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New Mexico Nuclear Accident Ranks Among the Costliest In US History (latimes.com)
mdsolar quotes a report from Los Angeles Times: When a drum containing radioactive waste blew up in an underground nuclear dump in New Mexico two years ago, the Energy Department rushed to quell concerns in the Carlsbad desert community and quickly reported progress on resuming operations. The early federal statements gave no hint that the blast had caused massive long-term damage to the dump, a facility crucial to the nuclear weapons cleanup program that spans the nation, or that it would jeopardize the Energy Department's credibility in dealing with the tricky problem of radioactive waste. But the explosion ranks among the costliest nuclear accidents in U.S. history, according to a Times analysis. The long-term cost of the mishap could top $2 billion, an amount roughly in the range of the cleanup after the 1979 partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. The Feb. 14, 2014, accident is also complicating cleanup programs at about a dozen current and former nuclear weapons sites across the U.S. Thousands of tons of radioactive waste that were headed for the dump are backed up in Idaho, Washington, New Mexico and elsewhere, state officials said in interviews. "The direct cost of the cleanup is now $640 million, based on a contract modification made last month with Nuclear Waste Partnership that increased the cost from $1.3 billion to nearly $2 billion," reports Los Angeles Times. "The cost-plus contract leaves open the possibility of even higher costs as repairs continue. And it does not include the complete replacement of the contaminated ventilation system or any future costs of operating the mine longer than originally planned."
Just when I thought we might be done with mdsolar spam, this article shows up. He's a biased and intellectually dishonest submitter who will do anything to try to make nuclear energy appear awful. Can we ban mdsolar from submitting more stories and spamming the queue?
Nuclear energy is the crazy hot girlfriend of energy. She may be nice, kind, and wonderful for days, months, or years - maybe decades. But someday, somehow, she's going to go berserk on you. 100% chance. And cleaning up the mess at that point will leave you with a very long term scar.
Designing a system easy enough to be catastrophically broken by a single seemingly harmless substitution is a big problem too.
I have no problem with nuclear power but fragile processes are not good for anyone.
The system itself worked correctly, as the containment system properly contained the leak. The problem is that the "seemingly harmless" substitution wouldn't have appeared harmless to an engineer who knew what was going on, but the person who made the substitution didn't understand the requirements for the part he was substituting.
When I worked on government computers, I often saw similar problems. The developers would specify certain hardware requirements, but over the life of a program, as equipment went obsolete, other people would make substitutions based on the specs of the old part. After a few years, the same software was running on high-end components, at only about 1% utilization. Nobody ever wanted to be the guy who made the system less capable, even though the lower-end hardware would have cost far less.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Can you honestly put your hand on your heart and say the true decommissioning costs of these nuclear plants are built into the prices today? I don't think anyone can. We have properly decommissioned and cleaned up so few nuclear plants that all of the cost estimates I see have a massive risk of cost overruns associated with them. The unfortunate feature of such a long-lived asset and then waste stream is that it's very hard to price in the true cost and the community end up wearing the risk if these are miscalculated. I don't claim malice or conspiracy, just that pricing long term costs is really, really hard.
Since uranium runs out, the subsidies for nuclear never tend to zero the way the do for solar which can produce energy without bound long after subsidies end.
Uranium doesn't "run out" if you use breeder reactors. They effectively have fuel indefinitely.
Solar panels are good for about 20 years. That's what the three major Solar sales companies in the Bay Area said, when they visited my house, and we talked about it. Sadly, on the lease program, Solar City was not willing to install updated panels when better panels became available: I was stuck with them for the "full lifetime of 20 years". Also on the lease programs, all three companies owned the panels on my roof, which means that they, not I, got the tax subsidy for them.
Basically: none of them produced quite enough power for both my house and my cottage tenant, they all wanted me to use PG&E as a battery, but admitted that the Nevada PUC decision to disallow net metering was probably going to happen soon in my area as well, since the electric companies really dislike net metering, and they agreed, that because the Smart Meters(tm) required to have Solar in the first place allowed differential rates of payment at different times of day, that I would likely get paid less during the day when my panels were generating electricity, and have to pay more in the mornings and evenings (when I was actually home from work, duh!).
Their suggestion was to put all my appliances on timers so that they ran while I was at work; I asked for their advice on where to buy a robot to move clothes from my washer to my dryer, so that I didn't have to run the dryer at night, either. They had no answer.
With the nuclear waste problem, subsidies for nuclear likely increase without bound. You've misunderstood the situation.
What nuclear waste situation? Oh. You mean the one Jimmy Carter created on April 7, 1977, when he ordered support cut for the Barnwell reprocessing plant or the construction of the Clinch River Breeder Reactor.
The one we could make "go away" pretty easily by reversing his executive order.
That nuclear waste problem, right?
That's a bad comparison, not comparing like-for-like. Solar is still developing rapidly and the subsidies are falling away, so a fairer comparison would be with the money invested in developing nuclear from the early days. It's difficult to do because a lot of that investment was for military purposes, but it's still a very significant amount of money.
In any case, what really matters is the economics of the two options today. Nuclear is vastly more expensive than renewables in Europe, maybe someone else has figures for the US.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It's nested fail safes. The drum was never supposed to blow. But we knew that and if "never supposed to" meant "never" then you could just stack the drums on the surface. The point of digging it into a salt mine was that if the drum did happen to blow, it would be contained. It did and it was.
It's like the difference between TMI and Chernobyl. TMI was built with nested failsafes. In fact the design assumed that the core would melt down and was designed to dilute the core to noncriticality, then spread out the molten stuff to cool it so it would not break out of the containment. That happened and that's why there was almost no external contamination.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
What's another paltry couple of billion dollars when they can't account for that they did with 6 Trillion dollars
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff