Slashdot Mirror
Nation's Biggest Nuclear Firm Makes a Play For Carbon Credit Cash
tomhath writes with this story that may shake up the nuclear industry. "The biggest player in the beleaguered nuclear power industry wants a place alongside solar, wind and hydroelectric power collecting extra money for producing carbon-free electricity. Exelon Corp., operator of the largest fleet of U.S. nuclear plants, says it could have to close three of them if Illinois rejects the company's pitch to let it recoup more from consumers since the plants do not produce greenhouse gases. Exelon and other around-the-clock plants sometimes take losses when wind turbines produce too much electricity for the system. Under the system, electric suppliers would have to buy credits from carbon-free energy producers. Exelon says the plan would benefit nuclear plants, hydroelectric dams, and other solar and wind projects."
Considering that nuclear power is the safest form of power the world has ever known, I'd say it's worthy of recognition for offsetting carbon more than anything else. To borrow a phrase, "It's the energy density, stupid."
There's a reason why China has 30 nuclear plants under construction, while the US just approved its first new plant in 30 years.
Eliminate the carbon credits.
Okay so then we will also do the same for all the radioactive impurities in coal power too. I mean burning it and letting spread across the land is just fine. How about the coal ask ponds that are already busting and polluting water and land.
You don't want to pay the full cost of the power you use. You are just happy to ignore the costs while pointing at nuclear and saying look at all that toxic waste. Except the amount is miniscule compared to traditional power sources. The problem is all the FUD related to nuclear power prevents and one from even considering to build a safe disposal location. Doesn't matter if it is 100 miles from anyone people still don't want THAT waste there. They are happy to have fraking fluids in their water and coal ash in their rivers, but forget putting that radioactive waste inside a mountain a 100 miles from me.
...what is very little recognized worldwide, is that nuclear energy gets a free lunch at the expense of the taxpayers, as regards risk insurance.
It is the most damned uninsured thing in developed countries and when one of these plants goes bust, you know what happens, ref. Fukusima.
If nuclear industry wishes to operate on-par terms with other forms of green technologies, please, bring the actuarial scientists in, to do all the math!
For the record, I am not against nuclear energy as a source of energy per se, however its use is not entirely rationalized on the basis of risk and cost to handle it.
Try to imagine what's the insurance cost of Catenom plant in north east France and add it in the operational costs and you will get the idea.
And this is before discussing about the overall lifetime (gasp) risks with spent nuclear fuel etc.
Rather the point. If they want to claim the special benefit credits they need to take full responsibility along with it.
it's easy to spot since he calls one of the political party's out by name. There's still some weight to the NIMBY folks though. The trouble with nuclear, at least in America, is that it's damn near impossible to keep it safe. Sooner or later some venture capital firm notices how much money's being spent on safety and moves in with promises of "efficiency", takes over the plant operation and starts cutting back. That's really what the NIMBY crowd worries about, they're just not allowed to talk about it because those same venture capitalists are our ruling class. It's pretty much the same thing that happened in Japan. They knew the plants weren't safe but didn't want to spend the money. Big disaster, lots will die of cancers and the like, but nobody important go in trouble.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Sure, just as soon as the federal government pays them back for the fees it charged while promising to take care of the waste...
Oh, and enjoy how things end up priced as we force this standard on other companies... Many of the pollutants that other companies are releasing don't break down, period.
10M years is a bit long as well - allow reprocessing and such, and you can get rid of 90% of the 'waste' by reusing it, and of the 10% remaining, you only need to keep it 'safe' for about 1-10k years, not the over 100k.
I don't read AC A human right
Payment in advance please.
Already paid, at least in the US. The US has been accumulating funds via taxes to do exactly as you demand since early days of Nuclear power. The nuclear industry, it's rate payers and their governments have already set the precedent you demand and paid the taxes you demand.
Nuclear waste is not a finance problem or a physics problem. It's a political problem, and the political problem comes from hysterical, low-information anti-nooks coupled with anti-energy, anti-prosperity libtards.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Political nonsense can always sometimes be used as a tool to push down competitors or elevate yourself with subsidies. If one energy source gets cheap, all other energy sources will stop getting as much profits. So there is always some at least light effort gamesmanship to trip up your competitors, and sometimes it is fierce. Think: If everyone had solar installments and hybrid electric plugin cars, not as many people would need gasoline(demand goes down, gas prices go down). Is the president shutting down coal power plants? Well the gas driven power plants are applauding his action.
God spoke to me
It's ludicrous for the Nuclear Industry to call itself carbon neutral when tens of thousands of tons of ore has to be crushed and refined with carbon based energy sources. The enrichment of the fuel at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant uses two brown coal power plants to run it. Then there is the massive cabon sink from the concrete to build the thing in the first place.
Even after that you have the CFC114 from the enrichment process which the EPA reports as the single largest contributor of greenhouse gasses. In all they are bogus claims suggesting the Nuclear industry is "carbon-free" because clearly it is not.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv-mFSoZOkE> Anything that is radioactive enough to be of a concern can be re-used as fuel.
This whole "but the nuclear waste!" propaganda is nothing but a farce. Let us reprocess the fuel, and we will get every joule of energy out of it we can, and the "waste" becomes rare and expensive elements we current dig up whole swathes of country to find.
You've already answered that the ash is not spread around the land with the mention of those ash ponds (dams really, since they are not small).
Alex Gabbard's stupid "but coal ash is nuclear waste too so why restrict nuclear waste" propaganda is still doing damage to minds. I suggest finding the numbers for the most radioactive coal on the planet and calculating how many hundreds of thousands of tons you need of it to get a banana dose to correct the mental damage.
Coal use has a lot of problems, many of which kill people, so I suggest focusing on what is real instead of failed 1970s nuclear propaganda from a guy mostly known by his NASCAR books.
I suggest you look at the Harford web site to learn about turning waste back into fuel to get a bit more of an understanding of the situation. Steel pipes that have been exposed to enough neutrons to become radioactive themselves are not something you want near people for example - by volume the vast majority of nuclear waste is not fuel rods.
Oversimplifying the situation into "it can all be used as fuel" is counterproductive if you want to see any of it used as fuel.
In Japan, they found at one point that there was a possibility of it *seriously* going to hell in a hand basket.
If the wind had been really wrong, it would have put serious fallout over Tokyo; which would have been really, really, really bad. While few people would have died, the economic disruption would have been (without any hyperbole) unbelievably stupendous.
http://world.time.com/2012/02/...
You can tell me all you want that this kind of accident can never happen, but I just don't believe it. We have no reason to think that Chernobyl or Fukushima were the worse cases, nor that these kinds of failures cannot happen again worse.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"You've already answered that the ash is not spread around the land with the mention of those ash ponds (dams really, since they are not small).
It doesn't spread across the land by floating through the air, but it sure sucks when a fly ash dam breaks.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
Safe except for the byproducts, which are most definitely not safe
Why not? The byproducts are very small in volume, and quite well protected/contained.
It's better than coal which spreads low does of radiation, not to mention other pollution, all over the place. Both in burning and in transport.
It's better than solar or wind, byproducts of manufacture of those systems end up in the environment.
Nuclear has the safest byproducts. because you will never come in contact with them.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Greenhouse gases and temperature appear to be capable of a feedback loop
No, they really don't. At least not in Earth's atmosphere.
CO2 emissions have gone up and up over the last two decades with almost no increase in heat over that period of time.
Apparently CO2 does not actually lead to a feedback loop. Which only makes sense when you realize the whole Earth is a system designed to process CO2 in vast quantities.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They are a way to give money to FAILING ideas.
If you want to stop the pollution, put a tax on the actual polluters at the step where they are polluting.
Sulfuric Acid, large particles, unburned fuel; yes worry about these and the USA has cleaned up them.
CO2 is a BS think to worry about. Getting rid of it, will be way TOO expensive.
And lastly ABC - Anywhere But China. If you are worried about Global Air Quality, stop buying things made in China. They pollute more for each thing made than anywhere else.
Nuclear can not compete going forwards. The writing is on the wall.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
> But don't let the scientific facts get in the way of your new religion
Take your own advice.
You're quoting someone who is a professional writer and has no experience in the sciences.
His book on the topic was widely panned for taking comments out of context. It took a good 300 years for that to happen to Jesus.
So spare us your chosen savior and the holier-than-thou BS.
