,000 per day for a gas or steam turbine isn't uncommon. Lastly, there are startup LDs, which are late fees for if the equipment isn't functionally complete and operating by a certain date. Startup LDs are a lot more of a headache because one vendor's delay often causes a delay with other vendors. Proving what is a "delay" and who caused it can be a major hassle. I'm glad I am not involved in this particular project because it sounds like a disaster.

Re:cutting corners

[houghi]

This already happens a lot in Belgium. It just does not happen often enough and not all the time. Obviously companies have adapted to the situation and will give longer times than needed.

It will also increase the price, so it is often used only for highways and the like.

Companies can even sometimes get an extra bonus if they are ready earlier. Understand that a highway closed for 8 hours is probably worse then a road where 3 people live for a whole year.

We also see billboards with the estamated price of the project. This will obviously not work all the time.

Where I live, I received a letter from the city how long it would take to replace a bidge. A few weeks later, I receved a second letter (well, a small booklet) to inform me that it would take several months longer. This due to the worse state the bridge was in and thus more repair was needed.

They were ready on the day that was promised in the second letter (one day early I think).

Re:cutting corners

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's not blame this on the Revolution. France has gone through what, six republics, two or three monarchies, a couple of empires, and the Paris commune since then. The political landscape has changed more and more often than pretty much anywhere else in the world. I'm not disagreeing with you at all, but your rhetoric is just plain ignorant. You have no idea what the Terror was or any of the currents and tides since then, or you wouldn't make the comparison. It's like suggesting that Charlemagne's division of his empire is relevant to current political dealings. I'm sure that you have good reasons for being pissed at the French, and I am pretty damn ignorant of anything remotely political over there now, I just know that one or two things have happened since the Revolution was relevant to current events.

Re:The Left is in charge

[sjames]

I've been hearing that since the '80s.

the problem with nuclear power

[Gravis Zero]

once you have reactors, you're stuck with them for the better part of a century and when shit goes wrong, it goes really wrong.

can we start switching over to solar panels and batteries yet? seriously, we are bombarded by free power every single day!

Re: the problem with nuclear power

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you want to power stuff with at night? There's a need for multiple sources of power.

Re:the problem with nuclear power

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, come build solar plants to Finland, but don't cut the powers from the nuclear and other plants, just yet. Let's wait and see one winter.

Re:the problem with nuclear power

[Anonymous Coward]

...can we start switching over to solar panels and batteries yet? seriously, we are bombarded by free power every single day!...

I'm waiting to see what happens in Germany on March 23. They've gone solar in a big way, and on that day they get a full eclipse.....

Re:the problem with nuclear power

[Anonymous Coward]

Eclipse doesn't last very long. If they have storage capacity for short winter days, an eclipse should be nothing.

Re: the problem with nuclear power

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Synthetic gas? Not to mention that night has traditionally been the less-demanding period.

Re:the problem with nuclear power

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Not full. And it happens in the morning. And eclipses can be predicted. I think Germans should just turn off their TVs and computers and whatever and just go watch the astronomical wonder.

Re:the problem with nuclear power

[Anonymous Coward]

http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html

Re:the problem with nuclear power

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly those solar panels and bateries are still not there technologically and economically. Also, manufacturing enough of them to replace worlds nuclear power would be a bigger ecological catastrophe than 100 fukushimas.

Re:the problem with nuclear power

[Registered Coward v2]

once you have reactors, you're stuck with them for the better part of a century and when shit goes wrong, it goes really wrong.

can we start switching over to solar panels and batteries yet? seriously, we are bombarded by free power every single day!

While solar has promise it faces a similar issue as many other power generation solutions do: NIMBY. People want power from a wall outlet but don't want production facility nearby, whether it's nuclear, coal, wind, solar or what have you.

Re:the problem with nuclear power

[Anonymous Coward]

What? You mean my solar panel doesn't work when it's covered with snow? WHAAAAAAATTTT???

You mean I'm going to have to bust up my furniture and start a camp fire in my living room until the sun comes up?

Re:the problem with nuclear power

[Anonymous Coward]

HELL YES! Would it kill your economy to have non-critical industries down tools for a moment, and go watch nature in all her wondrous beauty? Maybe you'll go home that night a little bit humbled by perspective, and go out the next morning with a better idea of your place in the universe, and determined to make the world a better place?

Re:the problem with nuclear power

[Anonymous Coward]

can we start switching over to solar panels and batteries yet? seriously, we are bombarded by free power every single day!

There are zero people stopping you from doing this for yourself, or of starting a business if you think it is worthwhile.

Re:the problem with nuclear power

[serviscope_minor]

And eclipses can be predicted.

Yeah, but what happens if Ming the Merciless starts his attack, huh, buddy?

Re:the problem with nuclear power

[Anonymous Coward]

While solar has promise it faces a similar issue as many other power generation solutions do: NIMBY. People want power from a wall outlet but don't want production facility nearby, whether it's nuclear, coal, wind, solar or what have you.

production facility nearby? you put solar panels on your roof, dummy!

Re:the problem with nuclear power

[Anonymous Coward]

Dont' worry dude. We are moving that way and this conversation is irrelevant. Search for the Feb. Agora report on growth trends and projections in the solar industry. A very nice up to date look. We're talking 2 to 5 terrawatts of installed capacity in the next few decades. 200 GW per year indefinitely under the most conservative assumptions (no new tech or mfg improvements) 700 to 1700 GW solar power added annually to the grid under optimistic scenarios. The scope is unfathomable. Its conceivable with this new found "yieldco" structure, (see SUNE,SPWR,FSLR,CSIQ,JKS,TSL), the collective value of these assets could support trillion dollar valuations of multiple companies.

5000 GW of solar energy on the global grid and their report doesn't even factor what happens when batteries decrease in cost when they are produced in similar scales. An 8% annual improvement in energy/kg or cost/kwh combined will half the cost of batteries every 8 years. In 2 decades the world will be transformed into a green energy paradise. Its impossible to beleive that no one sees it coming. We've been through this disruptive technology paradigm so many times recently. Its shocking really. Still no one recognizes the solar industry, but it has quietly grown quite large and cheap. We are adding 50GW/year and growing by 30% still. ammoritzed cost of solar power, without subisides is below 6 cents/kWh in Texas, almost 4cents with the ITC credit.

Re: the problem with nuclear power

[OzPeter]

What do you want to power stuff with at night? There's a need for multiple sources of power.

Pumped water storage has been around for a long time. Just look at the Bath County Pumped Storage Station in Virginia which has a 3GW capacity.

It is a perfect match for renewable energy sources.

Re:the problem with nuclear power

[Yoda222]

Helsinki has less than 6 hours of daylight in the winter with a maximum elevation of 6 degrees (on worst day), so it's not easy for solar arrays. And it's in the southern part of Finland so it's worse for the rest of the country. (to be honest the southern part of Finland is also where the vast majority of Finns are living) Nordic countries are not the best place for solar power. But other (renewable or not) sources can be considered, of course.

Re: the problem with nuclear power

[Eunuchswear]

It can generate 3GW. That's big.

But what is it's capacity?

The upper reservoir on Little Back Creek has [...] storage capacity of 35,599 acre feet (43,911,000 m3).

When generating power, the water flow can be as much as 13.5 million US gallons (51,000 m3) per minute (850 m3/s).

So it can generate 3GW for 51,660 seconds, about 14 and a half hours.

It's capacity is 43GWh.

Better not have more than 14 hours of windless days.

Re:the problem with nuclear power

[Eunuchswear]

If they have storage capacity for short winter days, an eclipse should be nothing.

That's a big "if".

The answer is that they, like everyone else, have essentially no storage capacity. On dark, windless days they burn coal and import nuclear electricty from France.

(On bright, windy days they export electricity to France for basicly zero cost).

Re: the problem with nuclear power

[cheesybagel]

Only problem is the construction of pumped storage is expensive like heck.

Re: the problem with nuclear power

[HornWumpus]

Haven't done the research, but I'm willing to bet Finland is winter night peaking, not summer day.

Re:the problem with nuclear power

[Anonymous Coward]

Batteries? You do know that pumping water upstream is the correct way to store energy in large scale, not using puny electrochemical cells, right?

Re: the problem with nuclear power

[K. S. Kyosuke]

You may think so, but for example, this document claims (on page 11) that there's a morning peak and an evening peak, it says nothing about a night peak.

Re:the problem with nuclear power

[Anonymous Coward]

While solar has promise it faces a similar issue as many other power generation solutions do: NIMBY.

Yes, that's a problem when solar is being done by a traditional power company trying to squeeze out every penny of profit.

Fortunately there's a solution - OMR (On My Roof). Imagine if *every* roof had panels on it. We'd get used to that just as we've gotten used to roof tiles, etc. Of course, we'd still need a grid, some power storage mechanisms (batteries, hydro-pumping, etc), and maybe even some power stations

OK, so that's the utopia, now just just need to figure out how to get there.

Re: the problem with nuclear power

[HornWumpus]

Link is broken.

I'm talking about yearly peak. In summer you have two typical peaks, noon - 2pm and 5pm-7pm. In winter you have heating peak at night, usually just before dawn.

