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US Panel Extends Nuclear Power Tax Credit (thehill.com)
Slashdot reader mdsolar quotes The Hill:
The House Ways and Means Committee voted Wednesday to remove a key deadline for a nuclear power plant tax credit... The credit was first enacted in 2005 to spur construction of new nuclear plants, but it has gone completely unused because no new plants have come online since then...
It would likely benefit two reactors under construction at Southern Co.'s Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Georgia and another two at Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Generating Station in South Carolina. Both projects are at risk of missing the 2020 deadline... "When Congress passed the 2005 act, it could not have contemplated the effort it would take to get a nuclear plant designed and licensed," said representative Tom Rice (R-S.C.).
Although one Democrat criticized the extension by arguing that nuclear power "does better in a socialist economy than in a capitalist one, because nuclear energy prefers to have the public do the cleanup, do the insurance, cover all of the losses and it only wants the profits."
It would likely benefit two reactors under construction at Southern Co.'s Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Georgia and another two at Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Generating Station in South Carolina. Both projects are at risk of missing the 2020 deadline... "When Congress passed the 2005 act, it could not have contemplated the effort it would take to get a nuclear plant designed and licensed," said representative Tom Rice (R-S.C.).
Although one Democrat criticized the extension by arguing that nuclear power "does better in a socialist economy than in a capitalist one, because nuclear energy prefers to have the public do the cleanup, do the insurance, cover all of the losses and it only wants the profits."
Can't survive without subsidies. Like the buggy whip industry....
Let it succeed or fail on it's own merits. Instead of doing everything you can to block it based on irrational and unscientific fear.
Not that I'm disagreeing with him/her. I don't like Nuclear because America doesn't have the balls to properly regulate and punish businessmen who flaunt safety. The risks are too great. It's not NIMBY. Make it public run or show me you're willing to throw people responsible for lesser disasters like oil spills in jail for 10-20 years and we'll talk. Until then it'll be like always: privatize the profits, socialize the losses.
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> Although one Democrat criticized the extension by arguing that nuclear power
If you can claim someone said it, you must surely know who it was. So, who said it?
nuclear power "does better in a socialist economy than in a capitalist one, because nuclear energy prefers to have the public do the cleanup, do the insurance, cover all of the losses and it only wants the profits."
As opposed to coal fired power where you just shit raw sewage continuously into the air and expect your great grandchildren to clean it up?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Three Mile Island was the only major commercial nuclear accident in U.S. history. Nuclear power in the U.S. has generated 24,196,167 GWh between 1971-2015. At an average price of 12 cents/kWh, that's $2.90354 trillion. So the approx $3.4 billion in cleanup and lossses from TMI is 0.117% of that. Or in other words, at a retail price of 12 cents/kWh, the historical cost of cleaning up nuclear accidents in the U.S. is 0.014 cents per kWh.
In contrast, subsidies for different energy sources are 23.1 cents/kWh for solar, 3.5 cents/kWh for wind, and 0.2 cents/kWh for nuclear. (Tables ES4 and ES4. Solar received $4.393 billion in subsidies while generating 19,000 GWh. Wind received $5.936 billion while generating 5,936 GWh, and nuclear received $1.66 billion while generating 789,000 GWh.) That's right. The subsidy for solar is 1650x more expensive than cleaning up nuclear accidents. The subsidy for wind is 250x more expensive.
Nuclear decommissioning costs are already paid for by the NRC's Financial Assurance fund. A portion of the revenue from electricity sales are placed into this fund.
The problem with insuring nuclear plants is just a quirk of statistics. The more times you roll the dice, the narrower the bell curve becomes and the more predictable the average outcome. e.g. A 1d100 has an equal chance to produce any result between 1 and 100 - the probability distribution function is a straight line. 2d50 produces a triangular PDF, with the values in the middle tending to be more likely. 10d10 produces an even more compact PDF - a narrow normal curve with results in the middle much more likely than the extremes. And 100d0.5 will always produce 50 - its PDF is just a single peak in the middle.
This is a problem for insuring nuclear plants - because they produce so much energy you don't need very many of them. Whereas there are thousands of coal plants, and (potentially) millions of solar installations, there are only operating 100 nuclear plants in the U.S. So insuring a nuclear plant represents a greater risk for the insurer. Even though the mean outcome will be that there is 1 accident every 30 years, the chance of a 2nd or 3rd accident is still significant and the amount the insurer has to pay out may easily surpass how much they've collected in premiums if they assume the statistically most likely outcome of a single accident.
The insurance company's response is to increase the premium to also cover that 2nd or 3rd event even though they're unlikely. In contrast, with thousands of coal plants they can be much more confident that there will be (say) only 10 accidents every 30 years, and 20 or 30 accidents is extraordinarily unlikely. So the premiums can be lower, even if the average risk (mean) is exactly the same. If there were some way to build thousands of small-scale nuclear plants instead of 100 large ones, private insurance wouldn't be a problem. You get around this problem by creating the largest insurance pool possible, which in this case would be nationalized insurance covering all 100 nuclear power plants.
Statistically, per unit of energy generated, nuclear power is the safest power source man has invented.
and the public is going to bail it out then either a) let it fail and then step in to blunt any damage (e.g. let the too big to fail banks go and then prop up the economy with subsidies) or b) if it's too big/risky necessary for human civilization don't privatize it in the first place.
What I'm sick and fucking tired of is paying $$$ in taxes every year and getting bugger all for it. I'm a socialist, not a kleptocrate. Don't just hand billions (trillions?) of infrastructure to somebody's brother in law under the thin guise of "Private industry is always more efficient". Public infrastructure should be just that: public.
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if we weren't about to elect Donald Trump & Mike Pence to the highest office in the land. Trump's already said his first order of business is to roll back the tighter rules Obama put through for the FDA and food safety. There was 8 years of constant outbreaks that more or less stopped when those rules went in. But they're bad for business so out they go.
Americans don't like experts. We don't like people telling us what to do and how to do it. I'm sorry, but that's just a fact. A study just showed that white Americans a. Blamed the weak job market on the gov't and b. Felt the gov't needed to do more to help them. These folks aren't thinking, they're feeling. So you'll forgive me if I don't want something like a nuke plant with a 50 year life cycle in my neck of the woods when I've got to worry about a few changes in political winds undoing all those regulations...
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part of the problem is a combo of NIMBY and wanting cubic meters of docs to prove that the tech being used is
99.9999999999% safe.
if they "simply" used the same protocols that the US Navy uses for its reactors then it would be safe enough (build the things as more or less sealed units that need a chunky crane to remove so that in 20 years when the fuel is expended you just get a crane yoink the HOT bits out and replace).
Challenge for those folks that would rather have a Supermax Prison than a nuclear power plant:
Name (with verifiable proof from 3 independent sources) all of the nuclear reactor accidents that did not involve
1 something getting shot at (or other wartime action)
2 brasshat squids mucking about
3 deliberate sabotage
and don't count things like missiles getting lost or fuel getting lost those are not reactor accidents
This topic is filled with people who think they are experts..
Welcome to the internet.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Solar and wind can't survive without subsidies, government mandates and market intervention giving them priority on the grid. Per unit of energy produced, they receive outrageously lavish subsidies, and their preferential treatment is pushing all reliable generators out of the market, not just nuclear. It is the pinnacle of hypocrisy to criticize nuclear, which receives virtually no help. Nuclear advocates don’t even want subsidies; they want a fair marketplace and rational technology-neutral regulation. Go ahead: eliminate all subsidies. Technologies with real potential don’t need subsidies, only an environment free of insurmountable obstacles.
