As Sea Levels Rise, Are Coastal Nuclear Plants Ready? (nationalgeographic.com)

mdsolar writes with this National Geographic story about the danger of rising sea levels to low-lying power plants across the country. According to the story: "Just east of the Homestead-Miami Speedway, off Florida's Biscayne Bay, two nuclear reactors churn out enough electricity to power nearly a million homes. The Turkey Point plant is licensed to continue doing so until at least 2032. At some point after that, if you believe the direst government projections, a good part of the low-lying site could be underwater. So could at least 13 other U.S. nuclear plants, as the world's seas continue to rise. Their vulnerability, and that of many others, raises serious questions for the future."

Comments

At My Door

[JimSadler]

I am very close to a nuke that is right on the beach on Florida's Treasure Coast. Apparently to shut down a reactor and clean up everything that is contaminated is a process that takes years. This nuke has only one road that runs along the beach and if that road is swamped access to the plant would be by helicopter or boat, weather permitting. And that road frequently has challenges with hurricanes and spring tides as it is. I wonder if any planning is going on in regard to this situation.

Re:At My Door

[mdsolar]

The NRC has pretty much ignored this in relicensing decisions. And they've made no plan for the waste stored at Humboldt Bay in northern California.

Re:At My Door

[NotDrWho]

In the U.S. we already have entire cities that are below sea level. Fortunately, we have these things called dikes, levees, and cofferdams that we can build when we need to to protect them from actually being underwater (as long as they're properly built and maintained). So even if sea levels do rise as predicted, these plants aren't going to be flooded unless for some bizarre reason we allow them to be flooded.

But hey, alarmism sells.

Re:Poor planning

[Zobeid]

That's an extremely gradual process. However, we've just recently learned about the collapsing ice sheets in Antarctica, which appear likely to cause the much more rapid rise in sea level over the next few decades. Nobody had planned on that, and it will cause headaches, hazards and costs far beyond this example of nuclear power plants.

They don't need to be 'ready'

[BitZtream]

We can move them. Yes, it would suck complete and total ass and be ridiculously expensive and environmentally dangerous, but the sea doesn't rise over night without an Earth quake so in the many many many years while the water is creeping up the shoreline towards the plant ... we can decommission it and move the dangerous bits to higher ground.

Well, in theory we can ... unfortunately the utterly retarded NIMBY anti-nuke crowd will ensure that instead we'll leave it right where it is cause god fucking forbid some accident might happen ... and instead we'll just let it pollute thousands of square miles of sea and destroy our food stocks instead ... because thats way better than moving some dangerous materials in a controlled and actually very safe method.

So you either move it and don't tell anyone, so that NIMBY morons don't have a chance to stand in the way of the trucks doing the moving (which makes it way more fucking dangerous!) before you get it to higher ground. Remember these are the same morons who would swallow coal dust and get cancer for sure rather than take the risk that if they hang out at the nuclear plant after a major disaster they might have a slightly higher chance of thyroid cancer ... that can't be proven scientifically anyway.

Besides ... nuclear reactors are water tight from the start, at ridiculously high pressures, if you get them into a cold shutdown state, you can just leave them under water for centuries without anything actually happening. Put a concrete sarcophagus around it so that nothing can easily damage it and forget about it. By the time it actually starts leaking it will have decayed to something we don't care about nearly as much.

Re:Pitard hoist

[bigpat]

Wind and solar turn out to be so much cheaper, that really it is the opportunity cost of nuclear power that has delayed climate action. The politically promoted and protected nuclear industry has slowed progress for decades.

Solar power is more polluting, more toxic, less efficient, more destructive of habitat and much less safe than nuclear. Better than coal, sure, but better than coal isn't good enough. Mankind is better off without solar power. It would be much better to focus all of our resources on next gen nuclear power instead of going down the dead end of solar.