Places that have an absolute peak in summer are summer daytime peaking, places that have an absolute peak in winter are winter nighttime. Given Finland's latitude I'd be amazed if they were not winter peaking. But it largely depends on how much electric heat they use.

Nuclear ain't cheap any more.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nuclear used to be cheap when directly connected to military money (and thus to tax money). Now it has to stand more and more on its own feet. I think it just ain't worth the hassle.

Makes me sad for the great French people who have been enticed to over-invest in this dud

Re:Nuclear ain't cheap any more.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The tricky question(and the one that I've been bombarded with vehement and competing answers on, which has left me confused) is whether nuclear isn't cheap; but military procurement slush used to make it look that way; or whether nuclear could have become cheap; but military procurement slush made that unnecessary and potentially even directly inhibited it.

It's definitely the case that military purposes kept the money rolling in for R&D, pesky questions about safety and storage largely under wraps, purchases of a lot of equipment that could also make plutonium, and some PR-piece "Look at how fuzzy and peaceful nuclear energy can be!" reactor installs at home and in selected friendly-and-not-too-likely-to-change locations abroad.

It's likely that, at the same time, this left the industry largely in the hands of companies that are very, very, good at government contracting; but perhaps a bit shaky on less lucrative and parasitic forms of economic activity.

Where the optimists and the pessimists part ways is the question of whether nuclear energy is in fact just not terribly economic; and so achieved certain unique capabilities for cost insensitive customers, while largely floundering without them; or whether nuclear energy as an industry was wildly distorted by catering exclusively to select cost insensitive customers with substantially different needs than energy production, and simply needs to develop product lines that reflect current requirements.

Re:Nuclear ain't cheap any more.

[Anonymous Coward]

You all are thinking about it weird American way. This is source of vast majority of French electricity, not one contractor for a few cities. And this is not tsunami prone Japan. This is public-private corporate issues, not issue with nuclear power. If US budget had $5B fall, it would be a freaking roundoff error.

Also, really, no one has pointed out the major bias that mdsolar has had in submitting stories with editorial slant like this one?

Re:Nuclear ain't cheap any more.

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't it depend on whether that md in mdsolar stands for "must destroy" solar?

Re:Nuclear ain't cheap any more.

[Anonymous Coward]

Makes me sad for the great French people

You go on being sad. The French will go on exporting the cheapest electricity in Europe to foolish neighbors that green wash their coal fired base-load with fig leaf solar panels.

And the "global pullback" is a fiction. Since Fukushima China has put eight large power reactors into operation (Fangjiashan 1, Ling Ao Phase II unit 2, Ningde 1&2, Hongyanhe 1&2, Yangjiang 1 and Fuqing 1.) The US has five reactors under construction (Watts Bar 2, Vogtle 3&4, V.C.Summer 2&3.) Between China, India and S. Korea there are 36 power reactors under construction (China: Hongyanhe units 3&4, Ningde units 3&4, Fuqing unit 2, Yangjiang units 2&3&4, Sanmen units 1&2, Haiyang units 1&2, Taishan units 1&2, Shandong Shidaowan, Fangchenggang units 1&2, Changjiang units 1&2, Fuqing units 3&4, Tianwan units 3&4, India: Kudankulam 2, Kalpakkam, Kakrapar 3&4, Rajasthan 7&8, S. Korea: Shin Kori 3&4, Shin Hanul 1&2).

Russia began operating the worlds largest fast breeder reactor, the BN-800, last summer, and they'll have it at full power in 2015. Russia plans to build a fleet of fast breeders and close their nuclear fuel cycle with burning Plutonium.

So please, you navel-gazers go on indulging your sadness. The rest of the world is busy building their nuclear future at a pace you can't possibly fathom — and paying you and your little anxieties no attention at all.

Re:Nuclear ain't cheap any more.

[Anonymous Coward]

Very insightful and -- man I wish I had half your eloquence.

As a data point (supporting the "inherently expensive" side), watch what's happening in France: in the last decennia, nuclear power generation industry has tried to adapt to a more market oriented way of doing things: reactor safety teams, formerly part of each reactor were spun off to private companies, competing for contracts from the reactors. Guess which are chosen? Those with less "bad news".

Investing in long, long term safety is a bitch, and one which our short-term capitalistic economy doesn't grok very well.

Re:Nuclear ain't cheap any more.

[DerekLyons]

Are you talking about France? Or Russia? Or where then?

You sure as heck aren't talking about the US. The military (read Naval) reactor program parted ways with the civilian world decades ago - they're simply too dissimilar. Nor can civilian reactors effectively make plutonium, nor were they needed to. And the for companies involved in military reactors, government contracting is only one small corner of their business. Etc... etc...

Re:Nuclear ain't cheap any more.

[dotancohen]

The tricky question(and the one that I've been bombarded with vehement and competing answers on, which has left me confused) is whether nuclear isn't cheap; but military procurement slush used to make it look that way; or whether nuclear could have become cheap; but military procurement slush made that unnecessary and potentially even directly inhibited it.

That is pretty much what happened to the space industry, until SpaceX came along. And until SpaceX came along, nobody would have believed that space could be done both more cheaply _and_ more reliably.

Re: The Left is in charge

[cyber-vandal]

Left and right are both useless but this is a private company.

So far Areva has not delivered anything but delays

[Anonymous Coward]

Olkiluoto 3 was originally supposed to be in commercial production in 2009. Then it was postponed to 2011. Then 2013. And now, at the earliest, perhaps 2015. The whole project schedule has been overly optimistic and there have been numerous quality issues in welding, components and such. Apparently Areva was surprised about the Finnish officials being so strict about the quality guidelines and also failed to deliver all the design documentation to them in time (because in here, you simply don't build shit like this without plans). In 2009 they also threatened to delay the start of the final construction phase until TVO made changes to the contract in favor of Areva.

In 2012 Areva estimated the building costs being around 8,5 billion euros, which is quite a bit more than the shipping price of 3 billion.

So yeah, don't buy nuclear reactors from the French. Or cars for that matter.

Re:So far Areva has not delivered anything but del

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Are they just incompetent, or do they do most of their work for the same government that owns a third of their stock and not have a lot of experience with real customers?

Re:The Left is in charge

[Anonymous Coward]

If the Left were in charge, the company's 70% private stake would have been expropriated long ago.

Even British Labour's social democracy of the 1940s, which involved the commanding heights of industry all being nationalised and a comprehensive welfare state implemented, was centrist - the country still mostly operated by the investment and taxation of private capital.

"The Left" would be something like the socialism of Castro or Lenin. Compared to what came before, Castro and Lenin were both quite successful at achieving considerable advances for their country in short time. The USSR in particular did not "sink" until Gorbachev, although the seed of the problem was Khrushchev's desire to race again the West mostly by copying it (something China has learned from, which is why it's keen to develop an intellectual property industry, and why it puts the wind up America whenever China doesn't merely stick together something Designed In California).

We've moved so far to the right that anyone who doesn't treat Atlas Shrugged as a Holy Book is "The Left".

Yes

[Bruce66423]

They are both!

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone's getting rich off this (which might've been the whole point of the venture!)... so it's not a total waste.

Large Gen III+ reactors require special equipment.

[Futurepower(R)]

Also, Areva's reactors are so extremely large that special equipment is needed to make them. See this PDF file: How to Make Nuclear Cheap - The Breakthrough Institute. Quote: "Very large Gen III+ reactors have experienced construction delays and cost overruns."

Only thru third party effect

[aepervius]

Insurance, PR+NIMBY, and overpriced clean up make nuclear expansive. A realistic price for clean up and removing the cruft without removing the security and nuclear is not as pricey. Alternatively force coal to have zero radioactive emission like nuclear, and see how far you cheap electricity goes. Coal at the moment is allowed far more pollutant and far more radioactive emission than nuclear is allowed.

Re:So far Areva has not delivered anything but del

[pijokela]

I guess they are incompetent because they are having the same trouble with another reactor in France.

For a long time Areva was complaining that TVO, the company that bought the reactor in finland, was not doing everything required and that the safety requirements where somehow wrong, but since they have the same trouble in France with very favourable regulators - they must be incompetent.

The main problem has been to automation system. For the nuclear reactor safety standards, there must be two completely separate systems, so the other can be used as backup. I believe they have had a lot of trouble in creating two systems that are really separate, so that the other can really be used as a backup. Actual construction work at the site has been slowing down, because the designs just could not be finished.

Re:So far Areva has not delivered anything but del

[Cochonou]

There is something particular with the EPR and Olkiluoto 3 that is worth pointing out.
For the building of a french nuclear plant, the usual workshare is the following: Areva delivers the reactor equipment, while the EDF utility acts as the prime contractor for the construction of the plant.
For Olkiluoto 3, Areva took the lead, and operated as a turnkey plant manufacturer. This was actually part of a power struggle between Areva and EDF. You can see it did not turn out well.
Newer EPR plants (Flamanville, Taishan) reverted to a more traditional workshare.

Re:So far Areva has not delivered anything but del

[Anonymous Coward]

Besides, Olkiluoto, Flamanville, and Taishan are the first third-generation reactors to be built, so delays aren't that surprising.

But since plants then run for decades, a few years' delay won't make much financial difference.

In the mean time, the new Berlin airport is several years behind shedule, and it's just an airport

87%, not 29%

[Godwin O'Hitler]

"The government of France, the world's most nuclear dependent country, has a 29% stake in Areva"

Not according to Areva it hasn't.
http://www.areva.com/EN/financ...

"Today, public sector holdings (CEA, the French state and CDC) of group capital has risen close to 87%. 4% of AREVA’s share capital is float."

The French have a peculiar way of privatizing stuff. It sort of looks like the companies are private, but the state still ultimately owns them. And all these "private" companies are acting like global players. The problem is whose money are they playing with?

Re:87%, not 29%

[Anonymous Coward]

As opposed to US companies, which are completely transparent?

Re:87%, not 29%

[GroeFaZ]

Does it even matter who owns a nuclear power company? Those companies are highly regulated, they serve the same group of people that pay taxes (i.e. everybody), and if they are too big to fail, and something goes wrong for them financially, they will be bailed out with tax money anyway. Not to mention massive subsidies, which have been approved recently , just before the new EU commission took over.

Re:87%, not 29%

[Jesrad]

Allow me to translate from this french: "take its responsibility as a shareholder" = shoulder losses.

We here in France have what we call "état-stratège", where the taxpayer is turned into this wunderkind shareholder who holds lots of major stock forever and gets none of the dividends.

Re:87%, not 29%

[Anonymous Coward]

It can make it hard for said company to secure business outside of its home country. When national pride and national interest become part of business decisions, the company becomes too hard to trust. While there are some US companies like this, the most successful tend to be country-agnostic and dollar driven.

A good analogy would be buying stuff from a company in China...that reneges on your deadline because the State put it a work order. Large chinese works companies are risky business to foreigners for the exact same reason.

Re:87%, not 29%

[Anonymous Coward]

It depends on the link you're folliwng ;)
Here it's 28.83%:
http://www.areva.com/EN/finance-1166/shareholding-structure-of-the-world-leader-in-the-nuclear-industry-and-major-player-in-bioenergies.html

Re:87%, not 29%

[fche]

Yes, but it lets government bureaucrats play-act like they're entrepreneurs and brave businessguys and such.

Re:87%, not 29%

[Godwin O'Hitler]

Yes, but who owns CEA, the 54.37% shareholder? (Clue CEA = Atomic Energy Commision.)

Re:87%, not 29%

[cheesybagel]

They did get the dividends by having the cheapest electricity in Europe.

Solar Eclipse

[Anonymous Coward]

Just so people won't miss it. It's on the 20th, not the 23rd.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_eclipse_of_March_20,_2015

Additionally, over Germany it will only be a partial eclipse.

Nevertheless it's going to be interesting to see how our systems will cope. I can't find the article anymore but the solar capacity change will be somewhere between 5 to 15GW in only a few minutes.

Re:Solar Eclipse

[Eunuchswear]

Yup, I'm going to be keeping an eye on http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/france/

Wonder if we'll see an effect on the German export/import dial?

banks again ?

[Tom]

The only way you can have losses that exceed your net-worth is if someone has given you a huge amount of money that they really shouldn't. Typically, it means the banks gave these guys credit beyond even the most loose definition of sanity.

More and more I'm thinking that the fantasy worlds we live in when we play roleplaying or computer games are much closer to reality than the fantasy world of the financial industry.

Re:banks again ?

[cheesybagel]

They sold a turnkey nuclear power plant to Finland for $3.5 billion and I think the current cost so far is $8 billion and it isn't finished yet.

Re:The Left is in charge

[Viol8]

"he USSR in particular did not "sink" until Gorbachev,"

Heh, funny. The USSR had been virtually bankrupt since the 70s and spent a huge amount of what GDP it had on defense ti try and keep up with the USA. It still failed plus it plunged a hundred million people into a miserable existence of food queues and no prospects.

But you keep on dreaming the communist dream if you like. Whatever makes you happy.

Compare the alternatives

[Dr. Evil]

Death per kilowatt, etc.

Many of these nuclear costs are because of irrational fear. If no amount of safety is enough, no amount of spending will be enough.

Nuclear is already far safer than other power generation, including numbers from Fukishima.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/print/

Re:Compare the alternatives

[Runaway1956]

Depends on how you measure "safety". I grew up under the shadow of a coal powered plant. Back in those days, women routinely did their laundry, and hung that wet laundry outside on clothes lines to dry. In the village of West Pittsburgh, Pa, the women DID NOT hang their laundry out, because it would turn black before it dried.

Despite all the evils of that soot and coal dust, gardens were grown, children attended school, dinners were eaten, babies grew into young men and women, and life went on.

Tell me about life in Chernobyl today. How "safe" is nuclear power, compared to a huge coal burning plant up the road?

Relatively speaking, a nuclear disaster is far more dangerous, and far longer lasting than the alternatives that we have adapted to over the past couple centuries.

Re:Compare the alternatives

[CrimsonAvenger]

So, tell me about the number of fatalities associated with coal power. Include coal-mining deaths, since that's the only reason for them.

I note that there was a coal-mining accident in Ukraine the other day. It killed 30 people. Just that one accident.

Chernobyl killed about 60. Over the period since the accident, since that includes thyroid cancer deaths that are estimated to have happened due to the accident.

Oh, and since Chernobyl, the USA alone has suffered in excess of 830 coal mining deaths (in excess because I don't want to find a breakdown of 1986 coal mining deaths by month/day to allow a more exact number. But 1987 to 2014 add up to more than 830 by themselves).

So, coal is definitely safer. It pollutes, it does the CO2 thing, and it kills more people in normal operations that the worst nuclear disaster in history. Yeah, definitely safer...

Oh, and did you know that wildlife in the Chernobyl area is in much better shape than outside the exclusion zone?

Re:Compare the alternatives

[Runaway1956]

Are people living in the Chernobyl area? No? THAT is my point.

Yes, the wildlife is stronger and healthier. That is a tangential subject for discussion, but one that I am interested in. There are no crazy mutations of wolf, fox, wolverine, deer, or anything else. I've watched several videos now regarding wildlife around Chernobyl, most recently about the wolverine. Pretty awesome, IMHO.

All the same, the entire area is basically off-limits to humans, and ground zero is still dangerous as all hell. No one knows what has happened, or might happen, at the center of things. Is it even remotely possible that the radioactive materials MIGHT collect into a pool, deep in the ground, and reach critical mass? Face it - mankind lost control, and anything might happen now. Is any of that crap leaking into the water system, and simply hasn't been discovered (or acknowledged) yet? Are distant cities pumping any of it into their water systems?

As I suggested above - I grew up in coal country. The concerns you bring up are serious, but they are manageable. Chernobyl - not so manageable, huh? Fukishima? That has polluted cubic miles of ocean already, much of it headed toward America's west coast.

Nuclear power may be a good thing - but I don't trust any corporation or any government to manage it safely.

Re:Compare the alternatives

[dunkelfalke]

So you count coal mining deaths, but not uranium mining deaths?

Re:Compare the alternatives

[Dr. Evil]

The Ukraine mine had 32 this month. 101 died there in November 2007, 57 more the next month.

I grew up near a nuclear plant. We didn't know it was there except that the restricted building zone near the plant was full of baseball diamonds, beaches and nature trails. No, really.

Re:Compare the alternatives

[serviscope_minor]

Are people living in the Chernobyl area? No? THAT is my point.

so? It's rendered a tract of land uninhabitable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K...

I'm not sure anyone's living on top of that mess either, and it's by far the only one. OOh here's a better one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

Fun fact: not only is nuclear best in terms of death per kWh, it also renders the least land unusable per kWh generated. And yes that includes all the nuclear accidents.

Basically you're falling into the classic irrationality suffered by lots of people when dealing with nuclear. The events are very, very VERY rare and generally large. That makes them unpredictable (and therefore scary) and large (therefore newsworthy). If a nuclear accident happens anywhere in the world you hear about it.

Humans are generally bad at assessing the risks of rare events. Nuclear events are rare, very newsworthy and "scary" because radation is something out of most people's experience.

That doesn't make your gut feeling correct. Anf for every chernobyl you can point out (which is precisely one), there are hundreds of mining accidents, fly ash accidents, coal seam fires, and so on.

Like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

Have you ever heard about it? Say what you like about Chernobyl, but that accident you've probably not heard of unless you're (a) British and (b) over about 30 killed nearly 3x the number of people as Chernobyl (including cancer deaths).

and anything might happen now.

Well technically yes, but this illustrates my point. You're letting fear of the unknown completely dominate your risk assessments. Just because all the atoms in a box of gas might rush to one end (theoretically possible, statistically unlikely) doesn't mean it is ever likely to happen. So while "anything" might happen, it might still not be likely to happen before the heat death of the universe.

In order for the materials to reach a critical mass, there would have to be something to concentrate them. After that, what would happen is it would get hot (it almost certainly wouldn't even be prompt critical), melt, mix with some molten rock, become diluted and go subcritical again in short order.