Sure, just as soon as the federal government pays them back for the fees it charged while promising to take care of the waste...
Do you mean in terms of nuclear waste or some other toxic externality? Would you please clarify what you mean here?
Oh, and enjoy how things end up priced as we force this standard on other companies... Many of the pollutants that other companies are releasing don't break down, period.
We should be handling them as well. It's the by-product of our era's technology so it is our responsibility to handle it. It doesn't matter if the next generations are super-human or cave men, it's still the responsibility of human's of this era to deal with its mess.
10M years is a bit long as well -
Not for pu-239, about 50 times more time is right. Remember it is still highly toxic even when you exclude its radioactive emmissions and that's what it will take to do that.
allow reprocessing and such, and you can get rid of 90% of the 'waste' by reusing it, and of the 10% remaining, you only need to keep it 'safe' for about 1-10k years, not the over 100k.
C'mon Firethorn, didn't we find common ground on this years ago? You already know that to do this with burners you would already need to have the spent fuel containment, fuel management and reactor units already set up with the reactor disposal in place to even come close to achieving it. Anything those reactors produced will be hot and as toxic to life as anything can be. No structure will last 10k years and siting them in a porus mountain is the same amount of effort to do it in a mountain which actually would last.
If we focused on preparing the infrastructure and technology to burn up the radioisotopes we would have about 30 years work and another 50-70 years research into materials technology to make it worthwhile wrt the energy yeild and burn-up rate of the reactor units. And also for humanity to mature enough to operate them, which reactor accidents like Fukushima and Chernobyl show, we aren't.
It's not impossible, but it does start with a granite mountain site that uses the DOE's original science based defense in depth strategies large enough to house the facilities and the railway (or other) infrastructure to move it from around the country. That is the only rational way to deal with radio isotopes that are radioactive for geological timeframes, treat it geologically, dispose of the reactors in place and avoid the energetic costs of decommissioning while it cools in the belly of a mountain.
Even getting started would mean getting pro- and anti- nuclear folk to agree that a geological spent fuel containment facility where you would site the facilities, is the starting point. Which is the truely fucked-up irony of this fully polarized debate.
Ok, so maybe it is impossible.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
It would seem logic that they would take full responsibillity regardless if they get special benefits or not.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
1 banana equivalent dose is approximately 15 Bq. Table 2 of this document shows the radioactivity of the coal - let's use the lowest US figures. The note above table 2 says to multiply the U-238 value by 14 and the Th-232 by 10, and add those to the K-40. The results in 124 Bq/kg for US coal, and 1628 Bq/kg for Brazilian coal. That indicates that 1 kg of unburnt US coal is 8.22 BEDs. When burnt, between 1% and 10% of the ash escapes the scrubbers and is emitted into the environment directly (new vs old plants). Assuming that all of the radioactive elements are end up in the ash/slag and NOT directly put up the flue (as would be the case with gaseous radioactive elements such as Ra-226 and Ra-228), 12.1kg of coal when burnt and passed thru 'new plant' scrubbers results in 1 BED out the smokestack. With 850 million tonnes (850x10^9 kq) burned in the US in 2009, that resulted in 70.25 billion BEDs.
If you use the worst-case US figures and an old plant, you end up with 12320 Bq/kg, which is conveniently close to 100x the best-case numbers - 0.121 kg unburnt coal = 1 BED, and 7.025 trillion BEDs up the flue. Interestingly, 121g is close to the mass of the average banana at 150g, so unburnt US 'bad' coal is as radioactive as your average banana, mass-for-mass.
Interesting quotes:
In the USA, 850 million tonnes of coal was used in 2009 for electricity production. With an average content of 1.3 ppm uranium and 3.2 ppm thorium, US coal-fired electricity generation in that year gave rise to 1100 tonnes of uranium and 2700 tonnes of thorium in coal ash.
If we apply the 1% up the stack rule, that means 11 tonnes of U and 2.7 tonnes of Th went out the stack - that's a lot of radioactivity up the flue and a lot of fissionable material wasted.
It is evident that even at 1 part per million (ppm) U in coal, there is more energy in the contained uranium (if it were to be used in a fast neutron reactor) than in the coal itself. If coal had 25 ppm uranium and that uranium was used simply in a conventional reactor, it would yield half as much thermal energy as the coal.
Please check my math.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Do you mean in terms of nuclear waste or some other toxic externality? Would you please clarify what you mean here?
Nuclear waste - The federal government charged a mandatory fee in exchange for a promise to dispose of the nuclear waste. Yucca Mountain never opened, ergo the federal government renegaded on it's deal, but it's still collecting the fees. Without them stepping in, the power companies would have figured something out themselves.
Not for pu-239, about 50 times more time is right. Remember it is still highly toxic even when you exclude its radioactive emmissions and that's what it will take to do that.
Lead is highly toxic by way of being a heavy metal and most versions of it are perfectly stable. My opinion is that if we bury it X deep, that any future humans that go digging it up should be able to determine that it's toxic and mildly radioactive and know how to handle it if they're going that deep into the ground.
Anything those reactors produced will be hot and as toxic to life as anything can be. No structure will last 10k years and siting them in a porus mountain is the same amount of effort to do it in a mountain which actually would last.
You're forgetting the 'more radioactive = shorter halflife' thing. The problem with nuclear waste and current standards isn't the short lived isotopes, it's the less radioactive long half life isotopes. Pull out the long-life ones, feed them through the reactors again until there's only short half-life isotopes left. Yes, they'd be radioactive as all hell. But only for a short period of time. "A Candle that burns twice as bright burns for half as long" type thing.
Oh, and I disagree with you on our ability to construct a facility that would last 10k years. It'd be expensive, but we can do it rather easily.
I don't read AC A human right
Regardless of if man-made climate change is real or not, can't we all get behind the idea that continually spewing burned-up mountain into the air is bad? Do you not believe that the elevated levels of airborne particulate downwind of coal-fired generation is something we should get rid of in favor of cleaner technology?
Climate change is not the only reason to stop converting mountains into dirty air that kills people.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
"Already Fully Paid is Propaganda. The nuclear industry has not paid for the mess they made mining and refining. They are trying to get out of paying for the long term disposal and tear down of the reactors. Witness Entergy at Vermont Yankee. Bunch of slimy money changers.
Citation required.
Other bits may be fair enough, if incredibly unlikely, I'll check later (since you haven't linked you table2, I'll assume by mistake not misdirection, I'll have to do a bit of digging won't I to find your source info?), but you've got a key assumption that completely ignores how devices designed to remove gas (their entire purpose is to remove NOx and SOx) deal with solid material.
That very unlikely number you've found may be true for the material in the bottom ash or even in the ash dam, but it's a very wild claim that it's coming out the stack.
We've had the technology to detect heavy metals in the flue gas for a century+ (spectroscopy) but nobody has seen any yet.
God, was I stupid - here's the citation you require. Table 2 and the other statements that I quoted are in this document.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
We have old gen II reactors that are being extended, but really should not be. However, there is NO replacement for them.
In addition, there is loads of spent fuel not only at these sites, but others that have been retired.
With transatomic and other companies molten salt approach, we can not only create a reactor that is INCAPABLE OF FAILURE (unless a number of physical LAWS are not true), but, these can burn up the majority of the 'spent fuel'. What will remain will be only 5-10% of the original volume, and will be safe in under 200 years.
Even once we build these (and we will), at some future point, AE combined with FUSION power, will likely become very viable. BUT, it is still better to run these fission reactors to process the 'waste' and turn it safer.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Thanks.
Wow - some of those U-238 numbers are two orders of magnitude higher than I've ever seen.
Still, it's a bottom ash situation because it's going to be heavy and not going to be reduced in the boiler. As others pointed out that ash still has to go somewhere even if it's not actually going up the stack, so it's not something that can be ignored.
I would look at Yucca like a very valuable prototyping exercise for a facility that goes back to the original DOE 'defence in depth' specification. I would think that some very valuable lessons were learned there and there might be some things it is suitable for.
Having the money available to do such a thing is a good first starting place and it makes sense to collect the money from the entities creating this externality, especially when you consider that the coal industry has, and continues, to get away with not paying for their externalities for so long.
If the Nuclear Industry continues to pay that fee and lobbies hard for a proper DOE facility to be constructed then perhaps they can claim a moral victory over the coal industry. Continuing to collect fees from them to build a facility is the right thing to do.