Why should nuclear bear the considerable cost of integrating unreliable and destabilizing energy sources into the grid? Shifting the cost onto a competing clean energy source is extremely unfair, and nuclear itself is far from mature. Conventional reactors don't even scratch the surface of the design space, and the nuclear supply chain and construction industries have wasted away. If ever there were a technology deserving of subsidies, this is it. In terms of fuel efficiency and waste production, the potential improvements are more than a hundred-fold, and these can be realized in a LFTR, with unparalleled economics, safety, and a minimal environmental footprint.
After decades of intense investment, renewables still contribute very little in terms of useful energy or avoided CO2 emissions. What they have achieved is sharply increasing energy costs wherever deployed. Proponents trumpet their supposed low cost, but experience tells another story. Germany has some of the highest electricity rates, and far from decarbonizing, they are constructing new coal plants. Even the Germans are correcting course now, and people should confirm the facts and reflect on them. Sadly, when faced with facts and reason, the human instinct is to doubled down on stupid, so it will require effort.
The internet?
Hell, welcome to the majority!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
"does better in a socialist economy than in a capitalist one, because nuclear energy prefers to have the public do the cleanup, do the insurance, cover all of the losses and it only wants the profits."
This is precisely why the calls for "A free and open market with big government off our backs." is disastrous. In addition to little things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... just think what it would be like if there were no regulation of meat, fuel, roads, drugs, doctors, chemical manufacturing, transport, storage, access, and I could go on and on.
The point being that if we want democracy, there has to be some way for limiting those stronger, richer, with more friends from becoming an issue for the less rich, less powerful, less popular. A society without limits is one with warlords and thugs running it.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Isn't it funny how hopeless nuclear fanboys kept insisting that the government was against nuclear power the entire time despite things like this going on?
You can blame government, hippies or whoever but the reality is that US nuclear companies just do not have their shit together which is why when the UK went shopping for nukes they went to the Chinese. Say whatever you like about the Chinese nuclear industry but they do not have the current mode of failure of Westinghouse etc of spending far more on public relations than they have on research and development.
On the very simple aspects it's very easy to get a handle on things.
For fine detail it matters if you are an expert or have listened to one on exactly that fine detail.
Due to people coming from different field or not having a generalised enough education there are a lot of topics where everyone who has picked up enough to attempt high school physics can get a handle on something but those that never got that far can not - hence a lot of pointless discussion here over very simple things and anger from the latter about "self appointed experts".
The most depressing one of those I've hit here is the 9/11 "truthers" who refuse to believe that hot steel gets soft. Am I an expert on that topic? Yes I fucking am and proved it with thousands of tons of steel rod with the right heat treatment before most people posting here were born - but you don't need to be an expert to know the simple thing that hot steel gets soft.
Welcome to the internet.
Yea, you'd think I was new or something! :)
I am not a nuclear power expert, I have opinions and thoughts, but they are just based on reading stuff online combined with my personal worldview.
And that is all most of what is written here really is, except some of it is really out in left field, such as the "ten thousand years of nuclear waste" comments. Anything that is radioactive for 10,000 years isn't actually very dangerous, that is basic science. It is the stuff with a 50 year half life that will kill you.
France USED breeders and then shut them down apart from a tiny research reactor.
A bit of background: In 1968 it looked as if high grade Uranium ore was going to run out since a long list of countries even including Egypt were planning to build reactors. The price of Uranium rose as a consequence.
The French response to that was to plan some fast breeders, build them, run them for decades and then shut them down. They have not built new ones because high grade Uranium ore is no longer a rarity and the demand is not high (there is about a centuries worth in a single mine in Australia and quite a lot in other places).
Various green groups claimed credit for the old reactors shutting down but the reality is something designed in 1968 and built very shortly after was just too worn out in so many components that it was not worth running any longer - especially since the French weapons program no longer needed the material and the competing reactor designs are much cheaper to use.
you don't need to be an expert to know the simple thing that hot steel gets soft.
And when it gets soft and has half a building sitting on top of it, it can bend and deform, and once it starts to go, it runs away and comes apart.
Yes, I agree with you, the 9/11 "truthers" are nuts, right up there with the "we never went to the moon" nuts. :)
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I can take it a step further... half a million people saw the planes hit the buildings, not on video, but in person, it was in fucking New York City. It isn't like it was a secret event. Further, one of my best friends was supposed to be on the AA plane that hit the tower, she swapped routes with her best friend a few days before because she had a family event to be at, otherwise she would be dead.
You can't cover up an event like that, too many people know too many people, same with the moon landings, someone would talk...
BTW, regarding the moon thing, I've met Gene Cernan (last man to walk on the moon) more than once in person, I had the chance to go to a lunch that he was a featured guest at and got to speak with him afterward, I don't for one second think he was lying to me about being on the moon.
Solar and wind have not finished producing power that the subsidies supported while nuclear plants are closing but will still draw subsidies for thousands of years without producing more power. The solar and wind subsidies will dilute to a number indistinguishable from zero but nuclear will always be an expensive goverment induced market distortion, a bad choice from start to eternal filthy finish.
Nuclear has had vast subsidies to get started, but it turned out to also need them to opperate, the Price-Anderson subsidy, if eliminated, would close all nuclear power instantly. And, owing to nuclear waste manegement intractability, it will need subsidies long after all power plants close. Nuclear has been a losing proposition from the start, and we can only hope that the irresponsible run-to-failure attitude of some operators won't result in tremendously more public expense.
Does it cost less, per megawatt hour, to subsidize a nuclear plant or a solar plant?
Anything that is radioactive for 10,000 years isn't actually very dangerous, that is basic science
It is, if you eat it. That is basic science
It is the stuff with a 50 year half life that will kill you.
No. Uranium e.g. is like lead a very poisonous heavy metal. Get it your food chain and you are in trouble. Its radioactivity or lack there of, is your least concern.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The problem with that event is not that people don't believe steal gets soft. Actually everyone should know/grasp that.
The problem is that the building did not collapse as intuition (and plenty of demolition experts testified) demands. For a layman, the part of the edge of the building where the plane hit, should slowly collapse. Which would lead to a tilting of the building to the side and the parts on top would simply crash over.
However, every video shows that the collapsing (in both buildings) started at the top. There was not even fire. As long as that is not explained, there will be "truthers". The building holds at the hottest part, until the cool parts above it collapse and then hit the hot part ... possible. But not plausible. The explanations for that are not plausible either, I only heard nonsense.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Oh look, it is you, the moron who doesn't know shit about anything...
Well, nice to know you keep posting things randomly, but you're wrong so often, I don't bother reading it anyway...
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Let it succeed or fail on it's own merits. Instead of doing everything you can to block it based on irrational and unscientific fear.
YES! Let them buy liability insurance on commercial market without any taxpayer funded limits and exclusions. Check back next day how many insurance companies lined up to underwrite liability of billions of dollars :/
That's only because movies used to show stuff as if cardboard boxes were falling over so the "intuition" of a lot of people was set by cheap special effects.
No they did not. Various nuts lied about demolition experts that do not exist while the ones that do exist sided with reality instead of Hollywood.
Impact. Dynamic loading not static. When a single floor collapses it hits the floor below pretty damned hard and buildings are not designed to withstand that sort of thing happening. If they were New York would look like the Valley of the Kings in Egypt.
Hollywood and cardboard box effects in the 1970s has a lot to answer for. Stuff falls down not sideways. Even when earthquakes provide a bit of lateral movement large buildings collapse into themselves without much tilting - they do not fall sideways intact like a cardboard box as "a layman" has been encouraged to think over the last few decades.
Although one Democrat criticized the extension by arguing that nuclear power "does better in a socialist economy than in a capitalist one, because nuclear energy prefers to have the public do the cleanup, do the insurance, cover all of the losses and it only wants the profits."