As I suggested above - I grew up in coal country.

Yep. Score another one for poor risk assessment on the part of humans. We down-rate risks which are know to us over ones we don't understand. You're used to coal based risks and unused to nuclear based ones, so your assessment of them is way off.

The concerns you bring up are serious, but they are manageable. Chernobyl - not so manageable, huh?

Chernobyl is now pretty much managed. It's sitting there glowing away slowly and otherwise doing very little. They're currently building a new cover to go over it precisely to manage any remaining risks.

Fukishima? That has polluted cubic miles of ocean already, much of it headed toward America's west coast.

Yes we can detect the Fukishima radiation on the West coast. Sounds terrible, eh? Well, no. That actually says more about the astonishing sensitivity of nuclear detectors than it does about Fukishima.

The radation level is 8 disintergrations per cubic meter per second. That's 10 atoms per cubic meter! That amount is phenomenally small and is a testament to the sensitivity of the instruments. It's also far below (about 1%) of the natural background radation of seawater, and far FAR below the level of background radation if you either live at altitude or live on granite or other volcanic substances.

Re:Compare the alternatives

[serviscope_minor]

So you count coal mining deaths, but not uranium mining deaths?

Well, given you need 6 orders of magnitude more coal than you do Uranium, it's a fair bet that the number of uranium mining deaths are insignificant compared to coal simply due to the quantities involved.

Re:Compare the alternatives

[AmiMoJo]

False dichotomy. The choice is not nuclear or coal. There are many other sources of energy that are less dangerous than both.

Re:Compare the alternatives

[Runaway1956]

"Fun fact: not only is nuclear best in terms of death per kWh, it also renders the least land unusable per kWh generated. And yes that includes all the nuclear accidents."

Does that also count all the land from which the fissionables were mined? Several people here are pointing to coal mines, but they make no mention of mining operations that support the nuclear industries.

You claim that Chernobyl is "managed"? In the weeks after the accident, all the management that was possible was performed. Hundreds of workers sacrificed themselves to dump the concrete on top of the site. Wikipedia isn't the go-to place for information, but you've already used it. Wikipedia will suffice to make my own point.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

Today, the only "management" being done, is to man the gates that block access to the exclusion zone.

About sixty dead, huh? I don't accept that, any more than I accept the inflated figures of a million dead. A lot of people whose deaths might be attributed to the accident are simply not mentioned. For instance, scroll down to this guy's mention: Ignatenko, Vasyli Ivanovych - note his unborn baby's fate.

Alarmists, on the one hand, want to attribute every unfortunate death in the region to the accident. People who might lose money, status, or political capital are going to down play the numbers. I suspect that the real numbers are probably in the thousands, making both the high and low estimates ludicrous.

Re:Compare the alternatives

[AmiMoJo]

I grew up near a nuclear plant. We didn't know it was there except that the restricted building zone near the plant was full of baseball diamonds, beaches and nature trails. No, really.

They used to do that in the UK as well. It was supposed to make people living near the plant, people like you, feel safer and that the plant posed no danger to them.

They had to stop because the plant kept leaking dangerous material into the surrounding environment. Most of the problems were due to accidents when handling waste or moving things around, occasionally things like cracked containers. There were some fines but nothing much done about it, they pretty much just shrugged and closed off the paths in the affected areas. No, really.

Re:Compare the alternatives

[dunkelfalke]

Except that you don't mine pure uranium, you have to mine uranium ore (pitchblende) from what is mostly useless rock and then refine it while coal is basically ready to use and comes in seams. Coal dust is not good for your lungs, but uranium ore dust also gets you radioactive poisoning, and so does radon exposure, with the additional benefit of lung cancer. It is no coincidence that uranium mining used to be a prison-camp job.

This is how an uranium mine looks like. So much for orders of magnitude.

Re:Compare the alternatives

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that there are people living there. It's not recommended, but they're doing fine.

Re:Compare the alternatives

[Dr. Evil]

Any specific cases of radioactive spills in suburban England?

After Sept 11, 2001, in my hometown the visitor center got shut down and a few extra security measures were put in place. Some people thought it was due to cover-ups.

But then, some people also thought the strange plants growing in the waste heat pond from the reactor were radioactive.

Re:Compare the alternatives

[cheesybagel]

Actually there are some senior citizens living in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. People could live there just fine. It just not a good idea to grow any vegetables in there or dig around the dirt too much.

Re:Compare the alternatives

[serviscope_minor]

Does that also count all the land from which the fissionables were mined? Several people here are pointing to coal mines, but they make no mention of mining operations that support the nuclear industries.

Not sure, but given the difference in energy density (6 orders of magnitude IIRC), the stats are not in coal's favour.

You claim that Chernobyl is "managed"?

It is now, yes.

In the weeks after the accident, all the management that was possible was performed.

Yes, and that is a form of management. The GP claimed that it was unmanaged, which is patently false.

. Hundreds of workers sacrificed themselves to dump the concrete on top of the site. Wikipedia isn't the go-to place for information, but you've already used it. Wikipedia will suffice to make my own point.

Uh... for someone quoting wikipedia, you need to actually read it. The "hundreds" you refer to is actually 60.

Today, the only "management" being done, is to man the gates that block access to the exclusion zone.

Apparently they're building a new cover. But so? What extra management needs to be done? Again the GP claimed that it is/was unmanaged. If you need to keep people out, and that's all you need to do and you are doing it then you are managing it.

About sixty dead, huh? I don't accept that, any more than I accept the inflated figures of a million dead.

OK, so a few hundred dead then? What do you accept? Either way, it's still safer than the alternatives by a long way. The UN originally predicted about 4000 deaths due to cancer, but that used a linear no-threshold model of radiation exposure which is looking less and less likely to be correct and seriously overesimates the effect of radiation.

Nonetheless, the numbers are small, very small. And this is the worst ever disaster from a powerplant of a sort never built in the west (strongly positive feedback coefficient) and that no longer exists (all remaining RBMKs have been modified to a much lower void coefficient).

By comparison, the coal industry pollution in the US shortens about 24,000 lives per year of which 2,800 apparently are due to cancer. So, even accepting the enlarged numbers, the total worldwide deaths from the worst ever nuclear accident are around 1/10 of the deaths *per year* in the US alone from coal pollution. And that's ignoring the minors.

So, either way, nuclear is vastly safer than coal. You have to bump the number of deaths quite high before it reaches the safety levels of the next-most-safe which IIRC is either solar or wind.

Re:Compare the alternatives

[Anonymous Coward]

You are completely and utterly wrong.

"This latest report finds that over 7,500 deaths each year are attributable to fine particle pollution from U.S. power plants. This represents a dramatic reduction in power plant health impacts from the previous studies...

Our 2004 study showed that power plant impacts exceeded 24,000 deaths a year, but by 2010 that had been reduced to roughly 13,000 deaths due to the impact that state and federal actions were beginning to have. The updated study shows that strong regulations that require stringent emission controls can have a dramatic impact in reducing air pollution across the country, saving lives, and avoiding a host of other adverse health impacts."

Re:Compare the alternatives

[Runaway1956]

"Uh... for someone quoting wikipedia, you need to actually read it. The "hundreds" you refer to is actually 60."

Sixty people didn't contain that disaster. A hell of a lot more than sixty people answered the call - some few were recognized. These sixty mentioned on Wikipedia's page are the "official" group of people who sacrificed themselves. The rest are to be swept under the rug, without so much as an honorable mention. Maybe their widows and children got a modest little pension as a "thank you".

Re:Compare the alternatives

[serviscope_minor]

Fine even if I accept your points, the rest of mine still stand, and I still addressed the case where it caused thousands of deaths. Well done for picking the single least relevant point.

Re:Compare the alternatives

[Dr. Evil]

Baseload power comes from nuclear, coal, geothermal or hydroelectric. Hydroelectric is limited, environmentally difficult and already exploited to the max. geothermal is highly regional.

Solar and wind will be great some day.... but they don't stand a chance at current baseload generation.

That leaves nuclear and coal.

What are the other options?

Re:Compare the alternatives

[Anonymous Coward]

Baseload power comes from nuclear, coal, geothermal or hydroelectric. Hydroelectric is limited, environmentally difficult and already exploited to the max. geothermal is highly regional.

Solar and wind will be great some day.... but they don't stand a chance at current baseload generation.

They come from those, but they don't HAVE to come from those. Since the baseload (guaranteed or minimum demand) changes over the day, and that change fairly well correlates with the availability of the sun, solar power is much better at being baseload than the unreactive behemoth of nuclear power (which only delivers the minimum daily amount, which fluffers insist is "baseload" to make anything else "worthless").

Solar DOES make baseload NOW. And better than nuclear. Unless you redefine baseload to make it fit nuclear's usage.

Re:Compare the alternatives

[MrL0G1C]

Chernobyl killed over 60

That's the most deceitful count of Chernobyl deaths I've ever heard. The lowest reasonable estimate is 9000 deaths, The extreme estimate is nearly a million deaths. 60 deaths is perhaps the first day death toll and excludes 99.9+% of the people who died as a result of the disaster.

http://www.theecologist.org/Ne...

Re:Compare the alternatives

[serviscope_minor]

So much for orders of magnitude.

You can't just dismiss numbers because you don't like them. Or, if you prefer, (in your best crocadile dundee accent) That's not a mine, this http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi... is a mine.

Either way so what? That's one large uranium mine. There are more large coal mines, because Uranium has 4*10^6 higher energy density. Even if uranium was evenly distributed through the Earth's crust (at 2.6ppm), then you'd still need to mine 1/10 of the volume to get the equivalent energy of coal.

And it's not uniformly distributed, it's much more concentrated than that.

OK, so let's try again.

From wikipedia: The worldwide production of uranium in 2012 amounted to 58,394

For coal, it was 7,000,000,000 tonnes.

Even given low concentrations that's a lot of zeros to play with.

Seriously though you're arguing against the wildly insanely huge energy density of nuclear fuels, which is frankly silly.

Re:Compare the alternatives

[serviscope_minor]

That's the most deceitful count of Chernobyl deaths I've ever heard. The lowest reasonable estimate is 9000 deaths, The extreme estimate is nearly a million deaths.

Except the UN estimated 4,000 deaths using a (nearly debunked and overly pessimistic) zero threshold model.

60 people is how many died on the day due to the accident.

More will have died later due to other things. But comparing like with like, hundreds die in mining and spoil heap accidents. Thousands die per year due to blacklung and other ailments.

Re:Compare the alternatives

[Mike Van Pelt]

>Are people living in the Chernobyl area? No? THAT is my point.

Actually, a few people are living in the Chernobyl area. Some of the old folks didn't evacuate, and some of them moved back.

Interestingly, the people who moved back to Chernobyl and Pripyat are doing better, health and longevity wise, than the people who stayed away.

Re:Compare the alternatives

[CrimsonAvenger]

Are people living in the Chernobyl area? No? THAT is my point.

Yes, actually a few are.

Illegally mind you, but so what? The only real problem with living there is the law against it and a slightly increased chance of thyroid cancer (for values of "slightly increased" that are smaller than your chances of increased lung cancer deaths living near a coal-fired plant)

Re:Compare the alternatives

[Dr. Evil]

"Solar DOES make baseload NOW. And better than nuclear. Unless you redefine baseload to make it fit nuclear's usage."

From Wikipedia, the largest solar plant in the world is at 550MW, opened this year, sits in the desert and takes up 6 sq km

Fukishima generated 4.7GW, opened 43 years ago, sits outside Tokyo and takes up 3.5 sq km.

I'm very pro-solar. I support all R&D in the area and I think it's the future.... however I imagine a future of distributed generation, distributed storage and distributed load, addressing generation, storage and distribution issues. 50sq km of solar farm in Tokyo and surrounds would be impossible, and PV isn't going to become 1000% more efficient any time soon. 50sq km of rooftops + conservation + wind, + etc etc, Very possible... of course it will take a lot more at a more northern latitude.

... but we need energy now.

Re:Compare the alternatives

[Anonymous Coward]

He's not lying. Wikipedia has a list, so presumably does the IAEA, the UK does show up a couple times. People are stupid, there have been a handful of deaths from radiological incidents over the years, but minor safety incidents are treated as a huge deal. Read an IAEA report about the incident of your choice and see if you an fault the process.

If you were asking about a situation that harmed random civilians, that's probably not happened.

Re:Compare the alternatives

[Dr. Evil]

He's claiming that poor plant maintenance activities caused random civilians to be exposed in the area around the plants that this occurs all the time and was even addressed by the authorities with fines.

I call BS.

Re:Compare the alternatives

[macpacheco]

Uranium has 2 million times more energy per ton than Uranium. So when its said and done, considering that current nuclear reactor use less than 1% of mined uranium and most uranium mines have 1-2% ore concentration, you end up having to mine 0.5% uranium ore vs coal to get the same energy.
Plus the nuclear industry is held to a very different safety standard and scrutiny, so it invests on safety not just on the nuclear plants, but throughout the whole supply chain, including mines. That's why there has been a single nuclear related death in the USA for over a decade, it was a uranium mining accident, a single death, compared to coal killing an estimated 13000 people yearly in the same USA, so we're comparing a single nuclear death for around 200k deaths from coal in the same period.
If the coal industry were held to the same standards that nuclear is held (safety wise, radiation wise, fatality wise) the coal industry would be shutdown in a heartbeat. Big Coal used all of its influence to avoid being regulated like nuclear is.

Re:The Left is in charge

[tehcyder]

..And France is sinking like a rock. This is just one example.

Yes, the whole nuclear power industry started from scratch a couple of years ago when the Socialists got in.

Nuclear is not cheap

[sjbe]

Nuclear is cheap.

Nuclear (specifically fission) power generation is cheap. All the safety systems, regulatory oversight, large construction projects, waste management/disposal, licensing, project management, environmental impact, financing and maintenance of nuclear power are tremendously expensive. And you cannot separate the power generation from the rest of those items.

Re:Nuclear is not cheap

[cheesybagel]

The amortized costs are cheaper. The capital expenditure costs are only a problem if you don't have the capital to invest in it.

Re:The Left is in charge

[gl4ss]

it's actually more than that.

the company by all means should be already bankrupt. its just that french government ownership goes through couple of different ways to it, making it more than 70.

I mean, who the fuck would keep holdings in a company like this other than the french government? it should be bankrupt.

Passive cooling != No cooling

[sjbe]

Well as an example, the new thorium reactors don't even need cooling as the reaction is cut off immediately when there's a failure.

Thorium reactors don't need cooling? I think you don't understand the physics involved. Some newer reactor designs have passive cooling systems which are (theoretically) safer but they still need and have cooling systems. Fission generates heat which is used to drive turbines. If you have heat you must have a cooling system. It takes a substantial amount of time for a fission reactor to cool even once the reaction is shut down and you have to have some form of cooling system in place to do that.

Re:Passive cooling != No cooling

[Twinbee]

I misspoke there. I meant to say, they don't need constant cooling to prevent a catastrophe as the reaction can be stopped immediately if need be. I didn't mean they don't need cooling for normal operation.

I'm not 100% sure of the above, but that's what I meant.

Re:Passive cooling != No cooling

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatabout Nachzerfallswärme* ? Sure as hell it exists with ANY fission and breeding reactor. Stick with the facts and dont play in the hands of the scaremongers by false pro-nuclear claims.

* For weeks, something like 1% of operating thermal power is generated by the spontaneous fission of follow-on nucleides from the U23x or Pu fission reaction. You need to remove that 1% of power or your reactor core is going to melt into "corium". Removing that 1% of power is done by simply pumping a few m^3 of fresh water into the depressured reactor and let it vent steam from boiling water. The steam is harmless compared to corium mixing with water. You need to do this QUICKLY. Shoot the beancounters and simply pump in water with a mobile fire engine. You need to do this in the first three hours after loss of cooling flow.

Having said that, the "core will melt to the center of earth" bullshit is Maoist AgitProp. Both in Harrisburg and Fukushima the "corium" did not even pierce the reactor vessel.

Count All OIL COSTS

[Anonymous Coward]

Just recently: 100k people killing in an Oil War in Iraq.

Face it: we are programmed by a bunch of morally corrupt people with religious fervour. They call themselves "green".

Re:Count All OIL COSTS

[Wootery]

I don't recall Dubya calling himself green.

Re:Count All OIL COSTS

[Runaway1956]

Can't blame that on the oil. Blame it on human greed. Anything of value can motivate greedy people to kill for it. People have been killed over water rights - does that make water dangerous?

According to MAOISTS

[Anonymous Coward]

..thats true.

The rest of the world will be powered by fission and fusion. See China.

Regarding the Maoists - they have been smoked out of China only to resurface in Berlin and Washington.

Maoist Bull$hit

[Anonymous Coward]

If we would simply let the plants de-radiate for 200 years, disassembly would be much cheaper.

It is only the Maoists, in the pay of the oil-gaz-war industry, who set goalposts such that all competitors to oil and gaz are "too expensive".

Re:So far Areva has not delivered anything but del

[Orgasmatron]

Ahh, but delays actually make a huge difference.

http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~bl...

It sounds like the European anti-nuke nutjobs have been paying attention to how the American crazies killed off the American nuclear industry.

Whatabout Guarantees for Solar Cells And Windmills

[Anonymous Coward]

..they fuck especially poor Germans (and we have a lot of those, most having a fulltime job) especially hard.

Nuclear will make baseload 24/7/365 with PLANNED downtime, while the Maoist Energy Sources (MESS) will only make energy when the god of Collectivism decides to GRANT us energy.

The Daimler plant here switched to GAZ for electricity production. I am sure Vlad Gazman likes having us by the balls.

BINGO

[Anonymous Coward]

Both the Russkies and the Chinese build fission reactors. LOTS of them, actually.

Just in the morally rotten west (thanks to all the Maoist propaganda operators who needed to monetize their AgitProp Dreck - oil and gaz were willing to pay) we are scared to hell from nuclear power.

If we were just remotely as "rational" and "enlightened" as we claim to be, we would build as many nuclear reactors as the Russkies and the Chinese. The truth is that we have become Sheeple who are willing victims to the AgitProp Wolves of all shades.