Industry has a very poor record of dealing with its externalities and the Nuclear Industry has already expressed its resistance to paying for the handling of spent fuel. I don't see that happening, Dixie Lee Ray's comments decades ago highlighted the need for collecting the fees from the Nuclear Industry for spent fuel containment.
Yes, and look how long it took for us to get to handling that properly, industry had to be told what to do because of the harm it caused.
I think that there are different grades of materials at different levels of toxicity. As long as the approach to placing and designing the disposal facility uses good scientific and engineering principles (as opposed to political and lobbying principles) then I have no problem with that.
No, I'm not. I'm considering the life of the reactor vs the amount of fissile ash it produces over its lifespan.
If you consider such an infrastructure you are going to be handling both types of materials, fuel and fissile ash, in the same facility. The reason to do it that way is to be able to fuel, de-fuel, operate and, dispose of the reactor, it situ, so there is no need to use energy to disassemble it move or disturb it. You derive maximum energetic efficiency from the reactor, handle fuel containment, re-processing and, fissile ash disposal in the same facility.
Well I would like to see that, which is why I support collecting the fees from the operators who produce the waste product. Not doing so is effectively taxing future generation. I would like to see the political will to actually do something that bypasses political and commercial concerns and actu
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I would look at Yucca like a very valuable prototyping exercise for a facility that goes back to the original DOE 'defence in depth' specification. I would think that some very valuable lessons were learned there and there might be some things it is suitable for.
Yucca mountain, however, wasn't built as a prototype. It was built to be a storage facility. My point was that the federal government violated the terms of the very deal it imposed. There were concrete dates where the facility was to be open and accepting waste by.
If the Nuclear Industry continues to pay that fee and lobbies hard for a proper DOE facility to be constructed then perhaps they can claim a moral victory over the coal industry. Continuing to collect fees from them to build a facility is the right thing to do.
How do you define 'lobbies hard'? They're still paying the fee, it's mandated by federal law. They've pushed congress to get a facility open. They've even sued the feds for breach of contract, and won. Still, there is no facility, so now they're entombing their older waste in above-ground casks. Given that over the course of several decades, the nuclear waste would still fit in a swimming pool*, the casks don't actually have to be big, because the rods inside are generating less than 2kW worth of heat(IE a hair dryer). They're paying a disposal fee AND paying for their own long term storage right now.
*Nuclear power plant waste cooling pools are about the size of a standard swimming pool, just extra, extra deep to absorb all the radiation. You could, with the impossible to obtain permission of the plant operators, swim in the top 5 meters or so and actually be exposed to less radiation than swimming in the ocean, outside, during the day.
Industry has a very poor record of dealing with its externalities and the Nuclear Industry has already expressed its resistance to paying for the handling of spent fuel. I don't see that happening, Dixie Lee Ray's comments decades ago highlighted the need for collecting the fees from the Nuclear Industry for spent fuel containment.
Citation please? Pulling from the wiki page on her: ""anything the private sector can do, the government can do it worse."
And I'll repeat: Of course the nuclear industry is going to 'express resistance' to paying for it's spent fuel. It's like you're asking a homeowner to pay $20/week for having his trash hauled away - when he's already paid $1200 on his property taxes specifically for 'trash pickup'.
I think that there are different grades of materials at different levels of toxicity. As long as the approach to placing and designing the disposal facility uses good scientific and engineering principles (as opposed to political and lobbying principles) then I have no problem with that.
Indeed there are. Mostly here I'm talking about stuff right out of the reactor, or 'high level'. We already have disposal locations for 'low level' nuclear waste, which is for mildly radioactive stuff such as contaminated clothing, certain medical equipment, etc...
If you consider such an infrastructure you are going to be handling both types of materials, fuel and fissile ash, in the same facility. The reason to do it that way is to be able to fuel, de-fuel, operate and, dispose of the reactor, it situ, so there is no need to use energy to disassemble it move or disturb it. You derive maximum energetic efficiency from the reactor, handle fuel containment, re-processing and, fissile ash disposal in the same facility.
Depends on the requirements for the processing facility. It might make sense to ship the waste there(as well as fresh materials) to be reprocessed into new fuel for economy of scale.
This immediately reduces the most grave consequential threat at *a
I don't read AC A human right