I remember in the beginning how refreshing it was to find Slashdot, where you could quite often find intelligent discourse about technical subjects and where Linux was often portrayed in a positive light at a time when the consensus in the IT industry produced such catchy phrases as "You get what you pay for" and other goodies. It feels quite disappointing to see that we are now becoming little more than a sort tabloid outlet, whose main editorial line is to post anything that stirs up controversy, because that attracts more commentators, who we can sell as potetial eyes that look at our adverts.
I've picked out this particular sentence, not because I feel that socialism needs defending, but because it once again portrays Americans as being stereotypically crude, uninformed and astoundingly stupid. So, is there actually 'one Democrat' that spews out this sort of tripe about socialism? Probably - just as there are Republicans and Americans of any denomination, who tend to hold a similarly uninformed view of the world. And for that matter, people from any nation. I happen to know quite a few Americans - and I have only ever come across 1 in the flesh, who matched the sterotype; to compare, I know loads of Britons that appear to be functionally braindead.
As for the comment on itself: the behaviour desribed matches very closely what we have grown up to expect from businesses, especially big businesses, under glorous Capitalism: acid rain, dead rivers, corrupt companies paying corrupt researchers (they don't really deserve being called scientists) to tweak their results, pollutants poured out in the environment with the excuse that "it hasn't been proven that these chemicals, which cause deformities in frogs are harmful to humans" - and so on. Plus, of course, they do all they can to avoid paying taxes, so who gets to pay the bill for cleaning up the mess for their reckless profiteering? Societies all over the world are still paying the bill for the tobacco industry's profitmaking - they make money from selling a drug that is proven to cause cancer, but they don't pay the expenses for cancer treatments, nor do they compensate for the loss of production or any of the other significant costs associated with their business. All in all, I think it has absolutely nothing to do with socialism when the public has to foot the bill for the mindless greed of Big Capitalism.
That's only because movies used to show stuff as if cardboard boxes were falling over so the "intuition" of a lot of people was set by cheap special effects.
Yes, and the buildings collapsed in the exact same way as in a movie, go figure.
No they did not. Various nuts lied about demolition experts that do not exist while the ones that do exist sided with reality instead of Hollywood. ... .... uh ... perhaps 4h after the collapse?
You live in a silly small country that hopefully soon will drift into insignificance
The rest of the world is _convinced_ that this 9/11 thing was a false flag operation. You know we have demolition experts, too. In puny Germany. And the first interview with demolition experts and building engineers explaining why such a catastrophe is impossible in Germany was
In other words: you have no idea how many _true_ experts have given her opinion on that case.
Even when earthquakes provide a bit of lateral movement large buildings collapse into themselves without much tilting - they do not fall sideways intact like a cardboard box as "a layman" has been encouraged to think over the last few decades.
You are completely mixing it up. In hollywood movies buildings always collapse straight down from top to bottom. Because they are always controlled demolitions.
A building several 100m hight, cant do that without being either exploded - controlled - or under strange circumstances - which might happen.
As a physics experiment I give you two simple tasks: drop a tennis ball at a calm not so windy day once from the east side of a building, lets say top or window, about 100m above the ground. Then do the same on the west side. Now you know how a "naturally" collapsing building would look. Hint: one ball will collide with the wall of the building several times, the other one will drop dozens of meters away from the wall on the ground. The tiny bit of difference in earth rotation speed from top of a sky scraper to its base is _hughe_.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I live in a very large country that is already insignificant but has not dropped the ball on education as badly as the United States of America has. A few decades ago I believe it educated it's engineers well, so that even if I was the least of them I can at least deal with simple stuff as this.
I suggest watching some videos of buildings in real disasters to cure yourself of this very sick little conspiracy theory.
WTF - do the mathematics yourself instead of taking the word of whatever nut fooled you- it's ignorable. You may be a coder and not an engineer but you can work this out and shake the bullshit out of your head.
FTFY.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
In modern times yes, in older times it usually was a building that was about to demolition and was cut into the scene, you seem to be to young :D
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.