Just compare the number of people killed by nuclear/kWh and number of people killed by other sources of electrical energy. You will figure that with CURRENT reactors, it is the most humane technology of all.

It just does not resonate with Big Oil, Big War and Big Gaz.

Re:BINGO

[Anonymous Coward]

Meanwhile in the Far East, they build cut-rate nuclear reactors (Fukushima). If the Japanese reactors aren't up to par, it REALLY makes me fear the corners being cut in the Chinese versions! (GULP!)

Re:BINGO

[cheesybagel]

The reactor itself was fine. It was just built on the wrong place. You aren't supposed to build a reactor like that in a flooding prone area.

MDSOLAR IS A TROLL

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing to see here. Move along.

Re:MDSOLAR IS A TROLL

[MachineShedFred]

mdsolar may be anti-nuclear power, but that doesn't make the story any less alarming. One of the leaders in nuclear generating technology is essentially bankrupt.

Re:MDSOLAR IS A TROLL

[macpacheco]

There is plenty of evidence Areva EPR design was the result of lack of innovation. They designed a reactor without any major simplification, without using passive safety, just adding more and more engineered safety.
With the current level of insane nuclear regulatory complexity Areva's design choices were the touch of death. Yet, I think China will manage to get their EPRs online, showing that even with all of their extra costs ariving from their design, a huge slice of the nuclear problem comes after the reactor is designed and licensed, but actual construction starts. China has a more realistic nuclear regulatory framework, like South Korea and India. In those countries reactors are being built at 1/3 to 1/4 of the cost in the USA or Europe.

Re:The Left is in charge

[Jesrad]

I've been living that since the '80s.

Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Most parts of the Chernobyl exclusion zone are already inhabited by very healthy animals again. Actually, they have better chances of survival because insane home sapiens does not want to convert this piece of land into something economical, too. Like we do with the last 1000 or so Tiger's territory.

Thats the same argument as yours.

On the aniversary of Back to the Future?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess Mr Fusion had a bigger impact than we thought

Re:The Left is in charge

[Anonymous Coward]

What does "virtually bankrupt" mean? Greece is virtually bankrupt, the US is virtually bankrupt, bla bla bla. Either an organisation is in a recoverable/sustainable position or it is not. The USSR's fate was not sealed before Gorbachev.

Indeed, trying to play catch-up with the US was its primary error.

Your "miserable existence of food queues and no prospects" rhetoric suggests to me that you are interested in beating some political drum. Whether a product is unavailable (as tends to be the case for poorer people in socialist societies) or unaffordable (as tends to be the case for poorer people in capitalist societies) is immaterial to the person who needs it. There is misery in every nation and every regime, and the bright and the cunning always have the oppportunity to rise past it, and the infantile ideologues will always thank their quasi-religion.

I'm absolutely no communist - I just like to base my position on facts and clear definitions. It takes a special sort of insecurity for a person to equivocate. Perhaps the long term view of the USSR, once the propaganda of victory is torn away, will be that it survived two decades longer than American capitalism, which - following regular bailouts and reboots - was firmly put to rest in the '70s.

Re:Whatabout Guarantees for Solar Cells And Windmi

[dunkelfalke]

They are in the similar ballpark, but without the horrendous dismantling costs. And renewable costs actually go down with time, not up. Also Germany still doesn't have a place for long term storage of nuclear waste. So I'd say long live Maoist Energy Sources.

I am also fine with natural gas, to be honest. Russia has been a reliable supplier even during the worst cold war days.

Re:The Left is in charge

[JBMcB]

The USSR in particular did not "sink" until Gorbachev,

The USSR started sinking after it stopped raping it's Warsaw Pact allies for food, manpower and natural resources. It's easy to focus on industrialization and modernization when you can just steal food from eastern European countries you have control over. My Romanian and Ukrainian friends have stories about that...

I also notice your timeline of the great successes of the USSR seems to bounce over Stalin, under whom most of the modernization and industrialization took place (Lenin was only in charge for roughly 7 years.)

IRAN

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm certain there is someone who will partner with the failing company . . .

Westinghouse too

[mdsolar]

Westinghouse's AP1000 is facing delays in China and the US causing huge cost overruns. http://chronicle.augusta.com/n...

Re:Westinghouse too

[dj245]

Westinghouse's AP1000 is facing delays in China and the US causing huge cost overruns. http://chronicle.augusta.com/n...

To be fair, I have worked with some of these Westinghouse guys and they are fairly universally not up to the task of playing in this industry. I'm not surprised they have tripped over their own dicks.

Re:Westinghouse too

[Anonymous Coward]

How could you when the enviros have delayed every single fucking project by a decade? Believe it or not, a large fraction of your workforce retires over a decade, and when the courts prevent working, well, a whole bunch of the smart ones go somewhere else for job satisfaction.

Re:Westinghouse too

[cheesybagel]

If the customer keeps demanding changes of course you get delays as a result. The major delay was caused by the Chinese issuing a one year stop construction order after Fukushima to review all new reactor construction. Then you get revisions and changes to the design and you get delays. Little surprise there.

Math wrong

[mdsolar]

Solar power displaces the use of those fuel based methods. They are used less, not more.

Re:Whatabout Guarantees for Solar Cells And Windmi

[Applehu Akbar]

I see two possible outcomes for Germany: either the currently operating nukes will be kept running, or the nation's baseload will to totally converted over to lignite, in which case the Greens will declare a great victory. Carbon matters for Greens when it suits them.

Re: The Left is in charge

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you Americans learn to do something else than consuming fatty Burgers and Disney shite. Areva effectively is a State Company. Very much like Gazprom is one. If you fuck with Areva, DGSE will ultimately send a killer for you.

Ask Greenpeace for details, they tried to fuck with french nuclear. And with Russian gaz. Almost same result.

Re: The Left is in charge

[Anonymous Coward]

Areva is a new name of the industrial spin-off of CEA, the French nuclear agency... saying that it is a private company is sort of like saying that Amtrak is a private company. A few decades back France took a number of government agencies and made them "private" companies, but they run basically as monopolies, and so heavily regulated as to make them de-facto government entities.

Smaller reactors are better.

[Futurepower(R)]

I looked at all the comments. There don't seem to be any that mention the underlying issue. Areva makes HUGE reactors. Management of large constructions causes expensive problems. Dealing with a disaster in a huge reactor is also far more difficult.

Quote: "Generally, modern small reactors for power generation are expected to have greater simplicity of design, economy of mass production, and reduced siting costs. Most are also designed for a high level of passive or inherent safety in the event of malfunction."

The Areva design does not have "passive or inherent safety".

Re:Smaller reactors are better.

[Maury Markowitz]

> Generally, modern small reactors for power generation are expected to have
> greater simplicity of design, economy of mass production, and reduced siting costs

All of these statements are likely true, except that they assume, as the quote notes, "mass production".

Nuclear power economy scales *very* strongly with reactor size. That's why almost all modern reactor designs are around 1 GWe. There are somewhat smaller designs, like CANDU6, but they have been unable to compete with the larger designs in the market.

The *very* small designs, the SMR's that you're referring to, attempt to address this through a modular scale-out. But in order for this to work, you need mass production, hundreds or thousands of modules. Until that time, the price/performance appears to be *terrible*. So everyone's sitting on their hands waiting for someone else to pull the trigger. After decades, no one has.

Re:Smaller reactors are better.

[cheesybagel]

The price/performance of nuclear is great. Similar to coal in countries without coal deposits and slightly over coal elsewhere. Coal is the cheapest power generation method but also the dirtiest by far.

The nuclear power plant construction costs have similar economics to hydropower. A large fraction of the cost is with large concrete and steel structure construction. The cost of the reactor itself actually pales in comparison. This is due to a large degree to very strict radiation control measures to prevent radiation leaks in case of meltdown. If someone ever designed a meltdown proof nuclear reactor the cost of building a nuclear reactor in terms of materials like concrete would go down a lot.

Re:Smaller reactors are better.

[Anonymous Coward]

AECL (CANDU's corporation) has had a small reactor designs (i.e.: nuclear battery) for a few decades now. Popular at universities, planned for roll-out in the far north, but quashed by greenpeace campaigns (even though these have a zero chance of meltdown). Not very efficient, but the design works and is proven. They're called SLOWPOKES if you want to look them up.

AECL hasn't been able to compete, not because of their designs, but because of poor management, almost zero marketing, and a schizophrenic government shareholder. It's why you've never heard of them, or their breakthroughs in using Thorium fuel back in the 70s and 80s.

Admiral Hyman Rickover

[Anonymous Coward]

...has all nuclear operations problems solved. No real accidents in US Navy nuclear reactor ops so far. And they operate as many reactors as france at one time in much more difficult circumstances.

Compare that to the uniformed fuckers of Britain and Russia. They manage to leak from their reactors all the time. Because they have a relaxed attitude to engineering. Rickover booted the politicos and social engineers out of the USN reactor business. He was much hated for this.

But - Results matter.

Re:Admiral Hyman Rickover

[MachineShedFred]

The US Navy operates a bit differently from commercial power; they have the freedom to not give a crap about being cost-effective. When it's time to refuel a nuclear submarine, they cut the entire reactor core out of the side of it and drop a new one in. The old core goes away to be disposed, and the submarine goes back out to sea.

It's amazing the safety record you can have if you just throw away the whole thing and start over every time you need to refuel.

Re: Admiral Hyman Rickover

[Anonymous Coward]

Except the current LOS ANGELES and OHIO Class subs are only refueled once in their life, and the newer SEAWOLF and VIRGINIA class subs will operate for 30 some years without needing to refuel.

Re:Admiral Hyman Rickover

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is what Admiral Rickover had to say about nuclear power:

"I do not believe that nuclear power is worth it if it creates radiation. Then you might ask me why do I have nuclear powered ships. That is a necessary evil. I would sink them all. I am not proud of the part I played in it. I did it because it was necessary for the safety of this country. That's why I am such a great exponent of stopping this whole nonsense of war. Unfortunately limits — attempts to limit war have always failed. The lesson of history is when a war starts every nation will ultimately use whatever weapon it has available." Further remarking: "Every time you produce radiation, you produce something that has a certain half-life, in some cases for billions of years. There are, of course, many other things mankind is doing which, in the broadest sense, are having an adverse impact, such as using up scarce resources. I think the human race is ultimately going to wreck itself. It is important that we control these forces and try to eliminate them." (Economics of Defense Policy: Hearing before the Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States, 97th Cong., 2nd sess., Pt. 1 (1982))

Found on Wikipedia, under Rickover

Hey, bucko

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't a matter of "the opponents" not being able to "defeat nuclear on science" (whatever that means), it's simply that nuclear industry couldn't beat THEIR competitors with engineering and sound economics. Sorry to hear you're such an impudent whiner about the matter.

Re:Hey, bucko

[Anonymous Coward]

No one can say that extra precautions aren't required for nuclear power, but the precautions that builders (at least in the US) are required to put in place are crazy and would be considered unreasonable for any other industry. The containment vessel has something like 20 ft of heavily reinforced concrete below it in addition to walls that can withstand a commercial airliner plowed into it like a missile. The approval process and permitting cost almost as much as the construction of the plant itself. A car analogy would be like buying a $30K car, then needing a $25k drivers license and paying a few thousand a year to the government for "end of life disposal costs".

Re:Technically Speaking

[Anonymous Coward]

Before you come whining about "the poor workers" - if we actually set this up in a honest way, these miners would use proper protection of their breathing system and surely they would be monitored by a first rate medical service (in order to check on the efficiency protective measures).

They would be aided by machinery similar to what we use to extract coal from the ground. It would all be very civilized and the people would be proud workers instead of the Hartz IV Lumpenproletariat.

But hey, making war in Mali is more fun, needs more complex technology, creates jobs for authoritarian folks and we can get medals for this !!!

Learning Curve

[mdsolar]

What you are calling a growth curve is often called a learning curve. It is the idea that costs reduce as more of the technology is deployed. People get bright ideas as they work in the field, going to greater scale means more can be produced with less labor, etc... You are correct that nuclear power gets more expensive with time. http://thinkprogress.org/clima... There are technologies where the more common behavior is seen. Wind and solar power are growing exponentially owing to lower and lower cost as more are deployed. At their current growth rates either can replace all the world's energy demand around the year 2035. http://www.realclimate.org/ind...

Contact Flibe

[Anonymous Coward]

flibe or lockheed. or get a candu, but the first two are better options for the future

Re:Whatabout Guarantees for Solar Cells And Windmi

[Anonymous Coward]

No, Brown Coal would be a win for Germany, the Maoists hate Germany, so it must be GAZ. Russian GAZ.

ERRATA

[Anonymous Coward]

"Removing that 1% of power is done by simply pumping a few m^3 of fresh water/minute into the depressured reactor "

ITER

[Anonymous Coward]

What about ITER? Isn't that 20 year old project in France? What's taking so long?

Bull

[Anonymous Coward]

The reactors in Fukushima did EXACTLY what was written on the tin. It was the local idiots who operated the reactor without protection against Tsunamics. When the water was boiling from Nachzerfallswärme, the idiots were to scared of the incompetent higher-up social engineers to 1.) simply vent the reactor and 2.) pump in fresh water using fire engines. That would have cooled the fuel pipes effectively and avoided a core-melt.

So we got corium. Because they could not ensure the flow of cooling water. AS EVERYBODY WITH A FECKING CLUE KNEW. There is no such reactor which can be turned off without coolant flow and without serious issues. NONE.

Somebody should have telefoned the Japanse Defence Minister and ask for Mobile Fire Pumps Airlifted ASAP. Instead they were paralysed in the critical five hours immediately after the Tsunami.

The reactor did what it was designed for - including the containment of the corium.

Re:Bull

[HornWumpus]

Corium contains water soluble elements. Once the cladding is melted it's a mess.

Re:Bull

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, dummy it did everything it was designed to do.....uh....except, you know....uh PUMP COOLANT.
That's what a meltdown is.

we need more nuclear

[Anonymous Coward]

safety regulations and studies need to be removed. Let the companies build the reactors without any oversight, and costs will go down a ton. As for the waste, there is no real need to dispose of it... we'll end up making good use of it in a few decades. Paranoia and over regulation is retarded and the bane of western civilization.

No, this is not meant to be sarcastic. We're too worried about stuff that is safe, and try to bubble wrap everyone.

FYI, I live within 25 miles of 2 reactors, and would have 0 concern if one were built 500 ft away. The technology is much safer than walking across the street... Heck, its safer than shoveling my driveway.

Iraq

[Anonymous Coward]

...recently paid for the externalities of OIL. Just 100k folks "collateralized" to hell.

How do you ACCOUNT for that, Mr Green-Moaist ?

Re:Whatabout Guarantees for Solar Cells And Windmi

[polar red]

Nuclear will make baseload 24/7/365 with PLANNED downtime

are you saying nuclear has NO unplanned downtime ?

NOT

[Anonymous Coward]

It should be called "Gas-Wende". Because that is what it REALLY is. There are days when we have not much sun and not much wind. Gaz from Russia With Love is used at these times. The whole solar/wind crap only "works" because of Extra Taxation by forcing utilities and consumers to accept this useless electricity.

Large companies like Daimler build their own gas-powered electricity generation stations.

Thorium is incredibly cheap.

[emil]

Uranium was an awful decision for power generation, chosen only because it could also be used in weapons.

Thorium is a waste product in mining, and it only comes in one naturally-occurring isotope, so it doesn't need expensive enrichment like uranium.

Thorium reactors follow the U-233 decay chain, and run entirely as a liquid, low-pressure system, which can be diluted easily and, if necessary, mixed with boron for complete emergency control.

Conventional uranium fuel comes as metallic rods - which cannot be diluted. High-pressure uranium reactors should be universally retired - they are expensive and unsafe.

Re: The Left is in charge

[Anonymous Coward]

Defense is the wrong word. Military excess is a better one. Who was responsible for that? Militarists. Sure, they claimed to be Communists and Socialists. But that doesn't make them leftists.

And really, there is a large gap between the industrial leftists and the environmental left. Different groups really. Politics is very multidimensional.

Re:Whatabout Guarantees for Solar Cells And Windmi

[cheesybagel]

Renewable costs don't go down with time. Windmills break down and solar panels lose efficiency as they get nearer to their end of life.

Just go ask California or anywhere else which has had these for 20 years.

220,000 Employees

[laughingskeptic]

This is a loss of $24,090 per employee. In the US, this company would fire 1/3 of its employees, demand the rest work 60 hour weeks and would recover in two years from a loss like this. None of that can happen in Europe. Instead the government will give them a 'loan'. They can't really buy more shares to resolve the issue at this point since the shares should be worth nothing.

Anti-nuke idiots will ruin this planet.

[Anonymous Coward]

*nt*

Re:The Left is in charge

[dunkelfalke]

Ukraine was not a country before 1991. Just saying ;-)
The USSR started sinking because eastern European countries and most of the union republics were a bottomless drain on the economy, not other way around.

Re:The Left is in charge

[Viol8]

"Your "miserable existence of food queues and no prospects" rhetoric suggests to me that you are interested in beating some political drum. Whether a product is unavailable (as tends to be the case for poorer people in socialist societies) or unaffordable (as tends to be the case for poorer people in capitalist societies) is immaterial to the person who needs it."

Whatever. Next time you see 50 metre long food queue at a supermarket that has next to nothing on the shelves in a western country then maybe we can have this debate.

How I stopped hating tax and learned to love it

[Jodka]

Those dangers pale to uncertainty and mismanagement caused by political instead of scientific evidence and method based environments.

Other energy sources would be vastly more costly if their waste products weren't already grandfathered in to the public mindset and their true impacts to safety and environmental impact (which is far more spread out than the catastrophic results failures induced by idiocy and insanity cause newer power sources) were actually measured and factored in to the comparison.

Bingo, we have winner there. So if governments internalized externalities by charging polluters to pollute, making the price of coal reflect its true cost, then the price of nuclear energy would be more favorable in comparison than now. Without those conditions, we are now all subsidizing the most polluting forms of energy generation, such as coal, by making polluting free.

I know the free market libertarian types will scream bloody murder about the proposal that pollution be taxed, just because it is a tax and they reflexively hate all taxes. But hold on you free market libertarian type people! If the government returned payments from polluters directly to the public in the form of checks, instead of letting the crooks who run our government squander it, then the net tax rate would be zero because the total tax dollars collected from polluters would equal the total tax dollars returned to the public. There is a redistributionary aspect to this tax, and those are typically regarded as a bad because they create price distortions. But in this case it is a good because it corrects, not creates, a price distortion by redistributing dollars away from polluters in proportion to the cost of their polluting.

There is a noteworthy point there: taxation is not a burden. The burden of Government is not taxation but instead spending inefficiency. Consider the following: You can go to the grocery store and pay $2.00 to buy a bag of onions. Alternatively, the government can tax you $2.00 and provide you bag the same bag of onions. The tax payer is rationally indifferent to those alternatives, therefore the tax is not a burden to the tax payer. What makes government a burden is spending inefficiency: In actuality, the government taxes you $2.00 and instead of giving you $2.00 worth onions it buys a tobacco farmer subsidy, anti-marijuana law enforcement, spyware to read your e-mail, and corporate welfare in the form of bad loans to Solyndra or some other boondoggle. What fraction does go to anything which is of value to the public, such as perhaps housing, is filtered through government contractors who capture most of the dollars for themselves and creates unemployment by offering an incentive to not work.

Because the public would pay money for the government not to do some of those things government spending efficiency can be negative. For example, with low government spending efficiency the cost to the tax payer of a $2.00 tax could be $3.00 if the government uses its $2.00 to purchase $1.00 worth of harm to the taxpayer. With high government spending efficiency, the cost to the tax payer of a $2.00 tax could be $-1.00, that is, the tax payer gives up two dollars but gains $3.00. In practice that does not happen. If it did then Wall Street investors would all have been replaced by government bureaucrats, if they can earn that rate of return.

So if the government both taxes pollution and returns the tax revenues to the public as dollars then taxation is not a net social burden. And the reduction in pollution is a net social benefit.

Re:How I stopped hating tax and learned to love it

[BoberFett]

Libertarianism doesn't dismiss externalities and solutions to them. Take your slurs elsewhere.

Re:How I stopped hating tax and learned to love it

[ender8282]

While overall this seems reasonable there is still the question of how the government proportions the money that it gives back? Does everyone get x/population dollars back? Is it based on how much people paid in taxes for dirty energy (which I think negates all benefits)? Does it get redistributed proportionate to income? Or inversely proportionate to income? In all cases you are going to have people complaining about it being unfair (for some definition of unfair).

The other issue is that unless all countries do the same it will just drive energy consumption from places which charge these tax-like-things to places that don't charge these tax like things. From a global CO2 level perspective it doesn't matter where it comes from, its all equally bad. (Generic pollution isn't as global, but it does have a non-trivial global component.)

Taxes should be about raising revenue. They should NOT be a mechanism for societal engineering because the people writing tax laws are simply not smart enough.

The only solution that I see is to 1) identify the carbon/pollution cost of a product, 2) charge a tax/fee for that amount when the product is sold, 3) uses the revenue to clean up pollution or capture carbon. Were we to start small (i.e. the fee charged represented the cost to clean up a fraction of a percent of the environmental cost) and slowly ramp up from there, we might be able to slowly disincentive pollution instead of just off shoring it.

Re:How I stopped hating tax and learned to love it

[Anonymous Coward]

Libertarians want maximum freedom. That's kind of what it means (liberty).

Some libertarians think we don't need any government at all, and all taxes are bad. These are the "anarcho-capitalists". They do not speak for all libertarians.

Some libertarians are "minarchists", who want the minimum possible government, but believe that some problems require government to solve them. I am a minarchist.

Taxes on pollution, as a fix to the "tragedy of the commons" where dumping pollutants into the air is free, is IMO an acceptable thing for government to do. I also believe that regulating the number of whales that may be killed is also a legit thing for government to do; 19th Century technology is adequate to the task of making whales extinct, and I don't see how an anarcho-capitalist society could manage this problem. (Maybe declare whales to be people and handle it as murder? Seems a bit over-the-top...)

BTW I like your analysis of taxes vs. benefits. Taxes are high in the USA but the benefits aren't there and in fact are likely negative.

Re:How I stopped hating tax and learned to love it

[cynicist]

What if I don't want a bag of onions?

Re:How I stopped hating tax and learned to love it

[RespekMyAthorati]

As long as those "solutions" don't involve the tax-supported government.
How that could be possible is never addressed by the randians.

Re:How I stopped hating tax and learned to love it

[Anonymous Coward]

Libertarianism doesn't dismiss externalities and solutions to them. Take your slurs elsewhere.

You are talking High-Brow Libertarian. I think the GP's point was that the low-brow types who frequent Slashdot have not a clue. If you mentioned Hayek they would think "Nice boobs, but what does she have to do with the effects of taxation?"

Re:How I stopped hating tax and learned to love it

[Jodka]

Libertarianism doesn't dismiss externalities and solutions to them. Take your slurs elsewhere.

I agree with with you completely. I just put that in there because Libertarian bashing is automatically worth a few positive mod points on Slashdot.

Re:How I stopped hating tax and learned to love it

[volmtech]

Bear with me, I lack a college education. So, for example, a utility is taxed one billion dollars for the pollution it produces. Then the utility raises cost to the rate payers by one billion dollars. Government then returns the billion dollars to the rate payers. This reduces pollution how?

Re:How I stopped hating tax and learned to love it

[forbin_meet_hal]

There are many different strains of libertarian thought. Only Randian anarcho-capitalists would really complain about a pollution tax. In fact, they'd try to put a market around it--"cap and trade." Even Milton Friedman conceded that laws and regulations are necessary in situations where market forces can't really make someone hole. It's not practical for a smoke-billowing plant to compensate everyone whose shirt is dirtied from the soot, for example.

Re:How I stopped hating tax and learned to love it

[Anonymous Coward]

By increasing the price of dirty energy sources relative to clean sources.

According to your example the dirty sources would have to raise a billion dollars in added revenue from their customers. However, the clean sources do not. Therefore the price of dirty sources increases relative to the price of clean sources and customers therefore turn away from dirty source and to clean sources.

In other words, it enables clean energy companies to capture the market by undercutting dirty energy companies on price.

Re:The Left is in charge

[cheesybagel]

Krushchev did some poor investments and by the time Breznev came around the economy started to stagnate. Too many resources were kept on the military industrial side of things at the same time as the rest of the industry collapsed. When Gorbachev came around they found they had little to no oil left they could economically recover at the same time they were stuck on an expensive and useless war on Afghanistan. They needed to replace their oil industry equipment with more modern technology and they did not have the funds to do it themselves anymore.

Re:The Left is in charge

[cheesybagel]

Yeah the economy under Stalin was wildly successful. Even when Lenin was in power a large part of the time it was Stalin pulling the strings of it all. Even if the regime was murderous you cannot deny it was economically successful. A large part of the success was due to the large industrialization drives. The national electrification plan, the heavy industries, making education and housing available for everyone, creating a middle class and increasing productivity, etc. This is something which can be done in a country much like the USSR was. A country with a lot of natural resources and manpower but poor infrastructure. It could also have been done with a lot less strife. Imperial Germany and Meiji Japan managed to do it. The problem was the Soviet Union wanted to do what they did in two decades in just one. Instead of starting with light industry first and do things progressively they just squeezed the farmers out of everything they had and jumped straight into the heavy industry.

Re:Whatabout Guarantees for Solar Cells And Windmi

[schnell]

I am also fine with natural gas, to be honest. Russia has been a reliable supplier even during the worst cold war days.

You may wish to ask Ukraine about how reliable a supplier of natural gas Russia is.

Re: The Left is in charge

[cyber-vandal]

I'm not an American so go fuck yourself.

Bullshit yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

Those animals are less healthy and have more genetic disorders and lower life expectancy than before. It just "feels" right that they should do better without humans, but they aren't. Except those species that we deliberately go out of our way to remove from near us.

They are WORSE OFF. But if they last to breed, genetic damage doesn't really matter as long as they make it approximately alive past birth.

The Drain

[JBMcB]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:The Drain

[dunkelfalke]

Russia had famines every 10 years or so, the last one was in 1947, though.

French Gov't owns more than 80% of Areva

[l'dav]

Since the CEA is a French public institution, this makes the French states owning more than 80% of Areva http://www.areva.com/EN/financ...

Re: How I stopped hating tax and learned to love i

[BlueTrin]

I think you misunderstand liberalism, pollution has a cost to other people, ignoring them is not libertarian.

Re:Whatabout Guarantees for Solar Cells And Windmi

[smithmc]

A lot less than solar and wind.

Re:Whatabout Guarantees for Solar Cells And Windmi

[Anonymous Coward]

solar and wind downtime can be predicted hours in advance. unplanned nuclear downtime can't. That's a big difference.